Attachment-Based Therapy · Virtual · Six Provinces
Attachment-Based Therapy
If the same painful thing keeps happening in your closest relationships — and you can see it happening while it happens, and still cannot stop it — that can be an attachment pattern rather than a character flaw. It was learned, which is what makes it workable.
Prefer not to create an account? Text two times that suit you to (519) 760-5211 and we will book it for you, or send them through the short form. We reply with two consultation times, usually within 24 hours. If you would rather work with a particular clinician, say so and it is arranged.
Free 15-minute consultation · No referral needed · Sessions noon–9pm Pacific, seven days
At a glance
Attachment-based therapy works on the patterns a person repeats in close relationships — anxious, avoidant or disorganised — and on where those patterns were learned. At TEO Counselling it is provided online by Mohamad Shabib (MACP, CCC), who sees clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador, and by Alison Shaji (MA Clinical Psychology, RCC), who sees clients in British Columbia. Individual sessions are $150 per 60-minute session, couples sessions are $175, and the first step is a free 15-minute consultation with no referral needed.
People often search for a therapist for anxious attachment style, an avoidant attachment therapist or simply attachment issues therapy — on this page it all means the same thing: attachment-based therapy, online, for adults in the six provinces listed above. If the pattern you recognize is the anxious one — the checking, the pursuit, the reassurance that wears off — the anxious attachment therapy page goes into that work in detail.
What attachment actually refers to
Attachment is the working model you built, early and mostly outside of memory, for a single question: when I need someone, what happens? If the answer was that someone reliably came, you tend to approach closeness without much strategy. If the answer was that someone came sometimes and not others, or came but arrived angry, or did not come at all, you built a strategy — and the strategy was intelligent at the time.
The difficulty is that the strategy outlives the situation. A child who learned to escalate in order to be noticed becomes an adult who cannot let a conversation end unresolved. A child who learned that needing things made the room worse becomes an adult who genuinely believes they do not need much. Both are old solutions still running long after the problem changed.
This is why insight alone can fail here. People can arrive able to describe their pattern in detail, having read about it for years, and the pattern is completely unchanged by the description. Attachment is held in the nervous system and in what your body does before you have decided anything, which is why the work has to reach further down than explanation.
The four patterns, described honestly
These names get used loosely online, sometimes as identities or insults. In clinical use they describe what someone does under relational stress — not who they are, and not permanently.
What are the four attachment styles?
Four are usually named: secure, where closeness and independence both feel workable; anxious (also called preoccupied), where distance reads as danger; avoidant (also called dismissing), where closeness reads as a demand; and disorganised (also called fearful-avoidant), where both readings run at once. They are descriptions of what happens under relational stress, not fixed types, and people can show one pattern with a partner and another with friends or at work.
Anxious, or preoccupied
Closeness feels necessary and unreliable at the same time. Distance reads as danger, so the response to a delayed reply is to pursue — text again, seek reassurance, keep the conversation open until it resolves. The reassurance works briefly and then wears off, which is the exhausting part. Underneath there can be a well-founded early experience of care that arrived unpredictably. This pattern has its own page: anxious attachment therapy.
Avoidant, or dismissing
Independence feels safe and closeness feels like an obligation arriving. The response to intensity is to step back — to become reasonable, to go quiet, to find the relationship suddenly less appealing once it becomes secure. This one is easily misread as not caring. The research suggests something closer to the opposite: in Mary Dozier and Roger Kobak's 1992 skin-conductance study in Child Development, adults who downplayed attachment while telling their stories showed a physiological stress response as they did it — distress is present, and the strategy is to not show it. Some avoidant adults arrive in therapy genuinely puzzled by their own withdrawal. The dismissive and fearful forms, and how therapy works with them, are covered on our avoidant attachment therapy page.
