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Lara Kennerly, PsyD
Attachment-Based Therapy in Sacramento & Across California
A psychoanalytic approach to the early attachment wounds that shape how you connect and how you let yourself be cared for, as an adult.
The way we reach for people, and pull back from them, is often shaped by things we don't fully understand about ourselves that often began in early life experiences. Attachment-based therapy helps make sense of those patterns and how they still shape life today.
What Is Attachment-Based Therapy?
Attachment-based therapy is a psychoanalytic form of psychotherapy informed by attachment theory. It looks at how early attachment experiences and attachment trauma keep shaping a person's emotional life and relationships long after childhood.
Our earliest experiences with caregivers teach us what to expect from other people and how to respond when we need support. When those relationships were marked by inconsistency, neglect, fear, or loss, the effects don't always stay in the past. They can resurface in adulthood as relationship trouble, emotional distress, or the same painful patterns playing out again and again.
For someone with attachment wounds, trusting people can feel risky, and staying close can be hard. Care is difficult to give, and often just as difficult to accept. Strong emotions can come on fast and be hard to control. These struggles usually don't show up on their own. They often come with anxiety, depression, or childhood trauma, along with feelings like fear of rejection, avoidance, and quick anger. Attachment-based therapy brings these patterns into view, so they can be understood in the context of a person's life and relationships.
The Core Principles of Attachment Theory
Modern attachment theory is built on three ideas about human connection:
1. Bonding Is a Basic Human Need
2. Relationships Help Regulate Emotion
The need to connect with other people is not something we outgrow. Human beings are wired for connection, and that need often becomes even stronger during times of stress or fear.
Close relationships play an important role in how we manage difficult emotions. Feeling connected to someone we trust can help calm the nervous system and make hard experiences feel more manageable.
3. Secure Connection Supports Growth
Feeling safe and supported gives people a foundation to explore and grow from. Over time, that security builds resilience and the confidence to meet life's challenges.
The Four Adult Attachment Styles
In the late 1980s, researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver extended attachment theory to adult romantic relationships. They identified four attachment styles that can continue into adulthood and influence how people experience trust, closeness, support, and emotional connection with others.
Secure Attachment
A securely attached child learns that support is available when needed. Their caregiver responds to distress with comfort, attention, and consistency, helping them develop a sense of safety and trust.
As adults, people with secure attachment are generally comfortable with both closeness and independence. They can acknowledge their needs, communicate them clearly, reach out for support, receive care from others, and offer care in return. They tend to handle conflict more effectively, maintain healthy boundaries, and build meaningful relationships.
Anxious Attachment (Anxious-Preoccupied)
Anxious attachment often develops when caregiving is inconsistent. At times a caregiver may be available and responsive, while at other times they may not. As a result, the child learns that connection feels uncertain and unpredictable.
As adults, people with this style often want closeness badly but fear that others don't want them the same way. Trust comes hard, and they may need frequent reassurance. Their sense of self-worth can rest heavily on how a partner sees them. Because separation feels genuinely threatening, the fear of being abandoned stays close to the surface, and from the outside this can look clingy or needy even when what's underneath is anxiety.
Avoidant Attachment (Dismissive-Avoidant)
People with an avoidant attachment style often appear highly independent and self-sufficient. They may avoid emotional vulnerability, keep others at a distance, and minimize their own needs as well as the needs of others.
This pattern commonly develops when caregivers were emotionally unavailable, distant, or rejecting. Over time, the child learns not to rely on others for comfort or support. What can look like not needing anyone is often a protective response to the fear of disappointment, vulnerability, or rejection.
Disorganized Attachment (Fearful-Avoidant)
Disorganized attachment is often described as a conflict between wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time. The person may deeply desire connection while also feeling unsafe within it.
This attachment style is often associated with experiences of abuse, neglect, or caregivers who were themselves a source of fear. Without a reliable source of comfort, the child is left without a clear strategy for seeking safety.
In adult relationships, this can lead to intense emotional swings, difficulty trusting others, and a tendency to move back and forth between seeking connection and pulling away from it. Many people with this attachment style struggle with feelings of unworthiness and may find themselves repeating relationship patterns that feel familiar, even when those patterns are painful and lead to repeated problems within relationships.
How Attachment Trauma Affects Adult Relationships
Attachment trauma is a major rupture in the bond between a child and their primary caregiver. This can occur in many ways and for many reasons, including: divorce in the family; loss in the family, such as death of a parent or sibling; postpartum issues; physical neglect, such as going without basic needs, like food or water; abuse, which could be physical, sexual, or emotional; caregiver(s) facing a life threatening illness; caregiver absence due to circumstances like incarceration/deployment; caregiver(s) having a substance use/mental health disorder; domestic violence in the home; frequent relocation and social disruption; physically/emotionally unavailable to the child. A child’s early life experiences shape their adult life, and the relationship with their primary caregiver is among the most important for their development. If a child doesn’t have their early relational needs met, this can show up later in life in their mental health, relationships, and sense of self, and most people don't know to connect it to the past.
