I presented a workshop at the TA Cumbria conference on Saturday 2nd March 2019. The conference theme was attachment. I wanted to talk about the way in which talk about attachment can influence us in various ways. Although I am interested in attachment theory as science and as a source of ideas about how to understand the ways in which people get stuck in their lives, I’m also interested in the way that it offers a set of general (or abstract) categories that can move me and the person seeking help away from the particular. Although such general/abstract categories can be hugely empowering – they can be tools for change – they can also be disempowering – at the extreme, weapons of oppression.
Whether we go with attachment-styles as a theoretical frame or something else – in the workshop I talked about core script beliefs from Transactional Analysis theory – the often more interesting question is how or whether I can change. Can I move from being stuck – in a way described by some theory or another – to being un-stuck? And, by so doing, reach a point where I am probably much more interested in getting on with other things as opposed to, say, describing how things stand with me in terms of a theory from the world of mental health.
Well, the above might not mean all that much if you weren’t at the workshop. And here is a link for the slides and the two handouts, for anyone at the workshop or for anyone curious:
