Establishing hope and relational safety
Working therapeutically with insecure attachment patterns
3–part interactive online cpd series
Key Info
Working with
Preoccupied Attachment
Stephanie Davis
Fri 10 OCT 2025
17.00 – 19.00 GMT
Live: Yes
Recorded: Yes*
Standard £45
Trainee £35
Working with
Disorganised Attachment
Sarah Benamer
Fri 24 OCT 2025
17.00 – 19.00 GMT
Live: Yes
Recorded: Yes*
Standard £45
Trainee £35
Working with
Avoidant Attachment
Linda Cundy
Fri 31 OCT 2025
17.00 – 19.00 GMT
Live: Yes
Recorded: Yes*
Standard £45
Trainee £35
Overview
This 3-part live webinar series will delve into the insecure attachment patterns – preoccupied, disorganised, and avoidant – as originally conceptualised by John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Mary Main.
Across the series, three clinicians with expertise in attachment – Linda Cundy, Sarah Benamer, and Stephanie Davis – will explore the relevance and application of insecure attachment patterns in the consulting room through case study material.
While highlighting the value of an attachment-informed lens, the series will also consider how attachment theory runs the risk of simplifying human interactions into a set of categories and labels, and illuminate how working with attachment in clinical practice needs to acknowledge complexity and nuance.
Clinical work will consider the role of mutuality and recognition, affective attunement, transference dynamics and cycles of rupture and repair in the therapeutic process. During each event, there will be time for questions and discussion to help you integrate ideas into your own clinical practice.
*Please, note: to protect clients’ confidentiality, only the theoretical introduction will be recorded.
Seminar Content
PART 1 – Working with Preoccupied attachment
Speaker: Stephanie Davis
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
Khalil Gibran
Stephanie will outline how preoccupied or ambivalent attachment typically develops from the infant’s experience of inconsistent caregiving in childhood. This experience of inconsistency can arise from caregivers who may have been sometimes close and sometimes distant, or those whose emotional presence was inconsistently available to the child. Such experiences can leave a child unsure as to whether their emotional needs will be met.
This unpredictability can lead the child to experience waves of amplified distress which they, then, need to manage in relation to a caregiver who cannot be consistently relied upon for comfort/soothing. Such patterns often endure and shape ways of relating in adulthood. Stephanie will also touch upon the social and how it can influence and shape attachment experiences for some children, often those from global majority cultural backgrounds who live as a minority group, or those who experience migration. In such cases the social can play a role in the exhibition of an attachment style that may be described as preoccupied. Clinically, the therapist’s experience can include significant body countertransference, embodied regressed states and the need to tolerate strong ambivalence in the work.
Stephanie will then discuss her work with Louise. Louise came to therapy experiencing frequent periods of heightened and overwhelming emotion, significant anxiety and struggles regulating and managing her emotions in relationships. Louise’s early experience of an inconsistently available main caregiver was in contrast to that of a younger sibling whose early childhood was shaped in a different cultural context, where the same main caregiver was more settled and available. Thus, Louise’s preoccupied attachment style was shaped by matters both internal and external to the family environment.
Through a process of imbibing the therapist’s reliable presence and physicality, comparable to Bion’s T(K) in relation to O, and creating an awareness of the inner and outer layers of experience that pervaded the present day, the work enabled Louise to find a greater capacity to tolerate her own emotions and to be more visible and present in her life and in relation to close and intimate others.
PART 2 – Working with Disorganised Attachment
Speaker: Sarah Benamer
“In the world before words, where felt sensation and emotion may be undifferentiated, infants rely on caregivers to contain, intuit, and metabolise these. Imagine parents themselves born of trauma, met by an infant’s body that does not correspond with expectation. With a child with a disability where the touch or proximity increases upset. How do they reconcile the baby of their fantasies and the baby that they have? In turn, how does a child make sense of the parents’ perhaps less than raptured responses and attachment messages in addition to pain and medical intervention?”
Sarah will discuss how disorganised attachment may manifest when the conflict between safety and proximity in early life for whatever reason means that no consistent attachment strategy is possible –such as when there is trauma, neglect, and physical, emotional or sexual abuse. The child may be caught in an impossible situation of attempting to maintain closeness to a caregiver who is a ‘scaregiver’, or to go on being through abandonment.
They are managing overwhelming feeling with the most rudimentary psychological structures by whatever means are available without the scaffold of a containing and sustaining other. These often confusing, incoherent, or disorganised patterns shape adult attachment states of mind and intimate relating fully or in part. This may emerge clinically through a tapestry of projections, embodied communications, in addition to what can be put into words.
Sarah will discuss Raven. Raven is a client whose body narrative is formative in the shaping of her sense of self. Her early attachment relationships came with their own traumatic payload, and the experience of the very skin she inhabits is fundamental to her identity and relational patterns. These factors mediate the therapeutic relationship and the shape of the transference.
