Ever wondered what punch the monkey might reveal about your need for earned secure attachment today? Learn insights from expert Beatrice Ng-Kessler!
Therapists can become a secure base for clients with insecure attachment.
Key points
- Earned secure attachment develops through reflection and integration.
- Relational safety is the foundation of attachment repair.
- Therapy itself provides a corrective attachment experience.
Recently, a young monkey named Punch (an interesting note: a primatologist said Japanese monkeys are hierarchical) went viral online. Rejected by his mother, he was filmed clinging to a soft Ikea toy as if it were an attachment figure. Videos showed him attempting to rejoin his troop, seeking contact, connection, and belonging despite early rejection.
The internet responded with empathy. People saw not just a monkey, but something deeply recognizable: the instinct to attach, even after rupture.
Perhaps this is a moment to discuss secure attachment.
Attachment is not simply about whether one had a secure beginning. It is also about what becomes possible later.
Read More Here: Abandonment And Attachment: The Emotional Truth Behind Punch The Monkey
What Is Earned Secure Attachment?
Attachment theory distinguishes between secure and insecure patterns formed in early caregiving relationships. But research has identified a category known as earned secure attachment.
Earned security refers to individuals who:
- May have experienced inconsistency, neglect, emotional unavailability, orย traumaย inย childhood.
- Yet develop secure attachment patterns later in life.
- Demonstrate reflective capacity about their past.
- Can integrate painful experiences without being dominated by them.
Research using the Adult Attachment Interview suggests that individuals with earned secure attachment are not defined by ideal childhoods. They are defined by coherence. They can reflect on early experiences with balance and integration.
It is not the absence of adversity that defines security. It is the integration of it.
What Makes Security โEarnedโ?
Several elements tend to be present in “earned security.”
- Reflective Capacity: The ability to think about oneโs own mind and othersโ minds. Not just โwhat happened,โ but โwhat did it mean?”
- Emotional Tolerance: The capacity to experience primary emotions without immediate avoidance or dysregulation.
- Narrative Coherence: The ability to tell oneโs attachment story in a way that is organized, balanced, and not dominated by idealization or resentment.
- Corrective Relational Experiences: Later relationshipsโpartners, mentors, therapistsโthat offer consistent safety and attunement.
Security, in this sense, is less a fixed trait and more a developmental achievement.
Why Earned Secure Attachment Matters for Therapists
Relational Safety Is the Primary Concern
Relational safety between therapist and client is always the primary concern.
If your client has an insecure attachment style, you must consistently attune to their attachment needs within the therapy room. The therapist models a โgood parentโ functionโproviding reliability, attunement, and a secure base. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vehicle for corrective attachment experience. In schema therapy, we call this “limited reparenting.”
Clients are not only working on symptoms. They are testing relational predictions:
Will I be judged?
Will I be dismissed?
Will I overwhelm you?
Will I be too much?
Security in the therapist regulates the dyad.
The Therapist as Attachment Environment
Therapy is not just a conversation. It is a relationship.
Clients bring expectations into the room, which are unconsciously shaped by their attachment style:
- Fear of rejection or intimacy.
- Fear of engulfment.
- Assuming hierarchy.
- Uncertainty of abandonment.
Earned secure therapists tend to:
- Tolerate emotional intensity.
- Repair ruptures without collapse.
- Invite disagreement without defensiveness.
- Maintain healthy boundaries.
Insecure dynamics in the therapy room can unintentionally reinforce clientsโ fears.
Narrative Work Is Central
Facilitating the clientโs narrative process is central to the work.
Therapists can lose their way in the middle of treatmentโbecoming overly focused on problem-solving, measurable outcomes, or behavioural goals. While these elements are important, healing attachment-related wounds requires more than deliverables.
We cannot overlook the corrective emotional experience that emerges through the therapeutic relationship itself, nor the transformative power of helping clients narrate their story in their own terms, rather than through narratives imposed by others.
Storytelling is not incidental to therapy; it is constitutive of it.
The therapeutic journey is interwoven with the client telling, reviewing, and revising their narrative with the therapist over time. Through this process, coherence emerges. And coherence is one marker of earned security.
Encouraging Manageable Risk-Taking
Encouraging interpersonal risk-taking begins within the therapy room.
Therapists often encourage clients to take relational risks in daily life without first recognizing that therapy itself should function as the incubator for such risk-taking.
Can the client disagree with you?
Express anger toward you?
Reveal shame in front of you?
At times, facilitating this work may involve the therapistโs willingness to be appropriately vulnerable. Such moments can activate the therapistโs own attachment system and personal sensitivities.
For this reason, the therapistโs relational stance should be an ongoing subject of supervision.
For example, a therapist with an avoidant attachment style may feel more comfortable working with similarly avoidant clients, yet experience greater difficulty with clients who present with anxious or disorganized attachment patterns. These dynamics require reflection rather than avoidance.
Earned security in the therapist does not mean perfection. It means awareness, regulation, and integration.
Protection Against Burnout and Reactivity
Without reflective integration of oneโs own attachment history, therapists may:
- Over-identify with clients and burn out.
- Avoid certain emotional themes.
- Become overly directive or overly passive.
- Tendency to please clients or fish for validation.
- Struggle with rupture repair.
A therapist who has earned security supports:
- Awareness of countertransference.
- Capacity to tolerate being misunderstood.
- Stability in the face of client anger, overcompensating behaviours, or withdrawal.
- Emotional endurance without emotional numbing.
It allows therapists to remain open without becoming overwhelmed.
Read More Here: The Power of Secure Attachment in Parent-Child Relationships
Final Reflection
Punch, the young monkey clinging to a toy after maternal rejection, reminds us that the drive to attach persists even after rupture.
Attachment patterns are powerful, but not fixed.
Earned secure attachment reminds us that security can be built.
For therapists, this is both hopeful and demanding. We are not required to have perfect histories. But we are called to cultivate reflective integration and relational steadiness so that clients can experience something different from what they expect.
Security is not something we declare. It is something the clients feel.
Beatrice also writes extensively for clinicians on Substack: https://substack.com/@beatricengkessler?r=a3k7r&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile&shareImageVariant=blur
References
Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., Sapir-Lavid, Y., & Avihou-Kanza, N. (2009). Whatโs inside the minds of securely and insecurely attached people? The secure-base script and its associations with attachment-style dimensions. Journal of personality and social psychology, 97(4), 615.
Dansby Olufowote, R. A., Fife, S. T., Schleiden, C., & Whiting, J. B. (2020). How can I become more secure?: A grounded theory of earning secure attachment. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 46(3), 489-506.
Hartel, M. M. (2022). Earned-Secure Attachment: A Critical Literature Review (Doctoral dissertation, Azusa Pacific University).
Written by Beatrice Ng-Kessler, MSc
Originally appeared on Psychology Today
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