ABSTRACT
Bowlby (1969) coined the term the “environment of adaptedness” to describe the attachment bond-generating context in which young human beings mature through their intimate interactions with their caregiver(s). Implicit in the phrase is the idea that the caregiving-care-receiving environment shapes the contours of the infant's capacity to develop and exhibit adaptive fitness. The interactive attachment context generates identifiable and lasting patterns in the form and consequences of attachment to relationship styles that persist across the lifespan. In other words, subsumed within attachment exists a continuum of relational connection patterns. As this chapter will highlight, the multiple and interwoven layers operating within the interactive, relationally attuned dance called clinical hypnosis enable it to operate with notable impact in promoting and actively eliciting healthier patterns of attachment. The patterns targeted by clinicians who utilize clinical hypnosis range from those that restore “optimal” developmental trajectories to those that induce or contribute to a variety of recognizable, if not predictable neurobiological, psycho-emotional, and social-behavioral challenges that tax intra- and interpersonal adaptiveness. Regardless of the professional home from which clinicians hale, it is well established that functional outcomes resulting from hypnotically informed therapeutic work are greatest when attention to client-clinical relational connectedness is inextricably interwoven into the healing journey into which the therapeutic dyad ventures.
