Anxious Attachment Style? Our Couples Therapy Specialists Shift You From Frustrating Fights To A Secure Attachment

If you’ve ever found yourself in a fight with your partner, feeling like you’re screaming to be heard, and like they never listen. Do you feel desperate for connection with your spouse, but exhausted at telling them what you need? Needing professional guidance to rebuild emotional closeness because you’re on the brink of divorce? When you yell, you want to be heard so badly, but somehow pushing your spouse further away. You are not alone in this high conflict fight cycle. Has your high conflict fighting made sex a chore, lifeless, or made you have no interest in it all together? Are you both fighting about sex now? At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind is an anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist.

People with anxious attachment styles tend to find partners and spouses with avoidant attachment styles.

Was love conditional growing up?When you have an anxious attachment style, your partner may have an avoidant attachment style. These very much clash. But, with couples therapy, you can build a secure attachment style together, as a team.

And, when you have an anxious attachment style, what does trauma in childhood look like exactly? Well, you may have had very strict, conservative parents, who were very religious. Their love was conditional, inconsistent, and you always had to be perfect. Or, you were parentified, had too many adult responsibilities growing up, and had to grow up a little too fast. People with an anxious attachment style have experienced childhood trauma, even if it just a little.

This means that your anxiety developed when you were a child because of your home environment and family life. You may have had a parent who had a very high level of anxiety. Anxiety develops in childhood. Your mother criticized you regularly and put you down. These comments made you feel like you had to be perfect. You walked on eggshells. Or, tried to please your parents constantly.

As a child, you did not know any differently at the time. Anxiety then became an anxious attachment style. However, this is emotional trauma, and it impacts your marriage today. Your early relationships with your parents impact your conflict style now.

Or, you may have had a mother or father that had an alcohol problem or a drinking issue. You had to look out for your parents and siblings. And, this causes you to have a lot of anxiety as a child.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind is passionate about helping couples on the brink of divorce build a more secure, close, and loving marriage than every before.

Anxiety has kept you safe for a long time. As a child, there was not a feeling of security emotionally. So, you never saw a mother or father showing you a a secure attachment. This is what you want in your marriage though.

Notably, having an anxious attachment style can cause a lot of problems in your marriage. Couples counseling helps you understand the connection between childhood experiences and your fights. And, with that awareness, Katie Ziskind helps you create a loving, positive, secure style of bonding.

You may not recognize it at first. But, your high-conflict moments are the voice of an anxious attachment style. It is still trying to protect you from something deeper. Including: the fear of being left, powerless, hurt, abandoned, or emotionally rejected. Katie Ziskind is an avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist.

If you’re a couple struggling with constant fights, marriage counseling teaches you skills for a secure connection. You know you need professional help. It is time to work with a specialist. Furthermore, when you experience emotional disconnection, or sexual frustration, counseling with Katie Ziskind helps you finally feel understood and supported.

Katie Ziskind is a trauma-informed, emotionally focused couples therapy specialist. She has dedicated her life’s work to helping frustrated couples like you break painful patterns, reconnect emotionally, and build a secure and lasting bond.

She specifically specializes in working with the anxious attachment and avoidant attachment dynamic—a pattern that often leaves one partner feeling rejected, hurt, and abandoned, and the other feeling overwhelmed or never good enough.

To note, Katie Ziskind works with couples in crisis, couples on the brink of divorce, and couples who love each other but don’t know how to stop hurting one another.

Her presence is grounding, compassionate, and emotionally intelligent. She teaches you the tools to pause a fight, soften your tone, reconnect after conflict, and move through painful conversations with kindness rather than criticism. She gives you practical strategies and emotional support that you can apply immediately in your everyday life.

You don’t have to live in a constant loop of miscommunication and resentment.

With Katie Ziskind, you’ll gain new awareness about your emotional patterns. And, in couples therapy, you will learn how to create rituals of connection that soothe rather than trigger.

You’ll be coached step-by-step through conversations you never thought you could have and feel more emotionally safe, both individually and as a couple.

Working with Katie is not just therapy—it’s emotional reparenting, healing, and growth.

She will help you rediscover the love and safety you both deserve.

Whether you’re feeling lost in your relationship or simply want to strengthen your bond, Katie Ziskind’s unique specialty in anxious attachment style couples therapy offers the hope, insight, and real tools you’ve been searching for.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Do You Yell Because You’re Frustrated, Don’t Know What To Do, or Afraid? Understanding Anxious Attachment in Marriage Conflicts

You might yell because you’re overwhelmed. Or, you might accuse because you’re scared. You might demand because you’re trying to hold on to the person you love.

And sadly, this pattern of pursuing, pushing, and pleading often triggers the exact response you fear most — your partner withdrawing, shutting down, and pulling away emotionally.

This is the heartbreaking, confusing, painful cycle that Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT), calls “the dance.”

In this dance, one partner — often the anxiously attached one — reaches out in anger, intensity, or protest, all in the name of closeness and connection. But what your partner experiences is criticism, control, or attack. So they do what avoidantly attached partners often do: they freeze, withdraw, or shut down to protect themselves.

To you, this silence feels like abandonment. So you turn up the volume — not because you’re mean or irrational, but because you feel invisible, forgotten, ignored, or unimportant.

This is the anxious-avoidant cycle of conflict in your marriage, and it’s more common than you think.

You are not broken. Really, you are reacting from a deep, emotional place rooted in your past. Maybe, from growing up in a home where love felt unpredictable. Or, you had to work hard to earn attention, affection, or approval.

In Imago Therapy, you learn validation skills. Together, we talk about how we unconsciously pick partners who mirror our early caregivers.

Through marriage, couples are hoping to heal those old wounds through love now. But, unless we bring those unconscious wounds into the light, we repeat the same painful dynamic over and over. So, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples counseling supports gaining this awareness.

In couples therapy, you get guidance around how to rebuild closeness. And, you rebuild emotional security after childhood trauma symptoms are harming your marriage. Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, teaches you a gentle communication. Couples gain a more positive way of relating and communicating.

As a trauma-informed couples therapist, Katie Ziskind helps couples just like you untangle this emotional knot.

Using tools from Emotionally Focused Therapy and Imago Therapy, Katie Ziskind will help you slow down your cycle or “dance.” Then, you can identify the vulnerable emotions underneath your intense reactions. And, you learn to reach for each other in softer, more connecting ways.

You’ll start to understand that your yelling isn’t just about being mad. There are diverse emotions under anger. Anger is about being scared that you don’t matter. As well, under anger is a fear that your needs will never be met. With anger, you may want to talk about fears that love is conditional. Abandonment in childhood leads to these fears. And, it all comes out as anger.

