Disorganized attachment brings a challenging and often overwhelming complexity into the therapy process. For AEDP therapists, these moments can feel chaotic, diffuse, or stuck—marked by fright without solution or attachment without safety. The therapist may feel unmoored, unsure how to find focus or how to move forward. This ASM provides an in-depth exploration of how disorganization manifests—and how we, as AEDP therapists, can meet it with calm, courage, and stability.
Together, we will explore what it means to tailor treatment to disorganized attachment, recognizing and tracking the markers of fragmentation—such as incomplete expressions, contradictory affects, role reversal, and maladaptive affects—as essential guideposts, not obstacles. We will look at how to become the organizer of the client’s internal experience, using our presence and reflective capacities to help patients make meaning of their experiences and help them to discover a sense of felt safety that may never have existed before.
Central to this work is engaging the client’s parts from a place of deep respect and intention, and learning how to facilitate repair between parts—especially when the self has been split in response to early trauma. We will explore the therapist’s common reactivities—often marked by confusion or our own disorganization—as essential data and a compass for recognizing how we may be responding to our clients. We will discover how to enlist therapist’s metaskills to counter common reactivities and strengthen therapeutic rapport and collaboration.