Author of Attachment in Psychotherapy

1.  Reflect on the ways you have been a “secure base” for your clients. If you have not yet had a therapy client, reflect on what you will do to be a “secure base” for your clients when you begin your work as a therapist. After reflecting, describe what you did do (or will do) behaviorally — what would audio-visual equipment filming you see you do and/or hear you do?

2.  Mikulincer & Shaver state that one of the therapy tasks of a good therapist is to “explore and understand how the client currently relates to other people.” Sometimes this results in the therapist helping the client “become aware of previously unrecognizable biases and failed relational strategies.” How does a therapist do this while still maintaining the role of a “secure base” for the client – and environment in which the client feels safe exploring?

3.  With what components of the Mikulincer & Shaver article did you align or find helpful? Why? Were there any parts of the article with which you disagreed or did not find to be helpful? Why?

4.  David Wallin, author of Attachment in Psychotherapy (2007), states in an interview that “…if we think about therapy as kind of a new attachment relationship, it’s a new attachment relationship that’s between two adults. but also a relationship between the therapist as parent and the patient as baby…We bring those yearnings, those fears, to adult relationships. I think it’s meaningful to think of that as, in a sense, the baby part of us. When that very young part of us can come alive in the relationship with a therapist, there’s an opportunity for that part of us to change and to develop.” Obviously, the relationship between a therapist and a client is not in reality a relationship between a parent and a child.  What really was Wallin talking about in providing this metaphor?

5.  Discuss how a therapist’s own attachment pattern might impact the therapeutic process with that therapist’s clients.