Through trauma-informed marriage therapy, you’ll learn to rewire this painful relationship pattern.

You’ll learn how to soothe your own anxiety without resorting to panic, rage, or protest.

And, your partner will learn how to stay present with you, even when emotions are high, without shutting down. You’ll learn that underneath every fight is a desire for connection. With the right guidance, you can co-create a secure bond, after an anxious, fear-based childhood. When you had to be perfect all the time, marriage therapy gives you skills for a natural, connecting bond. From specialized couples counseling, you can find your way back to each other.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Katie Ziskind brings a holistic, deeply compassionate lens to this marriage therapy and inner child. work.

With specialized training in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Imago Relationship Therapy, and trauma-informed care, she helps you both feel safe enough to be vulnerable. Katie Ziskind helps you feel brave enough to name your fears, and strong enough to stop hurting each other in the name of love.

If you’re tired of the yelling, the silence, the blame, and the distance, start in marriage therapy today. Now, if you’re longing for a relationship where you feel seen, heard, and held — reach out.

You don’t have to keep doing this alone. Together, you and your partner can break this frustrating cycle. And, you co-create the emotionally safe, securely attached relationship you both have always deserved.

Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, guides you in building a secure attachment. You gain skills for co-creating a safe, caring “dance,” and intimate bond.

Schedule a session with Katie Ziskind, trauma-trained marriage therapist.

Discover how healing your attachment wounds can transform your love and marriage life from the inside out.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind and the team of therapists specialize with frustrated couples on the brink of divorce who need expertise building emotional safety, feeling heard, seen, and building a strong family unit after experiencing childhood trauma, loss, and abuse.

If you are anxiously attached, you might get louder and louder when upset.

Your spouse is avoidant, and withdraws, this is a challenging conflict cycle that feels painful, hopeless, and hurtful.

Let’s meet to rebuild meaningful connection in your marriage. Our speciality of couples therapy nurtures an anxious attachment style. Your partner can learn to appreciate and reassure you.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, we specialize in helping distant couples like you. You feel anxious and constantly fear losing your relationship. And your spouse feels overwhelmed and pulls away emotionally.

This pattern is known as the anxious-avoidant dynamic. It is one of the most common—and painful—high conflict relationship cycles.

But underneath these patterns aren’t personality flaws or incompatibility.

They’re unhealed childhood wounds, often invisible but deeply impactful, as described in Imago Relationship Therapy by Dr. Harville Hendrix.

As well, if you grew up with an alcoholic parent, you may have learned to walk on eggshells, always trying to stay “good” to avoid triggering a blow-up.

You may have become anxiously attached starting as a young child. From a young age, you had to work hard to be loved. And, you were constantly monitoring your mother’s or father’s chaotic moods. Anxiety develops when you are always fearing abandonment, criticism, or anger. The silent treatment or angry sigh were common with your mother or father.

Your inner child might have learned that love was conditional, unpredictable, and something you had to chase. Today, that can show up in your marriage as clinginess, anger, jealousy, or a deep fear that you’ll never be enough.

If your parent was highly critical or expected perfection from you at all times, you might have both an anxious and an an avoidant attachment style.

Or, your partner may be avoidantly attached, triggering your anxiety. You may have learned to self-soothe, to keep emotions private, and to avoid conflict at all costs. In your marriage, this can look like your avoidant spouse shutting down. Commonly, an anxiously attached partner finds and avoidant partner. Your spouse uses pornography to numb out. Maybe, pornography is your spouse’s addiction. Painfully, you spouse pulls away from you. Or, your spouse goes to something numbing.

Right now, vulnerability feels unsafe in your marriage.

Deep down, you might believe that closeness equals criticism or shame.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Religious trauma can also play a powerful role in inner child wounds and marriage conflicts.

Maybe you were raised in a home where sex was never discussed, or where abstinence was the only acceptable path. Did you get a purity ring? Was talking about sex as an adolescent taboo? Perhaps, you were taught that sexuality was sinful, dirty, or dangerous. Was masturbation sinful too?

Your male spouse may have discovered pornography at a very young age. This porn exposure is something we talk about in couples therapy. And, neither of you had a healthy adult model to show what emotional or physical intimacy looked like.

These early experiences with pornography can confuse your spouse’s body, brain, and beliefs about love, desire, and connection. This is especially apparent in sex in your marriage. Pornography can negatively impact you both when you are trying to share a life, a bed, and a soul with someone you love.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, we understand that your reactions now—whether you shut down or lash out—aren’t your fault.

Anxiety and avoidance are survival strategies you developed as a child.

Your nervous system is trying to protect you. The good news is that those patterns can be unlearned. Together, we help you and your partner move out of blame and into curiosity. You’ll stop asking, “What’s wrong with you?” and start wondering, “What happened to you?”

This shift alone can create more compassion and space in your relationship.

Using Imago Therapy, we guide you in seeing your partner not as the enemy. You learn to be on the same team. And, your spouse is a mirror for your earliest wounds.

You’ll learn how you were both shaped by your parents’ emotional limitations and trauma. In marriage therapy, you see how you unknowingly trigger each other’s pain. We help you slow down angry, reactive moments. And, instead you can respond from your adult self, rather than from your scared inner child. This creates a pathway to a secure attachment that is truly transformational.

You’ll learn how to rebuild emotional safety in marriage therapy with Katie Ziskind, who specializes in anxious attachment styles and avoidant attachment styles.

If you’re the anxious one, we’ll help you express your needs in ways that foster closeness rather than conflict.

Or, if you’re the avoidant one, we’ll help you learn how to stay present, even when your partner is upset. These are not skills you were taught growing up, especially if your family dismissed, shamed, or punished emotions.

But these skills can be learned, and they can become the foundation of a deeply secure relationship.

Couples therapy with our team at Wisdom Within Counseling isn’t about fixing your partner. It’s about healing yourselves and better understanding each other.

This is about teaming up against trauma, fears, and conflict —together.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

We’ll help you recognize how your inner child is driving your current fight cycles, and how to re-parent that inner child with tenderness, connection, and truth.

The goal is not to become “perfect,” but to become more emotionally attuned, grounded, and loving—both toward yourself and each other.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, our therapists are trauma-informed, trained in Imago Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, and the Gottman Method.

We specialize in working with couples in crisis, couples who are tired of the same fight over and over, and couples who are ready to heal the root, not just patch the symptoms.

If you and your partner feel stuck, hopeless, or alone in your marriage interaction pattern—you’re in the right place. Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, teaches you how to build security, playfulness, and long-lasting love.

