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You May Experience
Overthinking Your Relationships
Disproportionate Emotional Reactions
Surface Level Relationships
Connected Brain Counseling offers counseling and neurofeedback therapy for issues with anxious attachment treatment in Denver CO
Understand Your Attachment Therapy Style with qEEG Brain Mapping + Neurofeedback
Connected Brain Counseling's Approach to Attachment Therapy
Your attachment style can fluctuate throughout your lifetime, did you know that!? There is no better proof or hope of healing than knowing that you can change the way you relate to others and feel more successful in your relationships. Though we are biased, we believe that therapy is the best place to start this journey of understanding your attachment style.
What to Expect In Attachment Therapy
In attachment therapy, your licensed professional counselor will take your childhood, relationships with your parents, and/or primary caregivers in order to understand how attachment was developed in your upbringing. Additionally, clients may be recommend to discuss understanding what type of attachment style category they fall into. While this is an important piece of information for your therapist to know, it may often not be the primary focus of discussion on the surface between therapist and client.
What are the Attachment Styles?
The Four Attachment Styles
1. Secure Attachment Style
2. Anxious Attachment Style
3. Avoidant Attachment Style
4. Dismissive Attachment Style
Anxious Attachment Styles
Understanding Anxious Attachment Styles
Individuals who struggle with issues associated with anxious attachment styles may find them selves overthinking relationships, over functioning and worrying about staying close with their partner.
While it is important to note that this is not the only way an individual may relate to their partner, when a client in attachment therapy notices stress regarding relating to a partner, friendship, boss, or family member, the possibility of an anxious attachment style may be discussed with your licensed professional counselor.
If you find yourself in need of constant and continual reassurance regarding the security of your relationship, you may resonate with having an anxious attachment style. Additionally, features of codependency frequently show with those who have an anxious attachment style.
Codependency is defined as, "Codependency is a way of behaving in relationships where you persistently prioritize someone else over you, and you assess your mood based on how they behave. Vicki Botnick, a marriage and family therapist in Tarzana, CA, explains that codependency often involves a sense of forgetting 'where you end and your partner begins.'" [Psych Central]
Trouble setting boundaries?
Having a hard time setting boundaries without feeling guilt, shame or distance from your partner may be a telling sign of an anxious attachment style. From a developmental perspective, anxious attachment styles may be reinforced when a parent figure encourages a child to abandon their own needs in order to maintain closeness. This is not always explicit, and often a child learns to abandon their needs in order to soothe their parent’s emotional dysregulation or because their parents, too, are abandoning their needs. Learn more with our attachment therapy today.
Avoidant Attachment Style
Avoidant Attachment Styles are characterized by a fear of not having their needs met within a relationship (including friendships, work partnerships, etc) and therefore creating distance in order to feel protected. Often, individuals who have avoidant attachment styles will avoid relationships or have many short relationships in order to avoid the risk of vulnerability and closeness that come with time.
Read the Research:
Neurofeedback for Attachment
Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma
“Siegel (2007) noted that a key neurobiological connection with attachment has been found in the medial prefrontal cortex, which also plays an important role in affect regulation, empathy, intrapersonal insight, attunement with others, as well as behavioral and emotional flexibility. Researchers (Cozolino, 2006; Suomi, 1999) have found that neuroplasticity can assist in molding secure attachments even when not originally formed.
Furthermore, McKinney et al. (1972), show how these changes made to the brain can be maintained. In fact, Coan (2016) notes that the entire human brain can be thought of as an attachment system, concluding that examining attachment neuroscience would enable scholars to identify how the brain supports developmental, social, and clinical aspects of psychological systems.
This developmental process sets the stage for the amygdala to either be able to regulate emotional states, or, to dominate brain response with fear (Fisher, 2009). Fisher (2009) notes that the core affect of insecure attachment is fear and quieting this fear enriches the capacity for attachment bonds and meaningful relationships."
"When the intention is to normalize the system, e.g., via neurofeedback, we describe it as self-directed neuroplasticity, whose outcome is persistent functional, structural, and behavioral changes. We argue that changes in physiological, neuropsychological, behavioral, interpersonal, and societal functioning following neurofeedback can serve as objective indices and as the metrics necessary for assessing levels of efficacy.
We suggest that brain changes occasioned by specific neurofeedback protocols will be reflected at one level by some biomarkers and not others. Because of the semi-independent relationship between levels, and differential time courses, changes in physiology may become apparent early in treatment, whereas behavioral changes may take longer to manifest. Additionally, as is true of most treatments of neuropsychiatric disorders, studies that focus heavily on group differences may not be sufficient to determine whether treatment is effective in some patients but not others. Given these limitations, we suggest a strategy that assesses efficacy at multiple levels and examines data for each subject, as previously suggested by Samuel et al. using an N-of-1 study approach, in order to usher in the era of personalized medicine [142]. We hope that taking such an approach will shed more light on neurofeedback’s utility as a viable treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders."
Family Magazine | The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Nov, Dec 2012
“The EEG is the symbolic representation of neural events, which results in the energization of muscles and choosing of meaning that results in speech and action. If that apparatus is constructed in a faulty manner, it cannot properly construct the meaning of the social cues around it. When we set it right, it has the freedom to create many realities based on choice, not functional deregulation. Family therapists who practice neurofeedback are thus only putting the reality constructing mechanism back in working order so that social construction can proceed on the firm foundation of science.”
“Our findings show that insecure attachment is associated with heightened emotional reactivity, whereas secure attachment is characterized by effective strategies for regulating emotions. Our study’s examination of neural responses reveals distinct differences that shed light on how attachment style influences emotional processing.
Specifically, the processing patterns associated with negative feedback demonstrate notable distinctions in both the P200 and P400 components. In the case of insecure individuals, a pronounced P200 response to negative feedback indicates heightened sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli. This heightened response suggests that insecure individuals are more attuned to negative feedback and may experience stronger negative emotional reactions. It is possible that their increased vigilance for potential threats, coupled with a tendency to interpret negative feedback as personally meaningful or impactful, contribute to this heightened sensitivity (Meyer et al., 1999; Liu et al., 2011; Weinberg et al., 2012).”
Frontal alpha asymmetry neurofeedback for the reduction of negative
affect and anxiety
“Frontal alpha asymmetry has been proposed to underlie the balance between approach and withdrawal motivation associated with each individual's affective style. Neurofeedback of EEG frontal alpha asymmetry represents a promising tool to reduce negative affect, although its specific effects on left/right frontal activity and approach/withdrawal motivation are still unclear.”
“In summary, the present study argues in favor of the employment of frontal alpha asymmetry neurofeedback to increase right vs. left frontal alpha activity, in order to reduce negative affect and anxiety levels, laying the foundations for testing on subclinical and clinical populations. On the other hand, we suggest that future research should investigate the effects of neurofeedback training aimed at increasing left vs. right prefrontal activity on approach motivation, positive affect and depressive symptoms.”
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