`Okika Counseling: Your Guide to Secure Attachment Style
8-Week Intensive Attachment Coaching Coming Spring 2024!
If you landed here, you might already have some self and emotional awareness of the significant role past experiences and your development have in your relationship to yourself and others.
*You might have noticed patterns in who you date and how you approach relationships.
*You may have experienced these patterns repeating in each of your relationships, resulting in shame, guilt, or regret
*You deeply desire a sense of connection and love, but fear that these patterns you engage will impact your ability to foster lasting love in your life, and may even fear that others will abandon, betray or control you.
*You have been in therapy but feel like you might have a "missing piece" in your treatment as it relates to putting some of what you learned into action.
It is fantastic that you have insight into these problems and recognize ways it might be limiting you from reaching your full potential! Attachment Coaching provided by `Okika Counseling guides you toward the solution in addresses these issues through a proven framework and tangible tools that aim to help you heal and restructure your attachment injuries, leading to a more secure attachment style.
What are attachment styles?
What are Attachment Styles?
Attachment styles refer to the emotional bonds and patterns of relating that individuals develop in their early relationships, particularly with their primary caregivers. These attachment styles play a crucial role in shaping how people form and maintain relationships throughout their lives. There are four primary attachment styles:
Secure Attachment
People with a secure attachment style tend to have a positive view of themselves and others. They are comfortable with emotional intimacy, can trust their partners, and are generally able to express their feelings and needs openly. They seek out and enjoy close relationships and can navigate conflicts and separations effectively.
Anxious (Preoccupied) Attachment
Individuals with an anxious attachment style often worry about their worthiness and whether their partners truly care for them. They may become overly dependent on their partners for validation and reassurance and may experience high levels of anxiety in their relationships. They tend to be sensitive to signs of rejection and may fear abandonment.
Avoidant (Dismissive) Attachment
Individuals with an avoidant or dismissive attachment style tend to be highly self-reliant and value their independence. They may downplay the importance of emotional intimacy and may have difficulty opening up to others or expressing their feelings. They may seem emotionally distant and prioritize self-sufficiency over close relationships.
Fearful-Avoidant (Disorganized) Attachment
Individuals with a fearful-avoidant or disorganized attachment style is characterized by a combination of anxious and avoidant tendencies. Individuals with this style often have a fear of intimacy due to past experiences of inconsistent caregiving or trauma. They may crave emotional closeness but struggle with trust and may vacillate between seeking and avoiding intimacy.
Attachment theory provides us evidence-based insights as to why we might choose certain partners, the way we think, feel or act in relationships, why we might repeat specific relationship dynamics or patterns, and provides us a framework toward becoming more secure in our lives.
Why are Attachment Styles important in Relationships?
Why are Attachment Styles Important in Relationships?
Insecure attachment can contribute to a variety of negative outcomes, including difficulty in forming and maintaining relationships, low-self esteem, and difficulty regulating emotions. The following areas are typically impacted by one's attachment style:
Influence on Relationship Satisfaction
Attachment styles can significantly impact how individuals perceive and experience their relationships. People with secure attachments tend to have more satisfying and fulfilling relationships, while those with anxious or avoidant attachments may face more challenges and dissatisfaction.
Communication Patterns
Attachment styles influence how people communicate and express their needs and emotions in relationships. Understanding each other's attachment styles can lead to better communication and conflict resolution.
Impact on Relationship Dynamics
Attachment styles can shape how partners interact and respond to each other's needs. For example, an anxious individual may seek more reassurance, while an avoidant partner may feel overwhelmed by this need, leading to conflicts.
Compatibility and Attraction
People often find themselves drawn to partners with attachment styles that match or complement their own. This can lead to more harmonious relationships when attachment styles align but can also create challenges when there are significant differences.
Healing and Growth
Recognizing one's attachment style can be a step toward personal growth and healing. Individuals with insecure attachment styles can work on developing more secure attachments through therapy and self-awareness.