Begin your journey toward healing your anxious attachment cycle and marriage conflicts —together.

With Katie Ziskind’s expertise and speciality, you both can co-create a relationship where both of you feel safe, seen, and valued.

Let our team of therapists help you stop the painful cycle of loneliness and disconnection.

Start in couples therapy to begin building the secure emotional bond your younger selves have been craving for decades.

How do I know if I have an anxious attachment cycle? Can I be avoidantly and anxiously attached too?

You might be wondering, “How do I know if I have an anxious attachment cycle?” or even, “Can I be both anxiously and avoidantly attached?”

The short answer is yes—you can have a blend of both, and it can feel incredibly confusing and exhausting, especially in your most important relationships. Understanding your attachment style is a powerful first step toward healing your relationship with yourself and your partner.

If you have an anxious attachment cycle, you likely feel deeply sensitive to emotional distance.

When your partner pulls away or seems emotionally unavailable, it may trigger a flood of fear inside you—fear of abandonment, of not being enough, of being rejected or unloved.

You may find yourself getting louder, needing more reassurance, asking questions like “Are we okay?” or “Do you even care about me anymore?”

“What do I mean to you?”

These needs aren’t wrong. They come from a deep desire to feel safe, loved, and emotionally close. But sometimes, when these fears take over, they can come out as criticism, clinging, or even anger.

You might notice you overanalyze texts. Maybe, you feel panic if your partner doesn’t respond quickly, or constantly worry that you’re too much or not enough.

These reactions are signs that your nervous system is in a heightened state, always scanning for cues of emotional safety or danger.

This cycle of the anxiously attached can create unintended pressure on your relationship, especially if your partner is more avoidant—and that’s where things can get really intense and escalated.

Now let’s talk about an avoidant attachment style.

If you grew up in a home where your emotions weren’t welcomed—or worse, were punished—you may have learned to suppress your needs, be independent at all costs, and avoid emotional vulnerability. You never had a voice growing up.

When your partner avoids you, shuts down, withdraws, or even gets irritated, it hurts. Your anxiety spikes and increases.

Many couples unknowingly fall into the anxious-avoidant trap, where one person craves closeness and reassurance while the other pulls away to manage stress, emotions, or fear of conflict.

This dynamic can be incredibly painful, leading to high-conflict fights, silent treatment, emotional withdrawal, and even thoughts of separation or divorce. Katie Ziskind helps you identify this pattern with clarity and compassion and teaches both partners how to co-regulate, repair trust, and rewire your emotional connection.

Using attachment theory, Katie Ziskind’s approach is deeply rooted in early attachment bonds and draws from the work of Dr. Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Therapy), Dr. Harville Hendrix (Imago Therapy), and The Gottman Method, integrating science-based tools with warm, personalized care.

She doesn’t just sit back and let you argue in session. Instead, she gently pauses the cycle and teaches you, in real time, how to validate each other, how to speak from vulnerability. And, she teaches you how to listen without reacting. She creates a safe space to slow down, reflect, and build emotional intimacy that lasts.

Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, teaches you how to be a team after trauma.

So what happens when you carry both avoidant and anxious attachment styles inside you?

This is called disorganized or fearful-avoidant attachment. And, it can feel like being caught in a storm of emotional contradiction. Part of you longs for closeness and intimacy, while another part of you pulls away when it actually shows up.

You might chase your partner one moment, then feel the urge to run away the next. Or, you might want to be deeply loved, but sabotage the connection out of fear you’ll be hurt or abandoned.

This push-pull dynamic can be incredibly confusing, not only for you, but for your partner.

You may find yourself saying, “Why do I always ruin things?” or “Why can’t I just be happy when things are going well?”

These inner conflicts are rooted in your childhood experiences—times when love felt unpredictable, unsafe, or conditional.

Maybe you had a parent who was emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, alcoholic, or just unable to provide consistent affection or care. These early experiences shaped your nervous system’s blueprint for love.

Your attachment style is simply a reflection of the strategies you developed to survive emotionally as a child.

And, you can absolutely shift these patterns in adulthood through couples therapy. You can learn how to create a secure, loving, emotionally safe relationship. We start with learning how to soothe your own nervous system and build trust.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, working with Katie Ziskind is unlike any other couples therapy experiences.

She is out of the box, holistic, and trauma trained.

Katie Ziskind is a trauma-informed, Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy-informed professional, and trained in Emotionally Focused and Imago Therapy. You’ll explore these cycles in a deeply compassionate, nonjudgmental space.

Katie Ziskind will help you and your partner slow down your fight cycles. She helps you see each other more fully than ever before. From specialized attachment style couples therapy, you can connect the dots to childhood pain, and rebuild safety through emotional attunement, validation skills, and secure bonding.

You’ll learn how to turn toward each other, rather than away, snap, lose it, or avoid.

From anxious attachment style focused marriage therapy, you’ll learn that the yelling is a trauma behavior.

When you and your partner get stuck shutting down, over-apologizing, or ghosting, these harm your marriage. Yelling cause more pain. These negative communication skills are all just protective behaviors. And, couples therapy helps you both see that underneath them is a deep longing to feel safe, wanted, and understood.

As well, the best part of marriage counseling focused on avoidant and anxious attachment styles? You don’t have to figure it all out alone. Healing your attachment style is possible. And, it’s one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself and your relationship.

As a specialist in anxious attachment style couples therapy, Katie Ziskind understands that high-conflict fights often aren’t really about the present moment.

Instead, they are fueled by past childhood wounds—like being neglected, having to walk on eggshells around a parent, or growing up with alcoholism or emotional instability. Katie Ziskind helps you see how those early experiences shape your reactions in your relationship now. And, in marriage counseling, she guides you toward new ways of deeply connecting with empathy rather than defensiveness.

Being a specialist in anxious attachment style couples therapy, Katie Ziskind understands that high-conflict fights often aren’t really about the present moment.

Instead, they are fueled by past childhood wounds—like being neglected, having to walk on eggshells around a parent, or growing up with alcoholism or emotional instability.

Katie Ziskind helps you see how those early experiences shape your reactions in your relationship now. And, she guides you toward new ways of connecting with empathy rather than defensiveness.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, we specialize in helping couples like you—where one partner is avoidantly attached and the other is anxiously attached.

Katie Ziskind and the team of marriage therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling help you break free from the exhausting cycle of conflict. This negative “dance” is making your relationship feel like it’s on the brink of collapse.

You might feel like you’re stuck in the same frustrating fights over and over again.

One of you shuts down and walks away. Then, the other gets louder and more desperate.

These aren’t just surface-level arguments. They are emotional echoes of deeper attachment wounds that likely started in childhood.

Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, teaches you how to be attuned. You gain tools to be sensitive, caring, and gentle with each other. She is a unique, out-of-the-box marital therapist.

If you’re the anxiously attached partner, you may have grown up with a highly critical parent who always pointed out what you were doing wrong but rarely praised what you were doing right.

Maybe, you felt like love had to be earned through performance, perfection, or people-pleasing.

Perhaps one or both of your caregivers were so consumed by their own anxiety, depression, or mental health struggles that you had to become the emotional caretaker. Now, you are always scanning for mood changes and trying to keep the peace.

Over time, this teaches your nervous system that closeness is uncertain, and you begin to crave reassurance like air.

You might have also experienced guilt-tripping growing up. Maybe when you tried to assert independence or express a boundary, you were made to feel selfish or wrong.

Hurtful phrases like, “After everything I do for you…” or “You’re going to make me sick with worry,” create emotional confusion in a child.

Love becomes entangled with guilt, insecurity, chaos, and obligation. As an adult, you may now feel terrified of upsetting your partner. Or, you are afraid of being abandoned.

This fear can come out in ways you’re not proud of: needing constant reassurance, getting angry when your partner pulls away, or spiraling when texts go unanswered.

If you’re spouse is avoidantly attached, their emotional wounds run just as deep.

Perhaps your spouse’s mother or father expected them to be “strong,” “independent,” or emotionally self-sufficient from a young age.

Maybe emotional expression wasn’t modeled or encouraged. And, your spouse’s mother or father told them to suppress emotions. Vulnerability was “weak.”

Your spouse’s mother or father might have cruel. They were punished, mocked, or ignored when they showed sadness, tears, or fear. Over time, your spouse learned that needing others wasn’t safe. That crying was not okay. And now, in your adult romantic relationship, emotional closeness is new. It is something you both need help with. Communicating emotions feels overwhelming. Let’s build a positive association with emotional vulnerability in counseling.

When you are anxiously attached, your partner avoids you – and its painful, sad, and frustrating.

As you reache for connection, they feel overwhelmed and retreat. That retreat then triggers your abandonment fear. Their avoidance causes to protest louder and more urgently. Your intensity triggers their need to escape again, so they goto pornography or alcohol. And, the negative cycle repeats.

Yelling, cruel name calling, and the silent treatment are too familiar. You both end up feeling misunderstood, rejected, and alone. Marriage therapy for avoidant and anxious attachment styles is here.

When you desperately want to feel loved by each other, Katie Ziskind is an expert with attachment styles.

This is where working with Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling can change everything.

Katie Ziskind is a trauma-informed, attachment-style couples therapist with advanced training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy, Imago Therapy, and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. She brings a deeply compassionate and nonjudgmental lens to your relationship struggles, helping you both understand how your nervous systems are wired and why you react the way you do under stress.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

In marriage therapy sessions, you’ll learn how to slow down the emotional escalation before things get out of control.

Katie Ziskind will help you identify the specific childhood experiences that shaped your attachment style. Perhaps, it was emotional neglect, and anxious parenting. Or, growing up in a household where you felt invisible caused self-protection symptoms. As a child, you felt ignored, silenced, forced to be compliant, or not good enough.

With this insight, you can begin to see your partner as trying to cope with their own childhood pain.

Together, you’ll begin to co-create a new relational blueprint—one where your anxiously attached partner feels heard, seen, and emotionally safe, and your avoidantly attached partner feels respected, not pressured.

You’ll practice new ways of communicating that build connection instead of destroying it.

You’ll learn how to comfort each other instead of triggering each other. The very patterns that are pulling you apart now can be transformed into your greatest source of closeness and growth.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, our marriage counselors understand that couples in crisis often feel like they’re out of options.

But, we also know that conflict is not a sign of failure. Conflict is an opportunity for growth. It’s a sign that your relationship is trying to grow, to evolve, and to become more secure.

With Katie Ziskind’s guidance as a trauma-trained attachment specialist, you can heal. A secure attachment is totally possible. You can talk about these childhood wounds together. In marriage therapy, you can build emotional intimacy tools. You never saw these growing up. And, you can rediscover the love that brought you together in the first place.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, is not about assigning blame—it’s about healing as a unit.

If you’re the anxiously attached partner, you’ll learn how to express your needs without overwhelming or chasing your partner. As well, if you’re more avoidantly attached, you’ll learn how to stay present and communicate your boundaries without shutting down.

Together, you’ll find the middle ground where both of your needs can coexist, and emotional intimacy can finally begin to flourish.

There is hope. Even when things feel hopeless.

Let our team at Wisdom Within Counseling help you rewrite your conflict story. This is not just for your marriage today. It is for your children and next generation. As well, healthy communication helps you be better parents. This is for your inner child wounds. Don’t keep fighting, but start in couples counseling for the future you both deserve.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

What questions can help you understand if you have an anxious attachment style?

Here are 10 powerful and reflective questions you can ask yourself to explore whether you have an anxious attachment style. Your anxious attachment style gets triggered when your partner avoids you. Wisdom Within Counseling specializes in intense, high-conflict fights in your relationship.

Do I often feel panicked or fearful when my partner pulls away, doesn’t respond right away, or needs space?

This may be a sign that you’re seeking constant reassurance because of deep fears of abandonment.

Do I sometimes get louder, angrier, or more emotional when I feel like my partner isn’t listening or connecting with me?
Anxiously attached individuals often escalate emotionally in hopes that their intensity will create closeness.

Now, do I replay conversations, texts, or arguments in my mind over and over, looking for what went wrong or fearing I’ve ruined everything?

This mental looping is common when you’re hyper-attuned to rejection or disconnection.

Do I feel like I’m doing all the emotional work in the relationship and resent that my partner doesn’t seem as emotionally invested?
Anxious attachment can create an imbalance where you’re constantly chasing closeness and feeling unseen.

Do I experience intense fear or dread at the thought of my partner leaving me, even after minor disagreements?
Anxious attachment is rooted in a survival-level fear of being alone or unloved.

Do I sometimes interpret my partner needing alone time or space as proof that they don’t love me anymore?
You may confuse distance with disinterest or rejection, even when your partner simply needs time to regulate.

Do I need frequent validation, texts, or check-ins to feel secure in my relationship?

This can point to an underlying fear of not being good enough or being forgotten.

Do I sometimes yell, cry, or demand answers in the middle of an argument, even if my partner is shutting down or getting quiet?
Anxiously attached partners may unintentionally push their avoidant partner further away with escalating emotions.

