Let’s Learn About AAP

Adult attachment psychotherapy (AAP) is based on attachment theory. This theory outlines four different attachment types that a person can develop based on the attachment they had with parents or early caregivers.

Each attachment style entails a different set of behaviors that govern relationships well after childhood, and into adulthood. The four types are secure, avoidant, anxious, and disorganized.

Accordingly, treatment focuses on how childhood experiences with early caregivers have impacted the ability to form healthy relationships as adults.

When is AAP Useful?

This therapy is utilized when patients describe difficulties fostering meaningful connections with others, and when they’ve endured negative childhood experiences.

The aim of AAP is to help patients regain trust in relationships, which requires doing inner-child work. This involves getting in touch with the version of yourself that was initially wounded, most likely a younger version of yourself.

This therapy will help you ‘reparent’ this version of yourself with love, patience, and compassion; elements that may have been lacking or missing completely in childhood.

In doing so, a shift in your cognitive narrator is made to one who is loving and believes in you, rather than one who installs fearful thoughts of abandonment, disappointment, or pain.

Through deep reflection of the relationship with primary caregivers and how this dynamic continues to manifest into the present, patients will healthily process the attachment wounds endured in childhood.

Once they’ve done so, they can then redirect their focus to adult relationships with friends, love interests, co-workers etc.. As all your relationships have the common variable of you, and are thus interconnected and vulnerable to attachment behaviors you established prior.