Attachment Therapy in Victoria, BC

If you find yourself pushing people away when they get close, or clinging when you feel insecure, or unable to trust even when someone's trustworthy—these aren't personality flaws. They're relational patterns you learned early on. And they can shift.

What You're Experiencing vs. What's Driving It

You might notice patterns in your relationships that keep repeating.

Maybe you withdraw when someone gets too close. Maybe you need constant reassurance and feel anxious when you don't get it. Maybe you swing between wanting intimacy and panicking when it's offered. Maybe you don't feel much at all—relationships feel flat or you can't access deep connection.

Or maybe you're intellectually aware you do these things but can't seem to stop. You know your partner is trustworthy but you can't trust them. You know you're pushing people away but you do it anyway. You know you're seeking reassurance excessively but the anxiety doesn't go away.

What's usually driving these patterns:

Early attachment experiences—what you learned about closeness, safety, and expressing needs from your earliest relationships. If caregivers were inconsistent, dismissive, intrusive, or absent, you adapted.
Relational wounds—experiences that taught you connection isn't safe, or that your needs won't be met, or that you have to perform to be loved.
Nervous system patterns—your body learned to respond to closeness with anxiety, shutdown, or hypervigilance. That's still running automatically.
Working models of relationships—unconscious beliefs about whether you're worthy of love, whether others are reliable, whether closeness leads to hurt.

These aren't conscious choices. They're adaptations your nervous system made to survive relationally. That's why knowing better doesn't change how you respond.

How Experiential Therapy Works for Attachment

Traditional attachment work focuses on understanding your attachment style—anxious, avoidant, secure, disorganized. That's useful information, but it doesn't change the patterns.

I work with attachment at the level it was formed: in your nervous system and emotional memory. We don't just analyze your patterns. We work with what created them.

This looks like identifying the specific beliefs that drive your relational responses—"I'm not safe being vulnerable," "People will leave if they see the real me," "Closeness means losing myself"—and updating them where they were encoded. Not through challenging thoughts, but through working with the emotional experiences that formed those beliefs.

We work with the parts of you that learned these patterns, helping them experience something different in the present. Noticing what happens in your body when you feel vulnerable or when someone gets close, and working with those sensations to help your nervous system recognize safety and presence.

Working with specific attachment wounds—moments where connection failed or hurt was inflicted—and helping your system integrate new information: that you can be yourself, that your needs can matter, that closeness doesn't have to mean danger or loss.

The methods I use—Coherence Therapy for updating core beliefs, AEDP and IFS for working with parts and emotional patterns, somatic work for recognizing safety in your body—all target the patterns where they actually live.

You won't just understand your attachment patterns. You'll start responding differently in relationships. That's what changes how you connect.

This Approach Works Best If:

✓ You recognize patterns in your relationships that keep repeating

✓ You know intellectually what you're doing but can't stop

✓ You want to work with where these patterns came from and how to shift them at their source

✓ You're willing to work at the level of nervous system and emotional memory, not just thoughts

This May Not Be Right If:

– You want quick relationship tips rather than deeper pattern work

– You want to stay at the cognitive level rather than engage emotionally

– You're looking for validation on a specific relationship issue rather than pattern work

Ready to Start?

If you recognize yourself in what you've read here and want to work at this level, get in touch.

Get Started

Fees:

Individual therapy: $175/session

$5 discount when paying by e-transfer.

Insurance: As an RCC and CCC, my services are covered by most extended health plans in Canada.

I provide receipts for insurance reimbursement.

Limited sliding scale available for financial need.