Do I feel intense guilt or shame after arguments, especially when I realize I reacted out of fear?
You may regret your outbursts but not know how to stop the cycle.

Am I afraid that if I don’t fight for the relationship constantly, I’ll lose it altogether?
This inner belief often drives the anxious partner to cling tightly. Instead, couples therapy teaches reassurance, validation, and emotional safety.

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If many of these resonate with you, you’re not broken or “too much.” You are both carrying unresolved attachment wounds from your early childhood experiences.

The good news? With a trauma-informed couples therapist like Katie Ziskind, who specializes in anxious and avoidant attachment dynamics, you can learn how to regulate your nervous system. Right in counseling, you gain strategies to build emotional safety.

And, right in counseling, you can co-create a secure, loving relationship—without needing to fight for it.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

What questions help me know if my spouse has an avoidant attachment style?

Here are 10 questions you can ask my spouse to explore whether they have an avoidant attachment style. Now, many people have both an anxious and avoidant attachment style. There can be some overlap.

When my spouse’s avoidant attachment style is triggered, it contributes to intense, high-conflict fights in your relationship.

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Does your spouse often feel overwhelmed, trapped, or smothered when you want to talk about emotions or get closer?
Avoidant attachment often shows up as a strong urge to protect. It shows up as independence and space when closeness feels threatening.

Does your spouse tend to shut down, go silent, or leave the room during emotional arguments?

Your spouse may not know how to handle intense emotions. So, they escape instead of engaging—triggering your anxiety.

Does your spouse secretly think that needing someone or relying on you makes them weak or vulnerable?
Avoidant attachment styles often comes with a belief that self-reliance is safer than emotional dependence. Your spouse identifies as hyper independent.

Does your spouse get uncomfortable when you partner cry, gets emotional, or asks for reassurance?
Emotional needs might feel foreign or burdensome to them because they weren’t welcomed in their upbringing. They were made fun of by their mother or father for crying.

Does your spouse withdraw, stonewall, or go quiet when they feel criticized or pressured in a conversation?
Pulling away can be a protective reflex to avoid feeling exposed, shamed, or not good enough.

As well, does your spouse sometimes feel numb or disconnected from their own feelings?

Does your spouse have a hard time explaining what’s going on inside?

This emotional disconnection is often a survival mechanism from early experiences. Trauma includes neglect, abuse, or having to “hold it all together.”

Does your spouse often feel like no matter what they do, it’s never enough for you? And, does that trigger them to avoid, want to give up or shut down?
Your spouse may feel constantly criticized. They may hear their highly critical mother’s voice in their head. Or, they may feel misunderstood, which can increase emotional withdrawal.

Does your spouse value peace so much that they avoid hard conversations? This comes at a negative cost. Avoidance means staying distant or emotionally unavailable.
Avoidant partners often fear conflict. And, avoidant people don’t realize that their silence can feel like abandonment and neglect to their anxious partner.

Does your avoidant spouse think a lot about ending the relationship? Not because they don’t care, but because it feels too intense and don’t know what to do? Does your spouse find resolving conflict exhausting emotionally?
Your avoidant spouse might not know how to handle the emotional conversations. So, their your mind goes to escape, alcoholism, and even pornography addiction, rather than care and repair.

Does your avoidantly attached spouse have a hard time trusting? And, does your spouse struggle to believe that someone could love their real, unguarded self? So, they stay emotionally safe behind their protective walls?
Avoidant attachment style develops from childhood trauma where vulnerability wasn’t met with safety.

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If many of these questions resonate with your spouse’s behaviors, you’re not alone.

From couples therapy, you can see that you both are carrying attachment wounds from your past. Your spouse’s avoidance was necessary for survival in childhood trauma moments. But, now causes pain in your intimate relationship.

By working with Katie Ziskind, you both can co-create a secure, calm, safe, loving, caring bond.

Katie Ziskind is a trauma-trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. Couples in counseling learn skills in session to build a secure attachment style.

She can help you both gently open up, even if you are used to yelling or shutting down. From marriage therapy, you both can understand your emotional patterns and childhood trauma. Then, you can build a secure, healthy connection without losing yourself. Healing your anxious and avoidant attachment styles is possible.

Working with Katie Ziskind, anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, helps you bo co-create a secure attachment style and feel heard, valued, and supported.

Katie Ziskind helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, we understand how deeply frustrating it can be when you and your partner fall into the same high-conflict cycle over and over again.

One of you pulls away and shuts down, while the other becomes louder and more desperate to reconnect. It’s painful, exhausting, and may leave you wondering if divorce is your only option.

But there is real hope through working with a specialist. In marriage therapy, you can understand that these trauma reactions are not character flaws. Rather, they are attachment style patterns shaped by painful childhood experiences. With Katie Ziskind’s unique specialty in attachment style couples therapy, you can finally begin to break the cycle. It is possible to feel close again, and more secure than ever.

Perhaps, let’s say you’re avoidantly attached, you likely grew up in a home where emotional needs were ignored, minimized, or shamed.

You may have been expected to be independent far too young. Vulnerability was never modeled, and your parents may have been emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, or preoccupied with their own pain.

Over time, you learned to self-protect by withdrawing or staying silent in stressful moments. Your partner’s emotional intensity now feels like a threat, even when they’re simply asking for connection. This isn’t about not caring—it’s about survival habits you developed as a child.

Let’s say your partner, is anxiously attached, probably had very different early experiences.

Maybe, your spouse grew up in a chaotic home. Love was conditional on you getting good grades or behaving. You never had a voice. And, you had to take care of your emotionally anxious mother or alcoholic, angry father. As well, your spouse had a mother or father who was inconsistent, and overly anxious. Your spouse may have had a parent who used guilt and emotional manipulation on them. Furthermore, they were constantly trying to earn love by being perfect, giving, or helpful. Growing up, your spouse’s emotional needs went unmet. And, you emotional needs were neglected.

These childhood wounds and traumas taught your spouse that love can vanish at any moment. And now, when you pull away, your spouse panics. They may raise their voice, cry, or beg you to talk, trying to get the connection they fear they’re losing. If you are avoidantly attached, this pushes you away.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind, focusing on attachment styles, teaches you both how to develop an authentic connection.

Why work with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist?

In most couples therapy settings, a more general therapist doesn’t have the skills to support you and these intense moments.

Not all marriage therapists have extensive training like Katie Ziskind does. Working with a more general therapist who doesn’t have proper training leads to more conflict. Katie Ziskind is experienced with high conflict couples and passionate about trauma recovery. General therapists don’t know how to target the core issues of high conflict fighting.

