Attachment theory and clinical work

A ready advocate for the importance of understanding attachment in the clinical situation, I quote from Wallin’s (2007) Attachment in Psychotherapy: 

For patients whose healthy development was derailed by the shortcomings of … formative relationships, psychotherapy may recreate an interactive matrix of attachment in which the self can potentially be healed.

...attachment research enhances our ability as therapists to generate a developmentally facilitative relationship with our patients in which we are at once reworking old experiences and co-creating new ones.

Because many of our foundational experiences occur pre-verbally and became ‘internal working models’ (Bowlby), ‘representations of interactions that have been generalized’/RIGs (Stern), or ‘implicit relational knowing’ (Lyons-Ruth), Wallin suggests that therapists aid patients in integrating implicit bodily, emotional, and procedurally enacted experience [sometimes called ‘non-conscious’ to distinguish from the dynamic unconscious] - as well as symbolic, explicit experience - by attuning to these bodily, emotional, and enacted experiences of, and with, our patients as well as to the verbal and other symbolic experience.