Work with Raven illustrates how early attachment experience might re-emerge through both what is said and non verbal body narrative in therapy when there are disorganised aspects of experiencce. Relational risks taken in the space between therapist and client traverse both the creative adaptations made to the original socio-cultural and attachment circumstance and offer new possibility, ultimately of the move from insecure state of mind to earned security.
PART 3 – Working with Avoidant Attachment
Speaker: Linda Cundy
“I decided that I would never ask for anything because of what would be unleashed if I made myself visible.”
Ayesha
Linda will illuminate how avoidant attachment often develops from emotionally unavailable or rejecting caregivers in early childhood.
These caregivers may have discouraged emotional expression or failed to respond when the child sought comfort, leading the child to learn that depending on others isn’t safe or effective.
It is marked by emotional distance, a strong need for independence, and discomfort with closeness, intimacy or vulnerability in relationships.
Linda will then discuss a case study of ‘Ayesha’.
Who is this training for?
This webinar series is primarily designed for counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers.
Participants are invited to attend any of the individual webinars or join for the whole series.
Learning Objectives
- To deepen your understanding of how in attachment terms the self is constructed through the relationship a child has with their caregiver.
- To gain insight into how preoccupied, disorganised and avoidant styles can be identified and differentiated in clinical practice.
- To be up to date on the current body of knowledge on attachment, drawing on current theory and research.
- To develop strategies, tools and techniques for working effectively with insecure attachment patterns in therapeutic practice.
- To be of practical value, with implications for therapy and human relatedness.
Speakers
Stephanie Davis
Stephanie (MA (Cantab), PhD, UKCP) is a relational Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Supervisor who works with individuals and couples. Stephanie is a training therapist and supervisor at the Bowlby Centre and a supervisor with Headstrong Counselling.
Stephanie initially trained at the Centre for Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (CAPP) (now The Bowlby Centre). Following this, Stephanie trained as an Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) relationship counsellor with Marriage Care and completed her supervision training at WPF. Stephanie has worked both in the NHS and in private practice.
Prior to focussing on psychotherapy, Stephanie was a research psychologist specialising in Developmental Psychology. Stephanie is keenly interested in understanding the psychological impacts and consequences of early development, with consideration of the cultural and societal context, and in using narrative to elucidate our understanding of our identities and our selves.
Selected Publications:
- Davis, S. (2010). Serial Migration and Forgetting. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 4(1), 26–36.
- Davis, S., & Phoenix, A. (2009). Transforming Experiences: The Stories We Tell. Children in Scotland, 94(2), 14–15.
- Davis, S. (2007). Racism as Trauma. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 1(2),49–72.
Sarah Benamer
Sarah Benamer (UKCP, MBACP, SEP) is a Relational Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and supervisor who works with individuals and couples. She originally qualified as a psychotherapist at CAPP (The Centre for Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy – now The Bowlby Centre), and subsequently trained as a psychosexual and couples’ therapist, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.
Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, Sarah was a community worker, advocating for those in crisis within the NHS psychiatric system, and supporting individuals living with chronic pain, long-term illness and severe physical disabilities. In addition to therapeutic trainings, she has an MA in Applied Anthropology, a grounding that informs her ‘participant observer’ approach to clinical practice.
Sarah has a particular interest in the many roles of the body in our emotional and relational worlds and seeks to integrate psychoanalytic and attachment understandings with an appreciation of individual body narrative in her writing and speaking. Sarah is deeply committed to anti discriminatory practice, the accessibility of therapy, and theory that is relevant in the clients’ world.
Publications & Talks:
- Benamer, S. (2024). Embodied Intimacies. In B. Kahr (Ed.), Expanding Psychoanalysis: The Contributions of Susie Orbach (pp. 42–56). Routledge.
- Benamer, S. (2021). Not so hysterical now? Psychotherapy, menopause, and hysterectomy. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 15(2), 236–252.
- Benamer, S. (2010). Telling Stories? Attachment-Based Approaches to the Treatment of Psychosis (1st ed.). Routledge.
- Benamer, S. (2008). ‘Killing Me Softly’: A Relational Understanding of Attachment to Pain. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 2(2), 195–203.
- Benamer, S., & White, K. (2008). Trauma and Attachment (1st ed.). Routledge.
- Benamer, S. (2024). Minding The Menopause: From Misogyny to Therapeutic Meaning Making [Talk].
- Benamer, S. (2024). No Body Is an Island: Attending to Body Narratives in Clinical Practice [Talk]. The British Association for Psychoanalytic & Psychodynamic Supervision Autumn Conference (BAPPS).
- Benamer, S. (2018). Women on The Couch [Talk].
Linda Cundy
Linda is an Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice with almost thirty years’ experience. She is also a clinical supervisor, independent trainer and author who has curated, contributed to and edited four published books about attachment to date, including Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy published by Routledge.
Two further books are currently in press, with another single-authored work planned. She is Series Editor for the Psychotherapy Matters books, published by Karnac in conjunction with UKCP, and is the Attachment Consultant to the Bowlby Centre.