Want to feel safe right in couples therapy? This is like building a new muscle. Katie Ziskind will stop and redirect you if she sees blaming or finger-pointing.

But, at Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind takes a completely different approach that the run-of-the-mill therapist. Instead of focusing only on surface arguments, Katie Ziskind will gently guide both of you to understand your inner child wounds. To add, she helps you fully see the roots beneath your explosive, anxious, or overwhelming reactions.

You’ll begin to see each other with new compassion in marriage therapy.

As well, you gain specific skills to shift away from being enemies. You get awareness to see each other as two hurt children trying to feel safe in love. This deep emotional insight can transform your relationship from a battleground into a place of healing.

Understanding inner child wounds and unmet love needs is a key part of breaking the high conflict cycle. To note, this offers insight on how you both can then meet each other’s wounds and love needs.

Katie Ziskind integrates Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Imago Therapy, and trauma-informed approaches to help you recognize how your current fights are really echoes of unresolved childhood pain.

Couples therapy is a peak into positive, loving, communication, that leaves you feeling closer.

You’ll talk about the most painful moments from your early life in marriage therapy. Not to dwell on them, but to finally be witnessed, understood, and supported by your spouse. When your partner hears the story behind your withdrawal or emotional outbursts, they begin to soften. This process helps you be more of your authentic self. Couples therapy at Wisdom Within Counseling is about stepping into your best self, not preforming as a character. Not people pleasing or silencing your voice.

But, marriage therapy helps you release shame, guilt, and self-criticism. You both learn skills in high conflict specialized marriage therapy to be playful together.

You’re no longer just “cold” or “needy”—you’re human, shaped by pain, and deserving of love.

One of the things that makes working with Katie Ziskind so powerful is her ability to pause the session when things escalate. She won’t let you argue or get sucked into an old pattern.

Katie Ziskind helps both of you regulate your nervous systems and soothe each other in real time.

If either of you gets overwhelmed or triggered in marriage counseling, Katie Ziskind won’t let you spiral.

Instead, she’ll step in with tools to help you calm down, stay present, and communicate more effectively. You’ll practice what emotional safety actually feels like—in the moment, not just in theory.

Rather than letting sessions devolve into complaints or power struggles, Katie Ziskind offers a collaborative, team-based model of couples therapy.

She helps you build a shared understanding of each other’s needs and histories.

Understanding past trauma, from narcissistic parents, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, or religious trauma, is key in healing.

From marriage therapy, your relationship becomes a safe space to grow together. Wanting to matter and receive appreciation are normal needs. As well, wanting to know your partner finds you attractive is a normal need. Needing to talk about emotions is a normal need.

Couples therapy becomes a safe place to accept each other and offer each other belonging. Wanting to know you are valuable to your spouse is a normal need. Needing to know your partner still loves you, and why, is a normal need. Crying and wanting a long hug is a normal need. Asking for reassurance is a normal need. And, you deserve to be loved, and feel loved in a secure way. Katie Ziskind, at Wisdom Within Counseling, teaches you how to do all the above. You can meet with her on telehealth video therapy sessions. An expert in avoidant and anxious attachment styles causing hurtful fight cycles may not be available in your local area.

Your marriage doesn’t need to keep being a place where you’re constantly on edge.

Her approach focuses on emotional connection, empathy, and repair, so you can stop arguing and start healing.

You’ll learn how to express your feelings without blame. From avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy, you learn how to listen without defending. And, right in session, you learn how to comfort each other during hard moments instead of turning away.

Whether it’s holding hands during a vulnerable disclosure or learning to say “I’m here” when one of you gets triggered, you’ll begin to rewrite the way you connect emotionally and physically.

Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, also has training and expertise in sexual intimacy and understands how emotional disconnection spills into the bedroom.

She can help you rebuild a sex life that is emotionally connected, filled with consent, curiosity, and pleasure.

Many anxious-avoidant couples find that their sexual connection suffers, becoming either pressure-filled or emotionally absent. Katie Ziskind helps you bring emotional safety into the bedroom so that sex becomes a loving, bonding experience again.

With Katie Ziskind’s guidance, you’ll realize that your anxious-avoidant attachment style fight pattern is not a relationship death sentence.

Couples counseling becomes a structured roadmap to deeper intimacy. Katie Ziskind helps you both learn how to navigate fights calmly, rather than reactively.

As you understand each other’s childhood trauma stories more deeply, your fights change for the better. The same triggers that once tore you apart will become invitations for closeness, teamwork, and mutual growth.

Unlike many therapists who take a generalized approach, Katie Ziskind has extensive training specifically in attachment and trauma. She is Gottman Level Two trained, Emotionally Focused Therapy trained, Imago Relationship Therapy trained, and a certified sex therapy-informed professional.

This layered expertise allows her to address not just surface-level communication issues. But, also the deep emotional roots that drive disconnection, shutdowns, anxiety, and arguments.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

If you’re ready to stop fighting and start understanding, if you’re tired of walking on eggshells and wondering if your marriage will make it, you’re not alone.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind helps couples like you heal attachment wounds. Right in counseling, you develop true emotional intimacy. And, you gain strategies to build a secure, lasting emotional bond. From there, sexuality can flourish. You don’t have to keep living in disconnection. From working with Katie Ziskind, you can rebuild your relationship from the inside out, together.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind can feel like a breath of fresh air—especially when you’ve tried other therapists before and still feel like nothing has truly shifted.

Also, at Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind brings a trauma-informed, attachment-focused, and emotionally attuned approach that goes far beyond surface-level communication skills or general advice.

If you and your partner are stuck in high-conflict fights, start with Katie Ziskind today. And, if you feel rejected, shut down, or even on the brink of divorce, Katie is a specialist in attachment styles. She knows exactly how to break high conflict fight cycles. Katie Ziskind works differently—she gets to the core of what’s really going on beneath the fights.

One of the most powerful aspects of working with Katie Ziskind is her ability to help you connect your current fight cycles to your childhood attachment wounds.

Maybe, you had a critical, emotionally distant parent and learned to shut down when things get tense. Or, your spouse grew up with an anxious, unpredictable caregiver. And, they learned to get louder and more intense to be seen. These early relationship patterns don’t just disappear.

They show up in your marriage—especially during conflict. Katie Ziskind helps you see those patterns with compassion, not blame, and begin to understand your partner’s behaviors as protective strategies, not personal attacks.

Katie Ziskind uses tools from Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Imago Therapy, and the Gottman Method, all while holding a deep sensitivity to trauma.

That means she doesn’t just let you argue in session and hope something sticks. She pauses you in real time, slows things down, and helps you understand what’s really happening emotionally underneath your conflict—fear, sadness, shame, loneliness. When those deeper truths are expressed safely, something amazing happens: the fight softens. The defenses melt. You begin to feel like you’re finally on the same team.

