The way you were loved shapes how you love — others, and yourself.

Because they were once the best way you had to stay connected or stay safe. If closeness felt unpredictable growing up, you may have learned to chase it — or to stop needing it. Those strategies run fast and below awareness, which is why insight alone rarely changes them. What helps is slowing down enough to feel what happens in you in the moment the pattern kicks in, and meeting it differently.

The way we treat ourselves often mirrors how we were treated when we were struggling. If your distress was met with impatience, criticism, or absence, you may have learned to meet your own pain the same way. That inner critic usually started as protection. In therapy we get to know it — and build a kinder, steadier way of being with yourself that holds up when things get hard.

I combine two approaches that work hand in hand. Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, is an attachment-based model. Rather than only talking about your patterns, we work with the emotions that drive them as they come up in session, slowing them down, making sense of them, and reshaping how you respond to yourself and the people you love.

Focusing-Oriented Therapy adds attention to the felt sense: the bodily knowing underneath your words, where real change tends to begin. EFIT gives the work its map, and Focusing helps us go deeper at each step.

• People who keep ending up in the same kind of relationship, or the same kind of fight
• Anxious attachment: needing reassurance, fearing being left
• Avoidant patterns: pulling away, shutting down, feeling smothered by closeness
• A harsh inner critic, chronic self-doubt, or feeling never quite "enough"
• Trouble asking for what you need, or trusting it will be there
• Wanting to understand yourself before — or after — a relationship

No. Your attachment patterns live in you, and they can change in individual work. Many people do this between relationships, or while in one where their partner isn't interested in therapy. When the change happens in you, it tends to show up in every relationship you have — including the one with yourself.