An experienced professional therapist using emotionally focused couple therapy will achieve secure couple bonding in 12 to 20 sessions.  Gains are stable months after the original therapy.  Couples who achieve bonding are able to negotiate sexual issues and resolve them as well as those in sex therapy alone.

What is an Attachment Style?

#1.  In Secure Attachment your need for safe continuous connection with your care giver was there and you were open to recieve the comfort you needed when anxious and then move on out into the world to explore and, therefore, learn.  This condition must be there from birth on without a major interuption to develop into an adult with a Secure Attachment Style.

#2.  If there is an interuption of the safe connection with your care giver - like being off in hospital and parental visits do not happen for over a week - then you may be returned to your parent in a state of anxiety.  Your fears of the new situation were not met with comfort.  Your anxiety level excalated.  When returned to your caregiver you were insecure and expressed that with clinging to your mom for dear life.  It seems we never fully recover from this state of anxiety.  We enter adulthood with an insecure attachment style.

#3.  When safe connection with your caregiver is not there continuously - perhaps because of their own grief and detachment from attachment relationships - you may become withdrawn.  Then your inner child may have given up hope for emotional security from your loved ones.  This, too, may never be fundamentally resolved.  You are likely to continue to avoid close relationships right through your adult life.  This would be called an avoidant attachment style.

What are my sexual relationship like?

#1.  If your sexual relationship derives from a secure attachment style, and if your couple relationship is also securely attached, then you will tend to be more sexually satisfied and better at caregiving.

#2.  If your attachment style is insecure and as a couple your relationship is characterized by insecure attachment, then there may be less eroticism and more focus on reassurance and affection.

#3.  If your attachment style is avoidant and the relationship is characterized by the avoidant attachment style, then there is less focus on bonding and attachment, less reassrance and affection and more focus on sensation and performance.

Three Sexual Styles.

Your sexual style is defined by your habitual sexual behaviours.

#1.  Synchrony Sex:  Synchrony Sex is where eroticism, play, openness, and bonding come together and augment each other.

#2.  Solace Sex:  In Solace Sex, more anxiously-attached partners tend to focus on caregiving and attachment rather than on eroticism.

#3.  Sealed-Off Sex:  In Sealed-Off Sex the focus in on the physical sexual act - sensation and performance - and excludes activities that achieve bonding and secure attachment.

Sue Johnson, Author of Hold Me Tight says:

"Attachment theory can help us understand sexuality better. In a secure attachment relationship, the three aspects of relatedness - sexuality, caregiving and attachment - are integrated. Research says that securely attached couples tend to be more sexually satisfied and better at caregiving. In Hold Me Tight, I connect attachment strategies to habitual sexual behaviors. I suggest that there are three kinds of sex: synchrony sex, solace sex, and sealed-off sex. Synchrony sex is where eroticism, play, openness, and bonding come together and augment each other. In solace sex, more anxiously-attached partners tend to focus on reassurance and affection rather than on eroticism. The third kind of sex is sealed-off sex, where more avoidant partners focus mostly on sensation and performance. This kind of linking of sexuality and attachment - as a theory of romantic love - will enable us to integrate EFT and sex therapy interventions more and more effectively."