Attachment Perspective on Marital Dissolution and Relational Family Therapy

Divorce or dissolution of a long-term intimate relationship is an event on the continuum of an individual’s experience of attachment injury that is reawakened and played out again in this process. An attachment injury means the experience of rejection and betrayal of trust at a critical time of distress when one is in need of support. By means of the case study method, the article presents a case of a female client dealing with divorce. The history of traumatic relations through a lens of attachment theory is presented, along with divorce as the reawakening of an attachment injury and its processing in a relational family therapy model.