WHAT I DO
Helping people heal by reorganizing attachment trauma.
Whether you have a child struggling with big emotions, a caregiver navigating a hard season, or an adult working to understand your own relational patterns, I will meet you where you are and help you get to where you want to be. Grounded in attachment science and interpersonal neurobiology, my clinical and research work centers on one core belief: security can be learned at any age.
Clinical Work
Attachment-informed therapy for adults virtually, and for children and parents in person on weekends in Rochester, NY. Sharing Calm Counseling Services focuses on relational healing and attachment repair.
Doctoral Research
Examining how adults transition to earned secure attachment (ESA) and healing intergenerational trauma through caregiver ESA at the University of Rochester. For research inquiries, use the contact form.
Attachment Assessment
Certified in the administration of the Adult Attachment Picture Projection Test (AAP). Curious about your attachment representation, relational patterns, or experiences of trauma and shame? This assessment is a place to start.
Sharing Calm
Guided breathing and meditation practices rooted in neurobiology, designed to help regulate your nervous system and build a felt sense of safety.
Understanding Your Attachment Story
Foundation
Your nervous system learned how to handle closeness, danger, and need by practicing with the first people who were supposed to keep you safe.
If those people were reliably available, your brain built an internal map that said relationships are safe, distress is manageable, and asking for help works. That is secure attachment. It is not a personality trait. It is a regulatory architecture, the wiring your brain developed for handling threat and connection at the same time.
John Bowlby argued that this need for connection is as fundamental as food and shelter. Mary Ainsworth’s research showed that the quality of early caregiving shapes how children learn to regulate their emotions, tolerate distress, and relate to others throughout their lives. Mary Main and Carol George extended that work to adults, developing the tools we now use to understand how early relational experiences are carried forward, not just in behavior, but in the way we think, feel, and tell the story of our own lives.
Secure vs. Insecure Attachment
If the people who raised you were inconsistent, frightening, or absent, your brain still built a map. It just built one organized around survival under those conditions. Maybe you learned to shut down emotional needs, so the relationship stayed intact. That is dismissing (avoidant) attachment. Maybe you learned to amplify distress to keep people close. That is preoccupied (anxious) attachment. Maybe the person who was supposed to protect you was also the source of fear, and the system had no coherent strategy at all. That is disorganized (fearful/avoidant) attachment. None of these are character flaws. They are intelligent adaptations to the environment that shaped them.
These patterns do not disappear after childhood. They organize how we move through adult relationships, shaping our capacity to trust, our tolerance for closeness, and the cycles of conflict that can feel hardwired rather than learned.
Can attachment patterns change?
Yes. Adults with documented histories of difficult or traumatic early caregiving can arrive in adulthood with coherent, organized attachment. The research calls this earned secure attachment. We know it exists. We can measure it. What the field has not yet explained is exactly how it happens. That is what I research.
How Do I Know What My Attachment Pattern Is?
Online quizzes and social media are not clinically validated. The only way to genuinely understand your attachment representation is through a structured adult assessment, such as the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) or the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP). The AAP takes 15 to 30 minutes to administer and gives clinically meaningful insight into your attachment representation (that internal map) and the defenses you use to manage it.
What Does Reorganizing Actually Look Like?
It is relational work. Healing happens inside safe, consistent relationships where the nervous system gradually learn that connection does not have to mean danger or loss. It means noticing the patterns that protected you, understanding where they came from, and slowly building the capacity to stay present with another person without the system pulling you out.
Sharing Calm Counseling Services 