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Trauma Training
Disorganized Attachment and Trauma
Modern Attachment Training for Therapists
You know this client. Insightful, coherent, easy to like. For most of the session the work moves. Then you touch one particular story and something changes in the room. The words thin out. The affect goes sideways, too big or strangely absent. A client who can describe their week in vivid detail suddenly can't finish a sentence about their mother.
The attachment training most of us received doesn't explain that moment. Anxious, avoidant, disorganized: three boxes, sorted once, carried for life. Except the client in front of you doesn't stay in a box. They long for closeness and fear it in the same breath. They look secure for months and then a single image or anniversary finds something walled off. The research moved past the boxes years ago. Most of what reaches the therapy room hasn't caught up.
Sue Marriott, LCSW, CGP and Ann Kelley, PhD, the clinicians behind the Therapist Uncensored podcast and the book Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, have spent years carrying attachment research across that divide. In this live training they bring their modern attachment framework to the clinical question that matters most for trauma work: how to recognize disorganization, understand where it comes from, and know where it hides, including in clients who look regulated everywhere else.
Practical Skills
Practical Interventions You'll Learn
In this training, you will learn how to:
- Locate a client's presentation on the MARS spectrum, connection system (felt safety) versus protection system (felt threat), and track shifts in activation as the client's state changes.
- Distinguish blue-state dysregulation from red-state dysregulation, denied or false-positive affect, avoided vulnerability, and missed nonverbals on one side; negative affect bias and missed disconfirming cues on the other, and match your response to whatever is present in the room.
- Listen to narrative style to identify unresolved material that erupts (Tie-Dye pockets) regardless of baseline or current state, and surface implicit working models the client can't report directly.
- Recognize disorganized presentations and segregated, unmourned trauma in secure-presenting clients.
- Monitor your own activation and its reciprocal effect on the client's regulation throughout the session.
What You Get
What's Waiting for You Inside This Training
Locate a client's presentation on the MARS spectrum
Understand the connection system (felt safety) versus the protection system (felt threat), recognize how each state may present in the therapy room, and track shifts in autonomic activation as the client moves between states throughout the therapeutic process.
Distinguish blue-state dysregulation from red-state dysregulation
Learn denied or false-positive affect, avoided vulnerability, and missed nonverbals on one side; negative affect bias and missed disconfirming cues on the other, and match your response to whatever is present in the room.
Listen to narrative style
Identify unresolved material that erupts (Tie-Dye pockets) regardless of baseline or current state, and surface implicit working models the client can't report directly.
Recognize disorganized presentations and segregated, unmourned trauma
Identify clients who appear securely attached by identifying subtle attachment disruptions, conflicting internal responses, and unresolved traumatic material beneath outward stability.
Monitor your own activation and its reciprocal effect on the client’s regulation
By tracking shifts in your emotional, physiological, and relational responses and adjusting your presence to support attunement, co-regulation, and therapeutic safety throughout the session.
Learn on your schedule
On-demand access means you go at your own pace. Lifetime access is included, so you can return whenever you need it.
Adapt your clinical approach in real time
By using shifts in attachment state, autonomic activation, narrative organization, and relational cues to guide pacing, attunement, and interventions throughout the therapeutic process.
Free community membership
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Meet Your Trainer
About Your Trainer
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Sue Marriott & Ann Kelley
LCSW, CGP & PhD
Sue Marriott, LCSW, CGP is a clinical social worker and group psychotherapist with more than 30 years of experience in attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, and relational practice. Her work focuses on translating complex attachment science into practical approaches clinicians can use to better understand relational patterns, nervous system responses, and the dynamics that emerge within the therapeutic relationship. She is co-host of the Therapist Uncensored podcast and co-author of Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, where she works to update the language of attachment and make the science more accessible and applicable in the therapy room and everyday relationships.
Ann Kelley, PhD is a psychologist specializing in couples therapy and relational work, with experience in clinical leadership and supervising trauma-informed treatment programs. Her work explores how attachment, nervous system regulation, developmental experiences, and relational context shape the ways people connect, protect themselves, and respond to one another. She is co-host of the Therapist Uncensored podcast and co-author of Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, bringing attachment science into practical application and helping clinicians better recognize the patterns underlying conflict, disconnection, emotional reactivity, and connection.
Free Resource
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Take The Next Step
Ready to Begin?
See Beyond the Attachment Boxes
When a client seems regulated, articulate, and securely attached until one story suddenly changes everything, the usual attachment labels may not tell you what is happening. Disorganization can live in pockets surfacing as contradictory responses, unexpected dysregulation, or unresolved material that doesn't match the client's usual presentation. This three-hour training gives you a modern attachment framework for recognizing those shifts, locating activation on the MARS spectrum, identifying Tie-Dye patterns of unresolved trauma, and responding to what is actually happening in the room.
I'm Ready to Spot the Patterns I've Been Missing
When a client seems regulated, articulate, and securely attached until one story suddenly changes everything, the usual attachment labels may not tell you what is happening. Disorganization can live in pockets surfacing as contradictory responses, unexpected dysregulation, or unresolved material that doesn't match the client's usual presentation. This three-hour training gives you a modern attachment framework for recognizing those shifts, locating activation on the MARS spectrum, identifying Tie-Dye patterns of unresolved trauma, and responding to what is actually happening in the room.