ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews behaviors and processes necessary for repairing attachment injuries and trauma within families. It’s important for therapists to have a framework for helping parents learn new patterns of relationship interactions with their traumatized child. Repairing relationship ruptures is critical. The author identifies several key relationship skills parents need to develop when creating and maintaining secure attachments with traumatized children. Attachment theorists have identified the importance of maternal warmth and maternal sensitivity. Empathic attunement is a parent’s ability to be attuned to their child’s personality wiring and emotional needs. This will aid parents in their ability to recognize the root of the trauma behavior in their child to better understand it and respond effectively. The author discusses other important attachment-based relationship skills that parents need to develop such as empathic responding, recognizing one’s own emotional triggers by examining mentalizations, structuring, flexibility, and playfulness. These attachment parenting skills, which include improving positive intersubjectivity, form the foundation of the skills taught to parents in the treatment model discussed in this book.
