You learned early what happens when you need someone.
Attachment work is the part of this that explains the same fight, the shutdown, and the compartment. Not a personality type you are stuck with, a set of expectations about closeness that can be looked at and updated.
A working theory about people, formed before you could examine it.
Attachment theory starts from something unremarkable: human beings work out early whether closeness is reliable, whether a need is welcome, and what it costs to depend on someone. Whatever answer your childhood supplied became the assumption you brought into every relationship since, and assumptions do not announce themselves.
In practice this shows up as a reflex rather than a belief. Someone raises their voice and you are already gone. Your partner is quiet for an hour and you have already decided what it means. You want something and reach for the version that requires nobody’s cooperation. None of that is chosen in the moment, which is exactly why arguing with yourself about it has not worked.
I use the anxious and avoidant language loosely and only as shorthand. What matters is not which category you land in. It is the specific sequence that runs in you when the ground moves, because that sequence is what we can slow down, look at together, and do differently.
This is the approach I lean on most with couples stuck in a pursuing-and-withdrawing loop, and with men who cannot account for why being close to someone they love feels like exposure.
Five threads this approach follows.
None of these are diagnoses. They are the places closeness usually gets decided before anybody has said a word about it.
- What we look at
What you learned closeness costs
Everyone arrives with a working estimate of what happens when they need someone. It was formed early, it was probably accurate then, and it is quietly running your marriage now.
- What we look at
What you do when the ground moves
Under threat, most people go one of two directions: toward the other person hard, or away from them fast. Neither is a character flaw and both make the other one worse.
- What we look at
Shutdown, and why it is not indifference
Going flat during conflict reads as contempt from the outside and feels like nothing from the inside. It is protective, physiological, and much older than this relationship.
- What we look at
Secrecy as a bid for safety
A hidden compartment is not only about sex. Very often it is the one part of life where nobody can leave, be disappointed, or need anything from you.
- What we look at
Repair, which is the part nobody was taught
Attachment is not built by avoiding rupture. It is built by what happens in the twenty-four hours afterward, and that is a specific, learnable sequence.
Most of this work happens on one small moment rather than a whole history. A Tuesday evening where something went sideways in ninety seconds. We take that ninety seconds apart until both of us can see what happened in it.
In couples work I will often stop a conversation mid-sentence and ask what just happened in your body. That question is not a technique to catch you out; it is the only way to get underneath the content of the argument to the thing actually driving it. Nearly every couple discovers the fight was not about the subject.
In individual work it is quieter. We look at what you expected the other person to do, where that expectation came from, and what you would need in order to test it rather than assume it. Then you test it, in something small, and we look at what happened.
I am licensed in California only, so sessions are in person in Long Beach or by telehealth anywhere in the state. Se habla español.
You are not too much and you are not too distant. You are protecting something, and it is worth knowing what.
Asked most often by people who have already read about attachment styles online.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bring the fight you keep having
A free 15-minute phone consultation. If the same ninety seconds keeps repeating, this is usually the approach that explains it.