Many couples say they’ve never had a therapist who could actually guide them through a hard moment and help them reconnect emotionally, not just “manage conflict.”

Katie Ziskind teaches you how to speak and articulate your vulnerable emotions. Rather than put up self-protective walls, disassociate, yell, go silent, and shut down, you can connect. Emotional intimacy is a key skill you learn in marriage counseling to build a secure attachment.

You’ll learn to recognize when you’re in a triggered state. From attachment style focused couples counseling, you learn how to repair after a rupture or hurtful fight.

As well, you learn how to create emotional safety together. Emotional safety is not something most couples ever had modeled growing up.

And if you’ve experienced trauma—emotional neglect, childhood abuse, religious guilt, or sexual shame—Katie Ziskind brings a holistic, somatic, and body-aware approach to healing.

You don’t have to talk about trauma in every session. But, from specialized couples therapy for anxious and avoidant attachment styles, you’ll start to notice the connection between childhood and current conflicts.

In marriage counseling, you see that the work you do with her finally begins to heal the wounds underneath your frustrating fights and patterns. And, your fights begin to look different from the skills you learn in marriage counseling.

You’ll learn how to co-regulate each other instead of escalating. How to lean in instead of shutting down.

Couples often leave sessions saying things like, “That felt different, but good.”

Or, “This is the first time I actually understand what’s happening when we fight.”

With Katie Ziskind, with her speciality in anxious attachment styles and avoidant attachment styles, you’re not just learning communication.

You’re rebuilding your emotional foundation. She helps you and your partner turn toward each other again, even after years of resentment, frustration, or silence.

If you’ve tried therapy before and it didn’t work, you’re not broken—you just haven’t had the kind of emotionally safe, trauma-informed couples therapy that Katie Ziskind provides.

She works best with couples who are in crisis, who are high conflict, or who are deeply disconnected but not ready to give up. With the right guidance, even the most distressed relationships can rebuild trust and closeness.

If you’re ready to stop just surviving together and start healing together, Katie Ziskind can help you and your partner find your way back to emotional intimacy, laughter, and secure love.

It starts with one new kind of conversation in a specialized type of couples counseling. Katie Ziskind holds you with warmth, expertise in attachment styles, Gottman and Imago skills, and heartfelt empathy.

Has your marriage been on the back burner for far too long? Your marriage deserves to be a priority. Attachment style couples counseling gives your marriage the attention it deserves. And it’s possible with Katie Ziskind’s expertise in trauma, anxious attachment styles, avoidant attachment styles, and helps you build a secure attachment bond.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

How can you heal religious trauma in couples therapy?

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind can be a safe, healing, and empowering space for you and your partner to talk about what often feels hardest to say out loud.

For one, growing up in a conservative, strict and purity culture family, you may have learned that masturbation was sinful. You also learned that you were not allowed to ask your parents questions about sex. As well, your parents never offered you guidance around sex, how to have it, what it should be like in a marriage, or talk with you about your body. Most of what men learn growing up is from porn.

You get to talk about pornography and the influence on your sex life openly in marriage therapy with Katie Ziskind.

Pornography does a disservice to many boys growing up. It is a quick dopamine hit, and can become an addiction. More so, pornography does not offer accurate sexual education. In couples therapy, you can talk about your experiences with religious trauma, your sexual desires, and the pain of sexual rejection.

Also, pornography doesn’t show the emotional conversation, reassurance, and emotional support women need. And, it does not show 45 to 90 minutes of physical foreplay that is required for a female to orgasm or climax. Porn doesn’t show men massaging erogenous zones and slowly gently building desire.

Rather, pornography showing an over emphasis on penetrative, penis in vagina sex that is very male pleasure focused. This misinformation from pornography from adolescent years on, can make a man struggle sexually in a real life marriage. And, this leads a female to no longer like sex because it’s unsatisfying, dull, male-pleasure focused only, and boring.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind focused on attachment styles helps couples rebuild her sexual connection.

Pornography does a deep disservice to many boys growing up. If you’re like a lot of men, your first exposure to anything resembling “sex education” was likely through porn. And while it might have sparked curiosity, it didn’t teach you the emotional, intimate, or relational side of sex.

Instead, it gave you a distorted view of what sex looks like—performance-driven, fast, aggressive, and completely centered on male pleasure. It skipped over the most essential parts of real intimacy: communication, patience, trust, emotional safety, and the deep connection your partner actually longs for.

Pornography never shows you what women often need most: the emotional safety and reassurance that allows their bodies to open to sexual pleasure.

It doesn’t show you how a woman’s arousal typically begins in her heart and her mind. It doesn’t show you how important conversations before, during, and after sex can be for building trust and intimacy. Without emotional connection, a woman may feel used, dismissed, or pressured. And over time, she may start to avoid sex altogether—not because she doesn’t want intimacy, but because she feels emotionally and physically disconnected.

In real-life marriages, what you see in pornography sets up unrealistic expectations and often leaves both partners feeling disappointed.

Sex can be confusing without proper sexual education. Katie Ziskind is a sexuality educator. Many men want more frequent sex. As a husband, you may wonder why your partner isn’t initiating sex anymore. Or, you why your wife doesn’t seem “into sex.”

With a religious background, or religious trauma experiences, we get misinformation on sex. Many men do not know about the female orgasmic system and sexual arousal and desire process.

The truth is, without emotional foreplay and intentional physical buildup, sex can feel flat. Without emotional foreplay, for many women, sex becomes boring, and unsatisfying.

To note, women need 45 to 90 minutes of emotional and physical foreplay to even be ready for orgasm.

Especially for women, sex can even be painful and physically uncomfortable without proper warm up.

Porn rarely, if ever, shows the 45 to 90 minutes of non-goal-oriented touch that many women need to feel safe, aroused, and connected.

Foreplay isn’t just about quick kissing or a few touches before getting to penis in vagina penetration. It’s about massaging erogenous zones, whispering loving words, slow caresses, deep eye contact, playful teasing, and emotional warmth.

Co-creating a a healthy sex life is about tuning into each other, not just getting to orgasm.

And yet, porn trains men to expect penetrative, penis in vagina sex as a requirement.

Pornography does not offer accurate sexual health education on female sexual arousal. Rather, pornography shows and portrays women experiencing instant sexual arousal. Furthermore, pornography shows immediate compliance. Porn is very focused on male sexual pleasure, the outcome of penetrative sex, and women faking pleasure. And, pornography shows constant novelty. To note, none of these reflect what truly builds deep, satisfying sex in a long-term relationship.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re failing your partner sexually, or if your partner has told you she no longer likes sex, you’re not alone.