Disorganised, or fearful-avoidant
Both strategies at once, in alternation — reaching for someone and needing them to leave, sometimes within the same hour. It tends to develop where the person who was the source of comfort was also the source of fear, so the nervous system holds two incompatible instructions. This pattern is the one most closely associated with trauma, and trauma-specific work tends to be the more appropriate starting point rather than relationship advice. It is covered in depth — the push-pull, the research behind it, and how therapy is sequenced for it — on our disorganized attachment therapy page.
Secure
Not a personality type and not the absence of difficulty. Secure attachment is better described as a recovery time: conflict happens, distress happens, and repair is expected to be possible. It can be built later in life through relationships in which repair reliably happens, and a therapeutic relationship is one place that can occur. A 2015 systematic review in Psychotherapy Research of studies that measured adult attachment before and after psychological therapy reported that, in the studies it examined, attachment security increased and attachment anxiety decreased following therapy, while findings on attachment avoidance were unclear — a description of what those studies found, not a forecast for any one person.
One caution about the categories: you are not necessarily one of these. It is possible to be steady with friends, anxious with a partner, and avoidant with a parent — the pattern is a property of the relationship and the stress level, not a label to be assigned to yourself for life.
If you would rather sit with this on your own first, there is a free attachment workbook here — no email required, nothing to book. Some people read for a while before they are ready to talk to anyone, and that is a reasonable order to do it in.
What the work involves here
There is no Canadian credential called attachment therapist — the phrase is unprotected, so anyone may use it. Rather than lean on the title, here is the specific training this work is built from and what each part is for.
EMDR, for the memories the pattern is anchored to
Attachment patterns can be anchored to specific early moments that still carry a physical charge. EMDR works on those directly rather than through discussion. Mohamad holds Advanced EMDR training through an EMDRIA-approved programme; Alison is EMDR-trained as well.
Internal Family Systems, for the part that runs the strategy
IFS treats the protective move — the withdrawal, the pursuit — as something a part of you is doing for a reason, rather than as a defect to be overridden. That reframe matters practically, because people cannot reliably shame themselves out of an attachment strategy. Mohamad holds IFS Levels 1 and 2.
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, built on attachment directly
EFFT is one of the few mainstream models built explicitly on attachment theory rather than merely informed by it, and it works with the cycle between people rather than the faults of either one. Alison is EFFT-trained, and also works psychoanalytically and with inner-child approaches where the early material is the centre of the difficulty.
The Gottman Method, when it is happening between two people
Where the pattern is playing out in a current relationship, Gottman Method work gives both people something concrete to do with the cycle instead of relitigating it. Mohamad and Alison each hold Gottman Levels 1 and 2.
CBT tools, for the day-to-day layer
The thoughts and moves a pattern runs on — the catastrophic reading of a silence, the checking, the withdrawal — can be worked on with cognitive behavioural tools like thought records and behavioural experiments. How that works for anxious and avoidant patterns has its own page.
What is an attachment-based therapist?
An attachment-based therapist is a therapist whose training and way of working treat your patterns in close relationships as the thing being worked on, rather than as background to a symptom. In Canada it is a description, not a credential: there is no college that registers attachment therapists and no protected title, so the phrase on its own tells you nothing about what someone has actually studied.
What makes the description accurate is the specific training behind it. Some models are built on attachment theory directly — Emotionally Focused Family Therapy is one. Others engage attachment without being named for it: EMDR, where a pattern is anchored to early memories; Internal Family Systems, where the protective move is treated as a part with a job; the Gottman Method, where the pattern is running between two people. An attachment-based therapist is also, in practice, someone who expects your pattern to show up with them — the pull to please them, the urge to cancel once it starts to matter — and works with that in the room instead of around it.
So the useful question to ask any therapist using the phrase is which trainings they hold and how each one engages attachment. At TEO the answer is EMDR (Mohamad, Advanced through an EMDRIA-approved programme; Alison, trained), IFS Levels 1 and 2 (Mohamad), Gottman Levels 1 and 2 (both), and EFFT (Alison). Which of those fits you is settled on the free consultation call. If the pattern you are bringing is the withdrawing one, there is a page written for anyone looking for a therapist for avoidant attachment.
