Conceptualizing Attachment Trauma: A Developmental Trauma Perspective

Attachment trauma, as cogently formulated by Farina and Schimmenti (2025), involves traumatic experiences that fundamentally disrupt attachment bonding with primary caregivers and result in impairments in core self and relational capacities that include but extend beyond the symptoms of formal psychiatric nosology. An overview is provided of a clinical framework that similarly is grounded in clinical and scientific evidence of the adverse effects of a combination of traumatic victimization and attachment disruption, Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD). Six domains of self-dysregulation are identified by DTD, including affective, somatic, attention/ memory, behavioral, interpersonal, and self-identity coherence, and evidence linking the features of DTD with attachment trauma is summarized. This commentary concludes that attachment trauma, as formulated by Farina and Schimmenti, offers an important framework to enable providers, theorists, and researchers to develop clinical formulations and approaches to treatment that explicitly recognize and directly address the all too often overlooked alterations in core self-regulatory capacities that result from coping with the traumatic disruption or loss of attachment security.