Linda Cundy Seminar Videos – Avoidant Attachment and Defences Against Intimacy:
a series of webinars for The Bowlby Centre
These seminar videos are password protected.
The password is free for Bowlby Centre members and obtainable from Carol Tobin.
Non-members can view the seminars by paying £20 per video ( there are 3) and will receive the passwords for each video separately.
If in doubt please contact admin@thebowlbycentre.org.uk.
Part 1: The ‘Avoidant’ Individual
This first webinar identifies the features of ‘avoidant’ – Dismissing – individuals and outlines the features of early relationships that set the scene for this pattern of attachment to develop. Two different core anxieties are proposed, both requiring a creative range of protective defences – defences that profoundly impact relationships with other people and with the self. The range and nature of these defensive strategies, and their function, are described. It is important for therapists to recognise the presence of shame that drives avoidant behaviour.
Part 2: Therapy
Dismissing individuals resist seeking help, and therapists need to be sensitive to this in order to be useful to these clients. The combination of a Dismissing pattern of attachment plus trauma is described. This webinar helps practitioners identify ‘avoidant’ individuals who do seek therapy, outlining ways these clients may present, particular features of the therapeutic relationship, transference and countertransference. The overall aim of Attachment-Based Psychotherapy is proposed.
Part 3: What Therapists Do
This webinar focuses on how psychotherapists can use the Aims proposed in Part 2 to help Dismissing clients ‘earn’ security. Assessment and formulation are briefly outlined, and specific areas of focus in therapy are proposed. These clients’ resistance to change and the dynamics of their internal worlds are explored in order to help therapists be more effective. The practitioner’s own core pattern of attachment is considered as a factor in the relational dynamic of psychotherapy with ‘avoidant’ individuals.
*Linda Cundy is an Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, supervisor and independent trainer with twenty-five years’ experience. She has written / edited four books to date, Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era; Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment; and Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working with Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred and Shame. The fourth, Attachment, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen, will be published in August 2021. Linda has worked in the areas of adult mental health and bereavement, and has been appointed Attachment Theory Consultant to the Bowlby Centre.