What type of therapy fits attachment issues?
No single type of therapy fits every attachment issue, because the term covers three different patterns and several different layers of each; what fits depends on which pattern you run, whether it is anchored to specific memories, and whether it is playing out inside you or between you and someone else.
Where the pattern is anchored to early moments that still carry a charge, EMDR works on those memories directly. Where the difficulty is a protective strategy — the pursuit, the withdrawal — that you cannot argue yourself out of, Internal Family Systems treats that strategy as a part with a reason, which is the reframe that makes it workable. Where the pattern is running inside a current relationship and both people want to change it, the Gottman Method gives a couple something concrete to do with the cycle, and EFFT — built on attachment theory directly — is available with Alison for BC clients. And the day-to-day layer of thoughts and moves can be worked on with cognitive behavioural tools, which have their own page.
Pattern matters too. Anxious attachment work centres on the alarm and what you do when it fires; the avoidant pattern needs an approach that does not demand disclosure on day one; the disorganised pattern is the one most closely tied to trauma, and trauma-specific sequencing comes first. Each has its own page: anxious, avoidant and disorganized attachment therapy. None of these approaches can be promised to work for a particular person, and the choice is made with you, not for you.
What kind of therapy is available for insecure attachment?
Insecure attachment is the umbrella term for the anxious, avoidant and disorganised patterns, and the therapy available for it at TEO is individual or couples work online across British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador, using EMDR, Internal Family Systems, EFFT, the Gottman Method and cognitive behavioural tools depending on the pattern.
Much of it is done individually, and you do not need a partner to attend or to agree with it. If the pattern is anxious — the pursuit, the checking, the reassurance that wears off — the anxious attachment therapy page sets out what the work involves. If it is avoidant — the withdrawal, the sudden loss of interest once things become secure — the avoidant attachment therapy page covers both the dismissive and the fearful forms. If it swings between the two, that is the disorganised pattern, and the disorganized attachment therapy page explains why trauma work is sequenced first.
Who provides it depends on where you live. Mohamad Shabib works with clients in all six provinces; Alison Shaji, whose EFFT and inner-child training is directly attachment-oriented, works with British Columbia clients. Sessions are $150 per 60-minute session for individuals and $175 for couples, seven days a week, with a free 15-minute consultation first.
Who you would be working with
Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC is a Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC #11249205, through the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association). He has completed Advanced EMDR training, IFS Levels 1 and 2, Gottman Levels 1 and 2, and CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2, and works in English or Arabic. He sees clients across all six provinces the practice serves.
Alison Shaji, RCC is a Registered Clinical Counsellor with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors in British Columbia, and her training is directly attachment-oriented — EFFT, psychoanalytic and inner-child work, alongside EMDR, Gottman, CBT and DBT. She works in English, Hindi or Malayalam. Her registration is provincial, so she is able to see British Columbia clients.
Which of them fits depends on where you live and what you are bringing, and that gets settled on the free consultation call rather than guessed at here.
What it costs
Individual sessions are $150 for sixty minutes. Couples sessions are $175. The first conversation is a free 15-minute consultation, to work out whether this is a good fit, with no referral needed.
No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice. Some extended health plans do, and which designation your plan names matters — some list a Canadian Certified Counsellor, some a Registered Clinical Counsellor. You receive an insurance-ready receipt after each session. Full detail is on the fees page.
Sessions run seven days a week from noon to 9pm Pacific time. A small number of reduced-fee spots are held — if cost is the thing in the way, say so on the consultation call.
A free tool for this
A printable workbook from our free library, for sitting with your own pattern before or between sessions — no email address asked for.
Attachment Healing Workbook
Understand your anxious, avoidant, or disorganized pattern — and change it.
Open the tool →Common questions
What is attachment-based therapy?