Attachment styles provide insight into how we connect with others in relationships, affecting our emotional well-being, communication, and overall satisfaction. Recognizing and understanding these styles can help individuals and couples navigate challenges, improve their connection, and build healthier, more secure relationships.
8 Week Attachment Coaching Focus
What is Included in this 8-Week Coaching Service?
Each session will be targeting specific patterns of behavior you may have developed over the years as I help you learn specific insights and new skills to foster a more secure attachment style. All sessions do have a developed structure to them, but will remain individualized to focus on your specific attachment-related needs.
Session 1: Understanding your specific attachment style
We will take a deep dive into your specific attachment style and how they show up in relationships in order to get a better understanding of your experience of love and why you might do the things that you do while dating or in a relationship. You will also gain valuable knowledge and lessons in the field of attachment theory, and gain insight into your patterns, triggers, and insecurities to better develop an understanding of your unique relational needs.
Session 2: The Recovering Insecure
In this session, you will learn about secure attachment and what we are ultimately working toward, as well as be provided evidence-based practices in shifting from a "recovering insecure" into a "developing secure" attachment style.
Together, we will develop a clear vision of the secure individual you would like to become, and you will have access to:
~"The Recovering Insecure: A Guide to a More Secure Life," a workbook designed by Dr. Danielle Zandbergen addressing specific attachment-related concerns and a workbook that will remain useful beyond your 8-week coaching course.
~A 5-minute "Recovering Insecure" Daily Journal Prompt
Session 3: Healing an Attachment Injury
This session is specifically individualized to address one (or a few) of your specific attachment injuries and work toward "self-parenting" or "self-nurturing" to develop love and support from within. In this session, you will begin to learn ways of connecting and loving yourself, regulate your emotions when an attachment injury emerges, increase your self-esteem and replace maladaptive habits, become more independent, and manage your specifically relationship anxiety or avoidance.
Session 4: Working with your Shadow
As a rites of passage facilitator, I developed valuable skills in depth psychology and how to address the unlikable parts of our relationship styles through what Carl Jung described as "shadow work." The "shadow self" is the parts of ourselves we might keep hidden, such as trauma, resentment, guilt, or shame, that impact the way we choose to engage in our lives.
Through compassion, empathy, and respect, I will help you acknowledge and work toward accepting this part of yourself to live more fully and authentically.
Session 5: Understanding and Communicating your Relational Needs
You will then learn your specific communication and relational needs more in depth. Communication is a core foundation for any relationship, and when we spend intentional time understanding our own communication as well as the communication styles we prefer, we end up more equipped to communicate these needs to our friends, family and partners. This session also includes ways to tap into and better communicate your emotions so you can better navigate the internal and external experience of relationships.
Session 6: Developing and Maintaining Adaptive Boundaries
This session will focus on cultivating healthy interdependence and address areas you might struggle with co-dependence. We will take a deep dive into setting healthy boundaries in order to mitigate your potential for burnout, growing resentment, or overall dissatisfaction in your relationships. I will guide you through the different types of boundaries, how to set healthier boundaries in your life, and develop a language to communicate your boundaries in the future.
Session 7: Challenging Insecure Thoughts into Secure Values and Beliefs
Thoughts are not facts! In this session we will address specific thinking patterns that may result in self-sabotage. I will specifically guide you through my 3-Step Cognitive Reframe to help you shift these insecure thoughts to more secure beliefs and values that will have a lasting impact on your relationship to self and others.
Session 8: Consolidation, Forgiveness, & Security
Change doesn't happen overnight. True, lasting change requires healing, strategy, commitment, and a willingness to practice self-love and forgiveness. In this final session together, we will learn valuable mindfulness techniques to support you in your relationships and develop a sense of confidence in becoming more secure in your life. We will discuss and practice forgiveness for self and others so you can sever from the emotional baggage you have been carrying and move on transformed and empowered.