Services / Individual therapy / Attachment therapy
Why do I keep finding myself in the same relationships?
Individual therapy for relationship patterns, attachment & emotional intimacy
You may understand your patterns. You may even know where they come from. And still, something about the way you relate to others remains difficult to change.
Request a free consultation →Perhaps you find yourself drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable. Or you long for closeness, only to feel overwhelmed when someone gets too close. You might struggle to express what you need, worry that you’re asking for too much, or find yourself taking responsibility for how everyone else feels.
Sometimes the difficulty is harder to name. Your relationships may look relatively healthy from the outside, yet you find yourself feeling lonely, misunderstood, or unable to fully be yourself within them.
You may have spent years thinking about these experiences, trying to understand why they happen. And while that understanding can be meaningful, it doesn’t always change what you feel or how you respond when you’re actually in a relationship.
Therapy offers a place to explore not only the patterns you recognize, but the emotional experiences that continue to give them their hold.
I offer psychodynamic and relational therapy for adults navigating attachment difficulties, recurring relationship patterns, and struggles with emotional intimacy. I see clients in Newport Beach and Fullerton, with online therapy available throughout California.
The pattern
When relationships bring us back to familiar places
Our relationships are among the places where we most deeply encounter ourselves.
They can awaken our longing to be known, our fears of rejection, our desire for independence, and our uncertainty about whether another person can be trusted with the parts of ourselves we usually keep protected.
Often, these experiences don’t arise out of nowhere. The ways we learned to seek closeness, respond to disappointment, manage conflict, or protect ourselves from hurt were shaped over time. Some of these ways of relating may have helped us maintain important relationships earlier in life. But what once helped us feel safe or connected can eventually become a source of frustration or loneliness.
You might notice yourself
- 01 Feeling drawn to emotionally unavailable or inconsistent partners.
- 02 Becoming anxious when someone pulls away, even when you know the relationship may not be right for you.
- 03 Wanting intimacy but feeling uncomfortable, trapped, or exposed when it becomes possible.
- 04 Struggling to express anger, disappointment, or needs for fear of damaging a relationship.
- 05 Feeling responsible for keeping others happy or emotionally regulated.
- 06 Withdrawing when relationships become complicated or emotionally demanding.
- 07 Losing touch with your own preferences, desires, or sense of self when you’re close to someone.
- 08 Repeatedly questioning whether you’re too much, not enough, or somehow difficult to love.
These patterns can appear in romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, and even professional life. And while they may look quite different on the surface, they often share something in common:
a deeply familiar way of navigating the tension between our need for connection and our need to protect ourselves.
Beyond insight
Understanding why insight isn’t always enough
Perhaps you’ve already done a great deal of work to understand yourself. You recognize your attachment tendencies. You’ve read about boundaries, emotional availability, or childhood experiences. You can explain why certain people or situations trigger strong feelings.
And yet, when you find yourself in a familiar relational situation, the same feelings return.
You might know that someone else’s distance doesn’t necessarily mean rejection, but still experience it as a threat.
You might understand that you have a right to express your needs, yet feel guilty or ashamed when you try.
Or you might recognize that vulnerability is necessary for intimacy while finding yourself instinctively moving away from it.
This is part of what makes relational difficulties so complicated.
Knowing something about ourselves is not always the same as being able to experience ourselves differently.
Our ways of relating aren’t simply ideas we hold. They’re also emotional expectations, bodily responses, protective habits, and deeply familiar experiences of ourselves in relation to other people.
Psychodynamic therapy creates space to become curious about these experiences as they unfold, rather than treating them as problems to be corrected through willpower alone.
Attachment
What is attachment therapy?
Attachment refers to the ways we seek closeness, safety, and connection with important people in our lives.
Our earliest relationships can shape what we come to expect from others and how we respond when connection feels uncertain. Over time, we may develop particular ways of managing our need for intimacy, independence, reassurance, or emotional protection.
You may have encountered descriptions of anxious, avoidant, or secure attachment styles. These ideas can offer useful language for understanding relational experiences.
I’m interested in understanding a person’s relational life beyond a category.
Someone who withdraws from intimacy may also long deeply for connection.
Someone who frequently seeks reassurance may have learned that closeness is unpredictable.
A person who appears independent and self-sufficient may struggle to recognize how much they need others.
These experiences often contain contradictions that make sense when we begin to understand the person’s history, emotional world, and relationships.
In therapy, we can explore what closeness means to you, what you anticipate from others, and what happens internally when your needs for connection, autonomy, and safety come into conflict.
The goal isn’t to assign you an attachment label. It’s to help you develop a more compassionate and complex understanding of yourself, and to create greater freedom in how you relate.
My approach
A different way of working with relationship patterns
My approach to therapy is psychodynamic and relational.
Rather than focusing exclusively on changing particular behaviors, I’m interested in understanding the emotional experiences beneath them.
