Attachment based treatments for adolescents: the secure cycle as a framework for assessment, treatment and evaluation

The emergence of attachment-based treatments (ABTs) for adolescents highlights the need to more clearly define and evaluate these treatments in the context of other attachment based treatments for young children and adults. We propose a general framework for defining and evaluating ABTs that describes the cyclical processes that are required to maintain a secure attachment bond. This secure cycle incorporates three components: (1) the child or adult's IWM of the caregiver; (2) emotionally attuned communication; and (3) the caregiver's IWM of the child or adult. We briefly review Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Main's contributions to defining the components of the secure cycle and discuss how this framework can be adapted for understanding the process of change in ABTs. For clinicians working with adolescents, our model can be used to identify how deviations from the secure cycle (attachment injuries, empathic failures and mistuned communication) contribute to family distress and psychopathology. The secure cycle also provides a way of describing the ABT elements that have been used to revise IWMs or improve emotionally attuned communication. For researchers, our model provides a guide for conceptualizing and measuring change in attachment constructs and how change in one component of the interpersonal cycle should generalize to other components.