Relationships & Attachment

I work with adults experiencing relationship and attachment difficulties, relationship anxiety, and recurring difficulties that can feel hard to understand or change. This may involve partnerships, family relationships, or friendships. This is individual therapy rather than couples counselling.

Relationships can become difficult for many reasons, and it is not always clear why certain difficulties keep arising. Therapy can help you look more closely at what is happening in your relationships and how these experiences affect you.

Relationship patterns that keep repeating

Relationship difficulties are not always about one particular relationship. Sometimes you might notice similar difficulties coming up with different people or in different relationships. Experiences with important people in your life can also continue to shape what you expect from others and how you experience closeness, conflict and trust. Therapy can help you become more aware of what tends to happen, where these patterns may have come from, and how they affect you now.

Attachment and intimacy

Anxiety in relationships can take many forms. You may fear rejection, abandonment, dependence, or intrusion. There may be a strong need for reassurance, distress when someone does not respond, or difficulty feeling secure even when the relationship is going well.

At other times, anxiety is more connected to closeness itself. Emotional or physical intimacy may be longed for, but also feel uncomfortable, exposing, demanding, or unsafe. There may be a wish for connection alongside a strong pull towards distance, independence, or withdrawal.

Therapy can help make sense of what closeness, trust, dependence, and intimacy have come to mean for you, and how these patterns may have been shaped by your unique history and context.

Needs, autonomy and self-expression

Attachment patterns can also affect autonomy and self-expression. You may find it difficult to know what you want, express needs or preferences, or hold onto your own perspective in the presence of someone else’s feelings. At times, hurt or vulnerability may come out indirectly, such as becoming quiet, prickly, or withdrawn rather than saying what you need.

These responses can sometimes help manage feelings of rejection, conflict or shame, while also making it harder to feel known or understood.

Therapy can offer space to notice what happens in these moments and understand the feelings, expectations, and relational patterns that may be influencing how you respond.

Therapy may be helpful if you are experiencing

  • Recurring relationship patterns that feel difficult to understand or change

  • Relationship anxiety or insecurity

  • Difficulty with trust, closeness, intimacy, or distance

  • Fear of rejection, abandonment, criticism, or dependence

  • Difficulty knowing or expressing your needs

  • Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries

  • Conflict, withdrawal, resentment, or feeling unseen

  • Loneliness despite wanting connection

  • Losing sight of yourself in relationships

  • Relationship endings or loss, see also Grief & Loss

How I work with relationship difficulties

My approach to individual therapy is relational psychodynamic and attachment-informed. I am interested in how you experience yourself and others in relationships and the patterns that may develop or repeat over time.

The therapeutic relationship can also become part of the work. At times, familiar feelings or ways of relating may emerge between us. We can pay attention to these experiences as they happen and think together about what they might mean. This can offer an opportunity to experience and understand aspects of relationships differently.

The aim is not to tell you what decision to make or to offer advice. Therapy can instead help you understand more clearly what you feel, what you need, and the patterns or dynamics that may be shaping your experience of relationships.

Thinking about beginning therapy?

If relationship difficulties or recurring patterns are bringing you to therapy, you’re welcome to get in touch. The first few sessions give us time to understand what has brought you here and whether working together feels like the right fit.

Begin enquiry

Individual Therapy for Relationships & Attachment in East Melbourne

I offer individual therapy in East Melbourne and via telehealth across Australia for adults experiencing relationship difficulties, relationship anxiety, attachment patterns, difficulties with trust or intimacy, and recurring relational patterns.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Relationship patterns are the familiar ways we come to manage relationships, including needs for closeness, intimacy, approval, autonomy, and the ways in which we protect ourselves or repeat old hopes and fears with new people. They are often not chosen consciously, but can shape relationships in powerful ways.

  • This kind of insight alone is not always enough to create change. Therapy also involves emotional experience, reflection, and developing the capacity to recognise, tolerate, and respond differently to patterns as they emerge over time.

  • Therapy is interested in both past and present. Current relationships often reveal emotional patterns that developed earlier and continue to shape how you respond now. Understanding these patterns can create more freedom and choice in the present.

  • Therapy can provide space to process grief, confusion, emotional pain, uncertainty, or questions about yourself and your relationships following a breakup or significant relationship change.

  • No. I provide individual therapy, though relationship experiences and relational patterns are often an important focus within individual work.

  • Therapy is usually most helpful when sessions are regular. I generally recommend weekly sessions so there is enough continuity, containment, and momentum to build trust, understand patterns, and deepen the work over time.

    We can discuss frequency in more depth during the assessment process.