Attachment within a couple relationship

A online workshop designed and facilitated by Anne Power
11 hours over 3 Friday’s

Outline:

This course is offered both for couple therapists and for practitioners who work with individual clients but would like a fuller understanding of how attachment strategies play out in a relationship. The modules will map attachment dynamics in different areas of a couple’s life. In the final session we will briefly explore working directly with a couple as well as working with the ‘couple in mind’. This might be particularly useful for individual therapists who are considering a move into couple work and for those who are staying with individual work but find that clients often ‘bring’ their partner to sessions.

The approach I take is based on my own training at The Bowlby Centre, my systemic training with Relate and in recent years, my training and experience as an EFT (emotionally focused couple therapy) therapist. I will suggest points for reflection between meetings as well as asking you to read a chapter in preparation for each module. A copy of Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? will be needed for this reading

Session 1

How attachment impacts our selection of a mate

Secure attachment is a blessing across the life cycle and its impact on our choice of a partner is particularly telling. People with this attachment history are equipped to choose well. They have a view of self as loveable and of the other as dependable. Their comfort with themselves allows them to think about their own feelings and to be curious about their own experience and that of a potential partner. With less need to project parts of their self they are better placed to read and accurately assess another person. We will consider how insecure attachment could sabotage mate selection in any of the courtship pathways – romance, arranged marriage or self-arranged relationships.

How attachment impacts building and sustaining a relationship

Secure attachment enables both care-seeking and caregiving to be more effective. We will consider the importance of understanding our needs and being able to voice these in ways which our partner can digest. We will map how different forms of insecure attachment interfere with the reciprocal, mutual support which most people long for in a partnership. People often say that the difficulty in their relationship is all down to ‘communication’ and we’ll explore what may underly this idea and how clients might be helped to unpack and go deeper in understanding their experience.

Session 2

How attachment impacts fights: Triggering, escalating and repairing them

Rows are a part of most relationships, the problem is not so much the fight itself as the lack of repair. A couple who avoids all friction could be at risk of keeping their relationship in the shallow end. Many couples become drawn into an ongoing tug of war between their complementary attachment strategies: the more one tries to calm the situation by saying little and keeping at a distance, the more the other insists on talking and feels things would be OK if only they could get their partner to understand. When this pattern becomes embedded, the tension will be constantly humming and a relatively small jolt can catapult the couple into open conflict.

How attachment impacts sex in a long term bond

How can long term partnerships continue to enjoy sexual pleasure over the decades? Why does it often happen that all seems fine in a couple except for sex? Is sex a lightning rod to what is really going on, or an adjunct which is less important for some couples? We will consider how competing attachment strategies can interfere with their sex life, as with any aspect of a couple’s daily life. When clients become more regulated and less reactive in their attachment behaviour then sex may be easier to negotiate – as would other areas such as money.

Session 3

How we work with attachment in a couple

In this module we will switch to a more focused approach to working, either with the ‘couple in mind’ as we sit with an individual in the room, or actually working with a couple. The approach I offer is broadly based on EFT and I build this onto an attachment-based psychoanalytic base. We will consider how to help a couple who arrive with the common presentation of fighting about all kinds of unimportant things, despondent because they seem to have become enemies and longing to recapture a sense of being a team. We will also review the understanding from earlier meetings.

ABOUT ANNE

Anne Power has qualifications from The Bowlby Centre, Westminster Pastoral Foundation, Tavistock Relationships and Relate. Her clinical work has been in voluntary settings, in the NHS and in private practice in London where she now works online with couples and providing one-off supervision consultations. She has taught on a number of therapy trainings in London. Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? was published in 2022 and reflects on interviews with eighteen long-term couples.

Anne’s first book, Forced Endings in Psychotherapy, investigated the process of closing a practice for retirement or other reasons. Her published papers explore attachment meaning in the consulting room and in the supervision relationship.

Dates:

• Friday 9^th January 2026 – 9:00 to 12.30
• Friday 16^th January 2026 – 9:00 to 12.30
• Friday 23^rd January 2026 – 9:00 to 12.30

CPD: 10.5 hours (CPD certificate provided)
Limited to 15 participants

Cost: £300