It is therapy that treats your patterns in close relationships as the thing being worked on, rather than as background detail. Instead of only managing the symptom on the surface — the argument, the anxiety before a text comes back, the urge to withdraw — it looks at the relational pattern underneath it and where that pattern was learned. It is an orientation rather than a single technique, and here it is delivered through EMDR, Internal Family Systems, EFFT and the Gottman Method depending on what fits.
Is there such a thing as a certified attachment therapist?
Not in Canada, and it is worth being direct about that. There is no protected credential called attachment therapist, so anyone can use the phrase. What is worth asking any therapist instead is which specific trainings they hold and how those trainings engage attachment. Here that means Advanced EMDR through an EMDRIA-approved programme, IFS Levels 1 and 2, Gottman Levels 1 and 2, and EFFT — the last of which is built on attachment theory directly.
Can attachment patterns actually change in adulthood?
The clinical literature treats adult attachment as changeable rather than fixed, which is the premise the work rests on. What that looks like in practice varies a great deal between people, and no therapist can tell you in advance how far or how fast it will move for you. What therapy offers is a relationship in which the pattern can show up and be worked with directly, which is difficult to arrange anywhere else.
I took an online attachment style quiz. Is that the same as an assessment?
No. Online quizzes are a reasonable starting vocabulary and a poor diagnosis. They tend to sort people into one of four boxes, whereas in practice people can show different patterns with different people and under different amounts of stress — steady with friends and anxious with a partner, for instance. Bring the quiz result if it was useful for putting words to something. It is a conversation opener, not a conclusion.
Do I need a partner to do this work?
No. A great deal of attachment work is done individually, and it does not require your partner to attend or even to agree with it. Couples work is available where both people want it, using the Gottman Method. If you are single, between relationships, or the person in the relationship who is willing to look at this, individual sessions are the ordinary route.
What is an attachment-based therapist?
An attachment-based therapist is a counsellor or psychotherapist who works with the relationship patterns a person learned early — anxious, avoidant or disorganised — and with how those patterns run in adult relationships now. It is an orientation rather than a protected title: no Canadian body registers or certifies "attachment therapists", so the useful question is what a therapist is actually registered as and which trainings they hold. At TEO that work is done online by Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, a Canadian Certified Counsellor with the CCPA, working in six provinces; and by Alison Shaji, MA Clinical Psychology, RCC (BCACC), working with clients in British Columbia. Between them the relevant training is EMDR, Internal Family Systems Levels 1 and 2, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, and the Gottman Method Levels 1 and 2. Sessions are $150 per 60-minute individual session and $175 for couples, and the first 15-minute consultation is free.
What are the signs of reactive attachment disorder in adults?
Reactive attachment disorder is a childhood diagnosis. It is defined for young children who did not have a consistent caregiver, and it is not diagnosed in adults — so an adult searching for the term may be looking for language to describe something real that the label does not fit. What adults do describe, and what therapy works with, are insecure patterns that carry forward: finding closeness unsafe and keeping people at a distance, or needing constant reassurance and still not feeling settled by it, or both at once — reaching for someone and bracing against them in the same moment. Alongside that there can be difficulty trusting, difficulty naming what you feel, a harsh internal critic, and relationships that start intensely and end abruptly. None of that is a diagnosis, and nothing on this page is one. Only a qualified professional can assess you, and TEO does not provide psychological assessments or diagnoses. What the work can do is take the pattern seriously and look at where it was learned.
How much does it cost and is it covered?
Individual sessions are $150 and couples sessions are $175, with a free 15-minute consultation first. No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice, but coverage depends on the credentials your plan recognizes — check for Canadian Certified Counsellor or Registered Clinical Counsellor. You receive an insurance-ready receipt after each session.
If you need someone now
Therapy is not a crisis service. These are free and staffed around the clock:
- · 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline: call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7)
- · Kids Help Phone (for young people): 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868
- · Hope for Wellness Help Line: 1-855-242-3310 (24/7)
If you are in immediate danger, please call 911.
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