You want to be close. Let's find out what it costs.
Terapia basada en el apegoAttachment-based therapy
One delayed reply and the floor moves. So you reach harder, or you go quiet first — and either way you end up alone in it.
The pattern was learned. That is the good news.
Nobody chooses how they attach. It was settled long before you could weigh in — in a house where closeness came with conditions, or came and went without warning, or arrived as something you had to manage rather than something you could rest in. You worked out what kept the connection alive, and you got very good at it.
That strategy is still running. It shows up in who you are drawn to, in how fast you register a change of tone, in what you do the moment someone gets far enough away to be missed. It is not a character flaw and it is not a life sentence. Patterns learned in relationship are the ones that change in relationship, which is what this work is.
You are not too much. You learned, early and correctly, that needing someone was risky.
Reaching, or protecting. Sometimes both in one evening.
Two shapes, mostly. One reaches: you feel the distance first, you go after it, you explain again, you ask for the reassurance and then cannot quite believe it when it arrives. The other protects: you feel the same distance and go still, become self-sufficient, leave the room emotionally a few hours before anyone notices.
Plenty of women do both, depending on who they are with — reaching for the ones who pull away, cooling toward the ones who come close. Neither is a personality. Both are a nervous system deciding, quickly and without consulting you, which move has the better odds.
What makes this so hard to see from the inside is that each move makes sense in the moment and makes the outcome worse over time. Chasing reassurance makes it less believable. Protecting yourself makes you less reachable. The fear that started it gets confirmed either way.
- A delayed reply or a changed tone can reorganize your whole afternoon.
- You audit conversations afterwards for the thing you said wrong.
- You become the easiest version of yourself to love, then resent that you had to.
- Asking directly for comfort, space, or help feels harder than going without.
- Intensity has sometimes felt like intimacy — or independence has felt like safety.
- You want to be fully known, and you keep back the parts you think would be too much.
- You have ended things early, more than once, to avoid being the one who is left.
Recognizing yourself here is common, and it is not by itself a diagnosis. It is a place to start a conversation.
Why this changes in a room and not in a book.
You can understand your attachment pattern completely and still do it on Thursday night. Insight is not the mechanism. The pattern was laid down in the presence of another person, in the body, before language — and that is the register in which it updates.
So the work is not a curriculum. Much of it happens live: something moves between us in the session, and instead of moving past it we stop and name it. That is often the first time the thing has been named while it was happening rather than reconstructed afterwards, and it is a different experience for your nervous system than being told about it.
Over time you get something specific and unglamorous — a few seconds. The gap between the drop in the floor and the move you always make. That gap is where choice lives, and it widens.
What we draw on.
- AEDP — Level 1 and Immersion, AEDP Institute: attachment-based, emotion-focused work
- Emotionally focused individual therapy (EFIT), trained through ICEEFT
- Emotionally focused couples therapy (EFCT) — Level 1 and Externship, ICEEFT
- Internal Family Systems–informed work with the parts that reach and the parts that guard
- Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), as a certified practitioner, where old memories are still driving
The practical part.
- Sessions are 55 minutes at $150, usually weekly
- A free 15-minute consultation before anything is booked
- In person in Tampa, or by telehealth anywhere in Florida
- Available in English and Spanish
- Available as a Deep Focus session when weekly pacing is too slow
- This is individual work; premarital counseling is a separate track
One conversation, before you decide anything.
Fifteen minutes, at no cost. You do not have to arrive with the pattern already worked out — that is the work, not the entry fee.
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It's a conversation, not a commitment.