David Klein LCSW-R

Attachment explains more than romantic relationships. It shapes how we relate to everyone in our lives, and how we experience ourselves when those connections are threatened. It’s also why endings hurt so much: the bond doesn’t dissolve just because the relationship did. Understanding that is often what lets someone stop reading their own distress as a personal failing, and start seeing it as what it is: a system built for connection, doing exactly what it was built to do.

Instead of only talking about feelings, we work with them as they arise. This matters especially in relationships and loss, where the story you tell about what happened is often several steps removed from what your body is actually carrying. Working experientially gets underneath the narrative to what's live right now.

Some of the hardest losses never get a funeral: a divorce, a breakup, an estrangement, a pet who was family. There’s no ritual, and often no permission to mourn; people expect relief, or expect you to be over it. Much of what surfaces in this work is grief, even when it doesn’t look like grief. Naming it as grief is often the thing that lets it move.

Divorce ends a marriage. It doesn't end the attachment, the grief, or the question of who you are now. I work with adults at any stage — the middle of the legal process, or years past the decree when everyone assumes you're through it. The paperwork settles the logistics. This is the work of rebuilding what it disrupted: your footing as a parent, your relationships with your children, your sense of yourself.

Attachment theory has shaped how I work for twenty years, not just since my training in Emotionally Focused Therapy. In practice it changes what I listen for. Less what happened, more what it threatened — and what you did to protect yourself once it did. Those protective moves usually made complete sense when they formed. They just tend to outlast the situation that required them.

Emotionally Focused Therapy works on the attachment bond itself. With individuals (EFIT), we work with the emotions that drive a pattern as they show up in session, and reshape how you respond to yourself and others. With couples, co-parents, and families (EFT and EFFT), we slow the cycle down enough to see what each person is protecting, and help you reach each other again.