One of the auxiliary benefits of therapy, no matter what you’ve come to discuss, is that it helps you develop healthy attachment. It occurs because therapy is a process that keeps and nourishes clear boundaries, respectful communication, non-judgement, and acceptance, while you explore the freedom to be yourself (because everybody else is taken, remember?).

You do it together with your therapist, in a therapeutic alliance—hand-in-hand mutual work, by building a working relationship with them.

However, people who didn't have the experience of healthy attachment in their early life may experience all of the aforementioned things as something negative, resembling an unhealthy dependency, and feel it is dangerous.

It is especially relevant for people who grew up with narcissistic, addicted, or alcoholic parents, or parents with mental disorders or with severe PTSD. In their altered state of mind, these parents may not have been able to distinguish right from wrong, real from imaginary, love from hate, and so on.

Thus, they may have failed to enact it with their children, not showing that they can be safely attached to and not building a warm, loving and healthy dependency.

John Bowlby, a pioneer British psychiatrist and

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