Clients do not usually enter therapy intending to resist connection, avoid emotion or frustrate the therapist. What can look like disengagement, neediness, intellectualisation, hostility, compliance or emotional chaos may be an attachment strategy that once helped the person preserve safety, proximity, dignity or psychological survival.

This fast-paced, reflective workshop introduces attachment defences as meaningful adaptations. Participants will explore how these strategies develop, how they appear in the therapy room, what they may evoke in the therapist and how the therapeutic relationship can offer something different without stripping the client of their protection too quickly.

The session will combine accessible theory, brief reflective exercises, clinical examples, audience interaction and practical therapeutic language. This practical two hour workshop explores attachment defences as adaptations developed in response to early relational environments. We will consider what common defensive patterns protect, how they appear in the therapy room and what they may evoke in the therapist. Participants will explore dismissing, preoccupied and disorganised strategies without reducing clients to attachment labels. Particular attention will be given to affect regulation, shame, internal working models, countertransference and the interaction between the client’s protective pattern and the therapist’s own attachment responses.

This workshop is suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists, trainees, supervisors and other practitioners interested in working relationally and attachment-informatively.

Description supplied by the event organiser.