Relationship and attachment patterns, online across New Zealand

What is an attachment style?

An attachment style is the set of expectations you carry into close relationships: how safe it feels to depend on someone, how you handle closeness and distance, and what you do when you feel let down. It forms through early relationships and later experience. Research treats it as a spectrum rather than fixed boxes, and it can shift over time.

Attachment styles, in plain language

Attachment researchers describe adult patterns along two dimensions. Attachment anxiety is how much you worry about whether people will be there for you. Attachment avoidance is how uncomfortable you are with closeness and depending on others. Everyone sits somewhere on both. The familiar labels are just regions of that map:

• Secure: you can get close, ask for help, tolerate distance, and recover from arguments without it feeling like the end.
• Anxious (sometimes called preoccupied): closeness matters enormously and feels fragile. You see the two blue ticks and no reply and your stomach drops. You replay conversations looking for the moment it went wrong.
• Avoidant (dismissive): you are capable, independent and fine on your own, right up until someone wants more. Then you get busy at work, go quiet, or decide the relationship was never that serious.
• Fearful or disorganised: you want closeness and distrust it at the same time. You pull people in, then push them away, and are as confused by it as they are.

Two cautions. First, an online quiz is not a diagnosis, and these are tendencies, not a personality type stamped on you. Second, the research is clear that early experience shapes but does not determine your adult pattern; the links between childhood and adult attachment are real but not strong, which is good news if your early years were hard.

Repeating patterns: why it keeps happening

The patterns people bring to us tend to rhyme. Choosing partners who are unavailable, then working frantically to win them. Ending things first so you can't be left. Giving endlessly to friends and then feeling quietly resentful that no one gives back. Trusting a new person completely within a week, or never fully trusting anyone. Going cold in every argument, or escalating every argument until something breaks.

These patterns made sense once. If closeness was unreliable when you were small, staying alert to rejection was protective. If needing people led to disappointment, learning not to need them was clever. The trouble is that strategies built for one set of relationships get carried into every later one, including relationships where they no longer fit.

This matters for mental health as well as for romance. A review in World Psychiatry summarised decades of research showing attachment insecurity is a significant contributor to anxiety, depression and other difficulties, while greater security buffers against them. Working on how you relate is, for many people, also working on their mood and anxiety.

What therapy for relationship patterns involves

This work is different from a six-session skills programme. It is slower, and it goes closer to the bone. Two approaches on our team suit it particularly well.

Psychodynamic and relational therapy looks at how your important relationships, past and present, have shaped the expectations you carry, and then uses the therapy relationship itself as live information. If you find yourself apologising to your psychologist for taking up time, or wanting to cancel after a session that got close to something, that is not a distraction from the work; it is the work, happening in the room where it can be noticed and understood. A 2017 meta-analysis of 23 trials in the American Journal of Psychiatry found psychodynamic therapy equivalent in outcome to other established treatments such as CBT.

Schema-informed therapy names the deep patterns directly, for example abandonment ("people leave"), mistrust ("people will use me"), defectiveness ("if they really knew me") or subjugation ("my needs come last"), traces where they came from, and works to change them through imagery, experiential exercises and a therapy relationship that deliberately provides some of what was missing. You can read more on our schema therapy page.

Does attachment actually change in therapy? The research is still developing, but a systematic review of studies tracking attachment during psychological therapy found evidence that attachment security increased over the course of treatment in many of the studies reviewed, though the evidence base is still small. Security is also something people build in later life through good-enough relationships, including, for many, the relationship with a therapist.

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Boundaries: saying what you need without blowing things up

Boundaries come up in almost every one of these conversations. The sibling who borrows money and never mentions it again. The mate who only calls when their life is on fire. The manager who texts at 9pm and expects a reply. The partner who reads your messages. The parent who turns up unannounced and then is hurt when you're not delighted.

People with anxious patterns often can't set a boundary at all, because any friction feels like risking the relationship. People with avoidant patterns often set boundaries like walls, cutting off rather than negotiating. Neither is a character flaw; both are learned.

In therapy, boundaries are reframed as information about what you will do, not attempts to control what someone else does. "If you keep raising my weight at dinner I'm going to leave the table" rather than "stop talking about my weight". You practise the actual sentences, prepare for the guilt that follows (guilt is expected and is not proof you did something wrong), and work out which relationships can tolerate honesty and which can't. That last part is sometimes the hardest and most important finding.

We don't offer couples therapy, and what to do instead

Mindwell provides individual therapy only. We do not offer couples therapy, and we are not the right service if your main goal is for a therapist to work with you and your partner in the same room. That needs someone trained specifically in couples work, and in New Zealand that is often a counsellor or psychotherapist. You can search the New Zealand Association of Counsellors directory or the Psychotherapists Board register and look for people who name couples or relationship therapy as a specialty. If you ask us about couples therapy, that is where we will point you.

Individual therapy can still change a relationship, because you are half of it. Understanding your own pattern, changing how you respond when you feel abandoned or crowded, and learning to say what you need often shifts the dynamic even when only one person is in therapy. Sometimes it also clarifies, painfully but usefully, that a relationship cannot change and that you need support deciding what to do about that.

If there is violence or you do not feel safe at home, please talk to your GP, and in an emergency call 111. Online therapy is not an appropriate first response to danger.

Doing this work by video

Relational therapy depends on the relationship between you and your psychologist, so it is fair to ask whether a screen gets in the way. The evidence says largely not: a 2021 meta-analysis of 43 treatment studies found that therapy delivered by videoconference produced outcomes largely equivalent to in-person care. In practice many people find it easier to say the unsayable from their own space, with a familiar mug in hand and the option to look away from the camera when something is hard.

The practical side matters more here than for some other kinds of therapy. You need a private hour where the people you are talking about cannot overhear. Headphones help. Some people take sessions from a parked car, a spare room or an empty meeting room at work. If privacy at home is impossible, tell your psychologist and plan around it together.

Who this suits, and when something else fits better

This work suits adults who notice the same relationship difficulties repeating; who are recovering from a breakup, separation or divorce and want to understand their part rather than just move on; who are starting something new and anxious about repeating old mistakes; whose patterns show up with friends, colleagues or family rather than only with partners; or who feel lonely even when they are not alone.

Something else may fit better if you want couples therapy (see above); if the main issue is a specific, recent problem that a shorter, more structured therapy would address faster; or if your relationship difficulties sit alongside significant trauma that needs to be worked with first, which our team can also help with. If intense emotions and impulsive reactions are the biggest obstacle in your relationships, our emotional dysregulation page may be a better starting point.

What to expect at Mindwell

Two psychologists on our team focus on this area. Jezebel Machado is a Clinical Psychologist whose focus includes relationships and attachment, trauma and emotional dysregulation, working psychodynamically and relationally. Katherine Lee is a Registered Psychologist whose focus includes relationships and parenting, and who works with schema therapy alongside CBT, ACT and DBT.

Your first sessions map the relationships that have mattered most to you, what tends to go wrong, and what you want to be different. Because this is deeper work, expect it to take longer than a brief CBT course; sessions are 50 minutes and usually weekly or fortnightly, and you review progress together as you go. Sessions are $199 + GST ($228.85 incl. GST), booked and paid online, with a receipt for your health insurer if your policy covers psychology.

Related support: Schema therapy · Trauma therapy · Emotional dysregulation · Anxiety therapy