Treatments · Attachment-Focused Therapy
Attachment-Focused Therapy in Burlington & Ontario
Understand the patterns you learned in relationships, and make space for something different.
Attachment-focused therapy explores how your experiences in relationships have shaped the way you connect with others, respond to closeness and distance, communicate your needs, and understand yourself.
About · Attachment
Your relationship patterns didn't come from nowhere.
The ways you connect with others often develop through experience. Over time, relationships can shape what you expect from other people, how comfortable you feel relying on someone, what happens when you sense distance or rejection, and how you respond when your needs feel uncertain.
Attachment-focused therapy helps you understand these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment. This might include exploring how you learned to seek closeness, protect yourself from vulnerability, manage conflict, or respond when a relationship feels uncertain.
The goal isn't to blame your past or put you into an attachment-style box. It's to understand how your experiences may be influencing your relationships today and create more flexibility in patterns that no longer work for you.
What attachment-focused therapy can help with.
Attachment-focused therapy can be helpful when familiar patterns keep showing up in your relationships, even when you understand them intellectually or want things to be different.
Relationship Anxiety
Understand fears around rejection, abandonment, closeness, or uncertainty and how they influence the way you relate to others.
Boundaries & Assertiveness
Recognize patterns of overaccommodating, withdrawing, or struggling to express what you need in relationships.
People-Pleasing
Explore why keeping others happy can feel so important and practice making room for your own needs, preferences, and boundaries.
Self-Worth & Self-Criticism
Explore how relational experiences have shaped beliefs about your worth, lovability, needs, and place in relationships.
Fear of Abandonment
Understand heightened sensitivity to distance or disconnection and develop more secure ways of navigating uncertainty in relationships.
Difficulty with Vulnerability
Understand heightened sensitivity to distance or disconnection and develop more secure ways of navigating uncertainty in relationships.
Repeating Relationship Patterns
Identify dynamics that seem to follow you from one relationship to another and understand what keeps pulling you back into them.
Family & Interpersonal Relationships
Better understand longstanding relational roles and patterns that influence how you connect with family, friends, partners, and others.
Building psychological flexibility.
Psychological flexibility means being able to experience difficult thoughts and feelings without letting them determine what you do next. ACT helps you build this flexibility by changing how you relate to your internal experiences and reconnecting with what matters to you.
Stepping back from your thoughts
Learn to notice thoughts without automatically treating them as facts, instructions, or problems that need to be solved.
Making room for difficult feelings
Practice allowing uncomfortable emotions and sensations to be present without needing to immediately avoid, control, or get rid of them.
Taking action based on what matters
Clarify your values and practice making choices that move you toward the life you want, even when difficult thoughts or feelings come along.
You don't have to feel better before you start living differently.
At Ascend, we use ACT to help you notice when your life has started revolving around avoiding discomfort, controlling how you feel, or trying to reach certainty before moving forward.
ACT can involve mindfulness and experiential exercises, exploring your values, practicing cognitive defusion, and taking small, intentional actions outside of therapy. The approach is flexible, and we focus on the processes that are most relevant to what you're experiencing rather than working through a set protocol.
We may also integrate CBT and ERP when appropriate. You don't need to know which approach you need before starting therapy. Your therapist can help determine what will be most useful for you.
ERP At Ascend
Frequently Asked Questions About ACT Therapy
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ACT is an evidence-based behavioural therapy focused on psychological flexibility. It uses processes including acceptance, cognitive defusion, present-moment awareness, values, and committed action to help you respond more flexibly to difficult internal experiences.
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CBT may involve examining thoughts, identifying cognitive distortions, and testing beliefs or predictions. ACT generally places less emphasis on determining whether a thought is accurate and more emphasis on changing your relationship with the thought and deciding whether engaging with it helps you move toward what matters.
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No. Acceptance in ACT doesn't mean approving of a situation or giving up on changing things that can be changed. It refers to making room for internal experiences rather than spending increasing amounts of energy trying to eliminate or avoid them.
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Cognitive defusion involves creating some distance from your thoughts so they have less automatic influence over your behaviour. Rather than needing to prove a thought true or false, you can notice that you're having it and choose what you want to do next.
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Values describe the qualities and directions that matter to you in how you want to live. ACT uses values to help guide behaviour, particularly when fear, anxiety, or other difficult experiences are pulling you in another direction. Values and committed action are two of ACT's core psychological flexibility processes.
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ACT can be applied to anxiety and OCD, particularly around changing how someone responds to unwanted thoughts, feelings, and uncertainty. For OCD, we may integrate ACT principles with ERP rather than using ACT as a replacement for exposure-based treatment.
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Mindfulness and present-moment awareness can be part of ACT, but ACT isn't simply mindfulness therapy. Mindfulness is used alongside acceptance, defusion, values, and behaviour change to support greater psychological flexibility
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Yes. We offer virtual ACT therapy across Ontario as well as in-person therapy in Burlington.
Meet Our ACT Therapists
At Ascend Anxiety Clinic, our therapists use ACT to help you develop a more flexible relationship with difficult thoughts and emotions while staying connected to what matters to you. We take a collaborative, individualized approach and often integrate ACT with CBT, ERP, and other evidence-based approaches depending on your needs.
Jordan Best
Emma Weber
Therapy that fits your life.
Meet with your therapist face-to-face at our Burlington office, located at The Therapy Commons. In-person sessions are available for teens and adults.
In Person · Therapy In Burlington
Virtual · Therapy Across Ontario
Meet with your therapist securely online from wherever you are in Ontario, making it easier to fit therapy into your schedule without needing to travel.
Ready to get started?
Connect with one of our therapists to learn more about attachment-focused therapy and whether it might be a good fit for what you're experiencing. Complete the form below and we'll be in touch to help you find the right next step.