Ania Herbut
Transactional Analysis & Attachment Therapist & Coach
Take your relationships to the next level through deeper understanding of dynamics.
About
Attachment therapy is one of the coolest and most effective therapies for relationships in the 21st century. Once you understand how it works, it will transform how you perceive, feel and act in your relationships. Many people have found that the quality of their relationships shifted once they learned to apply attachment wisdom to their life.
Attachment theory is the work of a psychologist called John Bowlby, who established that the way our parents connected and bonded with us as children creates the framework for how we connect and bond with others as we grow into adulthood. Human beings are born ‘wired’ to attach to early caregivers in order to survive. Bowlby theorised that the quality of these early relationships shapes your personality, resilience, resourcefulness and vulnerabilities – essentially drawing up our relationship ‘blueprint’. Attachment theory allows us to understand this underlying dynamic and question whether something that was designed and structured when we were children is fit for purpose in our adult relationships.
Awake teaches the underlying wisdom of attachment theory in order to help you to understand and apply it to your own challenges. The program features practical exercises, homework and discussions to help learn and integrate skills. Attachment theory helps us answer the most pressing relationship questions:
8 Week Course
This course is about connections. It has been carefully designed to help you understand how your early experiences of significant relationships have shaped how you relate to and connect with the world around you. Challenging attachment styles and early relational ruptures affect nearly half of our population. However, these archaic patterns are malleable, and can be explored and changed, giving you a fresh start at the potential to love, feel and reflect on yourself with the freedom that comes from secure attachment. Based on modern approaches and clinical evidence, this engaging and experiential course will help you identify the internal roadblocks that may keep you from experiencing the connection you long for. Whether you are single and looking for a relationship, or whether you want to improve your relationship with your partner, work colleagues, children or wider family, by helping you to better understand the development of your Self, this course will enable you to grow beyond the limits imposed on you by your history.
Week 1: Attachment Theory – Introduction
Week one…In this first session we will explore the key assumptions of attachment theory. How, why and to whom we attach and what are the main characteristics of the four attachment types. We will discuss the complex dynamic that exists between a caregiver and an infant and learn more about the importance of non-verbal communication and attunement. In a safe and confidential environment, we will gently take ourselves back to our early years and begin to think about our own attachment history.
Week 2: What type am I?
Week twoThis week we will continue the self-discovery of our attachment behaviours and continue asking ourselves ‘what keeps happening to me in relationships?’. We will also carefully acknowledge the implications of knowing ‘my attachment type’ and will discuss both the benefits of awareness and the potential dangers of labelling oneself. We will end this session on a positive note, by beginning to think about plasticity and malleability of attachment behaviours and how best to prepare ourselves for this change. …
Week 3: Attachment, the Self and the body
We are now ready to go deeper and find out how early relationships shape the multiple dimensions of the Self, by affecting our body and mind. By thinking about the extent to which our infant needs were met, we will understand how our bodies become conditioned to react to relational triggers that can cause a variety of emotional states. We will continue to explore our thoughts and bodily feelings about our interactions with others and how these translate into core attachment styles, based on our developmental journey. Most importantly, we will learn how to self-regulate our emotions depending on our attachment type.
Week 4: Attachment types in relationships
What happens when attachment types clash? Do different types have different expectations of their partners and intimacy? How do different types behave in relationships and different stages of dating? What about sex? Do different types have different sexual needs? This week we will focus on discovering what happens when we enter relationships and how our attachment type often guides our choice of partners – outside of our awareness. We will have some fun exploring the triangular theory of love and what is needed for our future relationships to be more fulfilling and begin to think about strategies and solutions for successful relationship progression.
Week 5: Attachments and online dating
This week we are not going to talk about what technology does for us but what is does to us. We will reflect on our own relationships with technology and how attachment types are also present online. Whether on zoom or in the room, we always relate to one another, but we need to think how digital technology is affecting our experience of intimacy and relationships. We will consider internet and mobile phone addiction, the meaning of the ethereal m/other and how over-reliance on technology can lead to erosion of secure attachment. We will make sure to leave enough time to discuss how to manage the tangled net of online dating.
Week 6: When love goes wrong
Love me, don’t leave me! Can you be addicted to love? What makes a healthy relationship and how would you know if your expectations are unrealistic? This week we will explore co-dependence, symbiosis and love addiction by learning about the emotional cycles of love addicts and love avoidant attachment styles. Having developed more awareness about ourselves, once again we will address our attachment type, this time looking at it in the context of our Life Script. What can help us to re-decide and rewrite the Script? We will realise the power that parental messages and injunctions have on our script and attachment and how we can cherish and heal our inner child and work our way towards freedom from the Life Script.
Week 7: Working our way towards security
How does a securely attached person show up in a relationship? What are the characteristics of a securely attached person and what are the benefits of earned security? Can I gain security and how do I go about it? Secure attachment and emotional resilience and their benefits on physiological and psychological health. This week we will continue discovering how to gain, maintain and nurture security to work our way to a healthy relationship.
Week 8: Way forward and planning ahead
In this final session we will praise ourselves for our behavioural and emotional change and share our experiences. We will address deeper, unconscious communication traps and explore how we can get involved in relationship games that are destructive. We will practice useful techniques for self-analysis, attachment-informed healthy communication and successful interpersonal relatedness. Finally, we will end with celebrating the most important relationship there is – our relationship with ourselves. How to keep it secure and meet its relational needs is a skill that I wish everyone to take away and cherish forever.
Training Class
Our training classes are can be larger group experiences, depending on how many people sign up. They allow you to learn key skills in an online group hosted by our expert therapists . They are a mix of teaching, therapy skills and learning about the different systems and therapies that you can apply to your life. Ultimately we are teaching you new skills so that you can help yourself and deal with the challenges you are facing.
Our training classes are a great way for you to begin your learning experience.
Group Therapy
Our Group Therapy classes are smaller, more intimate groups. They give you the opportunity of sharing your individual challenges and working through them with our trained therapists facilitating the conversation.
Group therapy is the perfect way of experiencing the benefits of therapy and group teaching at a fraction of the price of normal therapy costs.