We might explore the relationships that shaped your early understanding of love, the feelings that become difficult to tolerate in moments of closeness, or the ways you protect yourself from disappointment, shame, or dependence.
In the room
We may also become curious about what happens between us in therapy.
The therapeutic relationship is not separate from the work. It can become a place where familiar expectations, feelings, and ways of relating emerge in a setting where they can be noticed and understood together.
Perhaps you find yourself worrying about disappointing me, struggling to express disagreement, or wondering whether certain feelings are acceptable to bring into the room. Rather than treating these experiences as obstacles, we can become curious about what they might tell us.
Over time, this work can help you recognize patterns as they happen, understand what they’re protecting, and develop new ways of responding.
The hope is not simply that you’ll learn how to have better relationships, but that you’ll experience greater freedom to be yourself within them.
More on my approach →Who I work with
Therapy for people who think deeply about their relationships
Many of the people drawn to this kind of work are thoughtful, perceptive, and accustomed to making sense of their experiences.
They may be highly capable in their professional lives, emotionally attentive to others, or skilled at understanding complicated interpersonal situations.
Yet they find that their own relationships stir up feelings they can’t quite think their way through.
You may be someone who understands other people more easily than you understand your own needs. You may have learned to be accommodating, self-sufficient, or especially attuned to how others are feeling. Or perhaps you’ve spent much of your life relying on your intellect to navigate experiences that feel more vulnerable emotionally.
These qualities aren’t necessarily problems. They may reflect important strengths and ways you’ve learned to move through the world.
But sometimes the very capacities that help us function well can also make it difficult to encounter the parts of ourselves that feel uncertain, dependent, angry, afraid, or in need of care.
Therapy offers a relationship in which those less familiar parts of your experience can have room to emerge.
You don’t have to arrive knowing exactly what’s wrong, or even knowing what you want to change. We can begin with what you’re noticing, what feels difficult, and what you find yourself returning to.
Gradual change
What might begin to change?
Change in relationships isn’t always dramatic or immediately visible.
Sometimes it begins with noticing that you feel anxious without immediately seeking reassurance. Or recognizing that you’re disappointed with someone without assuming the relationship is in danger.
You may begin to understand why certain people feel especially compelling, even when the relationships leave you feeling unfulfilled.
You might become more comfortable expressing a need, allowing yourself to feel anger, or remaining emotionally present when a conversation becomes difficult.
And perhaps, over time, you’ll find yourself less compelled to repeat relationships that have become painfully familiar.
These changes aren’t simply about learning a different set of relationship skills. They’re about developing a different relationship with your own emotional life.
The process is often gradual, and it rarely follows a straight line. But as we become more able to understand and experience ourselves, new possibilities for connection can emerge.
Attachment therapy
Frequently asked questions
Can attachment therapy help if I’m single?
Absolutely. You don’t need to be in a romantic relationship to explore your relational patterns. In fact, periods of being single can offer meaningful opportunities to reflect on previous relationships, recurring attractions, fears about intimacy, or the ways you experience closeness in friendships and family relationships.
What if I already know my attachment style?
Understanding your attachment style can be a helpful starting point, but therapy can offer something beyond identifying a pattern. We can explore how those patterns developed, what they mean in the context of your particular life, and what happens emotionally when they arise in your relationships.
Is this the same as couples therapy?
No. This is individual psychotherapy focused on your own emotional and relational experiences. While couples therapy explores the relationship between two partners, individual relationship therapy provides space to understand your particular history, feelings, expectations, and ways of relating.
You can benefit from this work whether you’re single, dating, married, or navigating relationships that don’t fit neatly into any of those categories.
How long does relationship or attachment therapy take?
There isn’t a predetermined timeline. Some people begin therapy with a specific relational difficulty, while others are interested in exploring longstanding patterns more deeply.
Psychodynamic therapy often involves sustained work because the experiences we’re exploring have developed over many years. We’ll talk together about your goals, how the work is unfolding, and what feels useful as we go.
Can therapy help if I’ve been in therapy before?
Yes. Some people seek depth-oriented therapy after previous experiences that helped them understand their difficulties but left them feeling that something remained unresolved.
Psychodynamic therapy can offer a different way of working, with attention to emotional experience, unconscious patterns, and the therapeutic relationship itself.
Next steps
You don’t have to keep figuring it out alone.
Sometimes we become so accustomed to certain ways of relating that it’s difficult to imagine anything different. You may have learned to live with relationships that leave you feeling uncertain, to minimize your needs, or to make sense of painful experiences without ever quite feeling free of them.
But the patterns that have shaped your relationships don’t have to determine all that becomes possible within them.
Therapy offers a place to slow down, become curious about what’s happening beneath the surface, and begin to experience yourself and others in new ways.
If you’re interested in exploring this work together, I invite you to reach out. I offer individual psychodynamic therapy in Newport Beach and Fullerton, as well as online throughout California.
Request a free consultation →You don’t have to know exactly where to begin. We can start there together.