Someone may keep choosing partners who are unavailable or harmful, replaying an old pattern from childhood without realizing it. Small conflicts can trigger reactions that feel much bigger than the situation. A deep sense of unworthiness can make a person pull away from healthy relationships, or damage them without meaning to. And physical closeness or emotional openness can feel unsafe instead of comforting. All of these are directly related to what was learned in childhood about themselves, their needs, their safety, and how to navigate interacting and connecting with others in whatever ways they learned best helped them survive and adapt. Many beliefs and behaviors that were developed out of necessity and were perfectly reasonable when put in place early in life, ultimately become ill-suited for later situations, and without help and self-work, these deeply-rooted patterns are difficult to change or adjust, and tend to cause problems in many areas of life for these individuals over time.
How Attachment-Based Therapy Helps
Attachment-based therapy helps people see how early attachment experiences still influence their emotions and relationships today. It's especially useful when the same painful patterns keep showing up no matter who the relationship is with.
The work often brings clarity to things like:
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Fear of rejection or abandonment
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Jealousy and insecurity in relationships
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Fear of commitment or emotional closeness
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Anger that feels hard to control
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Conflict or distance that keeps repeating with different people
Understanding where these reactions came from is the first part. The second is changing them, practicing new ways of relating in your life now. The relationship with the therapist is part of that work. If your early relationships felt unsafe or unpredictable, therapy can be a corrective experience of a steady, reliable human connection, a place to practice trusting someone and letting yourself be vulnerable while in a safe space.
What Attachment-Based Therapy Can Help With
Attachment-based therapy can be helpful for depression, anxiety, processing old childhood trauma, grief, and relationship difficulties. It is at the root of most adult issues individuals seek therapy for, as the way we interact and connect with other people is a significant piece of almost every personal struggle.
Depression and Anxiety
Many people who seek attachment-based therapy are struggling with depression or anxiety. This approach looks at how early relationships and attachment experiences may continue to influence emotional distress in the present.
Childhood Trauma and Emotional Neglect
Attachment-based therapy is often used to explore the lasting effects of childhood trauma, neglect, loss, inconsistent caregiving, and other experiences that affected a person's sense of safety, trust, or experiences of connection with others.
Grief and Loss
Loss can activate the attachment system in powerful ways. The death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or other significant losses may bring up not only grief, but older feelings connected to separation, disconnection, or unmet attachment needs.
Difficulty Giving or Receiving Care
Some people struggle to depend on others, ask for support, or accept care when it is offered. Others find themselves taking care of everyone around them while finding it difficult to express their own needs. Attachment-based therapy explores how these patterns developed and how they continue to affect relationships.
Recurring Relationship Patterns
When similar relationship struggles continue to appear across different friendships, family relationships, or romantic partnerships, attachment-based therapy can help uncover the pieces of your early experiences that developed into patterns that may be contributing to those experiences.
Attachment-Based Therapist in Sacramento, CA
I work with individuals who are struggling in various areas in their life that mainly involve how they interact and connect with other people. This often shows up in ways that are hard to explain, especially when it feels like the same challenges keep showing up over time.
Some people I see are in a relationship that feels difficult or unstable. Others are not in a relationship at all, but find it hard to begin one or to stay connected once things start to matter. Others experience difficulty holding healthy boundaries at work or with family members, feeling a constant underlying fear of rejection or broken connections/relationships.
Attachment-based therapy involves a focus on early life experiences with primary caregivers and connection experiences/breaks, as these early experiences set the stage for how one views self, others, and the world in general, and typically continues to factor in to how individuals experience life and others far into adulthood. Insight gained from exploring early life experiences are then integrated into how current difficulties are looked at, to provide greater and deeper insights and revelations about how it all is connected and maintains influence. This approach and framework is helpful for most difficulties individuals seek therapy for, given that how one interacts and connects with others is a piece of virtually all difficulties in some way, but it can be particularly helpful for depression, anxiety, grief, and relationship difficulties.
We take the time to understand those early life attachment experiences in order to better identify and understand current patterns that are problematic or a source of dissatisfaction, in a way that feels safe and manageable, without pressure to rush or force change on a specific timeline.
In-person sessions are available in midtown Sacramento office, serving individuals from nearby areas including Elk Grove, Roseville, Folsom, Davis, Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova, West Sacramento, Fair Oaks, and Carmichael. Secure online therapy is available to adults anywhere in California.
Frequently asked questions
In-Person & Online Attachment-Based Therapy in Sacramento & Across California
Meaningful change often begins with understanding. Dr. Kennerly works with adults throughout Sacramento and California who want to explore the impact of early attachment experiences on their subsequent relationships, emotional experiences, sense of self, and how they interact and connect with others.