Many couples come into therapy feeling lost, disconnected, or resentful around intimacy. Katie Ziskind, a certified sex therapy-informed couples therapist, understands this dynamic intimately.

She specializes in helping couples rebuild their sexual connection by healing the emotional rupture that often starts far outside the bedroom.

In couples therapy with Katie Ziskind, you and your partner will learn to slow down, talk about your needs and desires, and create emotional safety. Katie helps you reconnect with the emotional side of intimacy, which porn never taught you. She will guide you through understanding the impact of early sexual messages, helping you unlearn performance-based sex and relearn connection-based intimacy.

Instead of feeling pressured to perform, you’ll learn how to be present with your partner.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

You’ll explore emotional and physical foreplay techniques that don’t just lead to better sex—they lead to a better relationship.

Also, in couples counseling, you’ll understand that true sexual arousal begins in emotional safety. Instead of sex being an anxious experience, you can shift into fun and pleasure. Anxious attachment style couples therapy teaches that sex can become a space of healing. Sex can be fun, passionate, and be about mutually satisfaction. It is so fun to feel that spark and fire of desire together again.

Katie Ziskind also helps women reclaim their sexual voices. She especially counsels women who feel like sex is a chore or source of anxiety. Women who have low sexual desire or no sex drive benefit from counseling.

Through her gentle and affirming guidance in counseling, both of you can speak more honestly about what works sexually.

Anxious attachment style couples therapy gives you a space to talk openly about sex. For many anxiously attached women, sex feels overwhelming. You can talk about what hurts, what’s missing, and what you long for. Sex is not just about ejaculation or penetrative penis in vagina sex. She’ll help you turn toward each other with kindness, and rebuild the kind of sexual intimacy that feels truly alive.

If pornography has shaped how you view sex as a man, there’s no shame in that. But, anxious attachment style couples therapy supports sex positive education.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind gives you the sexual tools, sexual education, language, and emotional connection you were never taught growing up.

You’ll learn how to build anticipation, deepen trust, communicate desires, and restore the excitement you may have lost. Most of all, you’ll create a safe, shared sexual experience that honors both of you—not just the version porn sold you.

Sex doesn’t have to be boring, stressful, or disconnected.

It can be nourishing, fun, playful, erotic, and profoundly bonding—when it starts with emotional connection and mutual respect.

If you’re ready to move beyond the limitations of pornography and build a real, connected, and satisfying sex life with your partner, couples therapy with Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling is your next step.

At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind creates a warm and welcoming space where sex is not off-limits.

You can openly talk about sex. And, everything related to sexuality is held with compassion.

Whether you grew up in a faith community that taught you shame around sex, purity culture that made you fear your own body, or a family that avoided all conversations about desire, Katie Ziskind is here to help you untangle those messages gently and without judgment.

In marriage counseling, you can begin to name the confusion and grief that comes from being told that wanting sex is wrong. And, you can unlearn that expressing your sexuality makes you “less than.” Strict, conservative religious teachings make all genders of people feel like they have to push away their organic, sexual urges. For many women, a disconnection from libido and low sexual desire is a result.

Couples therapy becomes a safe place to talk about sex without the obligation to have it.

You and your partner get to grow a new limb on your family tree, by openly and confidently talking about sex. Instead of hiding it away or keeping it a secret, you can start to overcome sexual shame and guilt that was passed down generationally.

You can talk openly about the ways religious conditioning may have led you to feel afraid of erotic, sexual pleasure, disconnected from your body, or shut down in moments of intimacy.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Maybe you’ve been carrying guilt around sex for years, or maybe you’ve felt lost, not even knowing what you want.

Katie helps you explore these emotions safely, at your pace, and without pressure.

As a trauma-informed, sex-positive therapist, Katie knows how vulnerable it is to speak about sex, especially in the presence of your partner. That’s why she doesn’t just talk about techniques or surface-level issues. She helps you and your partner explore what’s happening emotionally beneath your sexual disconnection.

Is there a fear of being unwanted?

Are you afraid of being judged or shamed if you express what you want? As well, are you shutting down out of fear of rejection?

Katie helps you name these fears, and begin to rewrite your sexual and emotional story—together.

Many couples come to Katie Ziskind after years of sexual avoidance, rejection, or frustration.

Maybe, you’ve stopped initiating sex because you’re tired of hearing “no.”

Or, you feel shut down and disconnected because sex feels like a duty, not something pleasurable or bonding.

Katie gently guides you to talk about these moments with empathy, not blame, and to begin building a safe, connected sexual relationship that honors both of your needs.

If you’re someone who’s been impacted by religious trauma, Katie Ziskind helps you explore your spirituality in ways that feel nourishing—not oppressive. She understands how purity culture, fear-based teachings, or messages about sin and control can create anxiety, shame, or even dissociation around sex.

In marriage therapy, you’re invited to reclaim your body, your voice, and your right to pleasure—without guilt. You’ll begin to see sex as something that can be sacred, playful, emotionally connected, and healing.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Katie Ziskind specializes in working with anxious and avoidant attachment styles, which often show up in the bedroom as mismatched desire, avoidance of sex, or tension around rejection.

Maybe you feel anxious when your partner pulls away. With an anxious attachment style, you get flooded when your partner shuts down. Or, when they get upset about sex, you then start pulling away. Katie Ziskind helps both of you understand your nervous systems, your emotional responses, childhood experiences, and your deeper needs. From this deeply intimate work in marriage counseling, you can meet each other with understanding instead of the attack-blame cycle.

What makes couples therapy with Katie Ziskind different is how whole-person her approach is. She sees you not just as a couple with problems, but as two humans with histories, trauma, needs, and dreams.

You’ll explore everything such as early messages about your body and desire. Furthermore, in marriage counseling, you can talk about the role of stress and overwhelm in your sex life. Understanding each other’s worries and stressors rebuilds emotional safety. Emotional safety opens the door to sexual closeness.

As well, you’ll learn how to talk about sex without shame or rejection fears popping up. And, how to navigate rejection or difference in desire with tenderness and care.

In marriage therapy sessions, you’ll learn to turn toward each other again—starting with emotional intimacy and emotional security.

You’ll build new pathways for intimacy that feel safe, exciting, and deeply connected. Even if you’ve struggled for years, even if religion or trauma made you feel broken or ashamed, Katie Ziskind helps you remember that you are not broken—and your relationship can heal.

You deserve a place to be honest, curious, and vulnerable about sex, trauma, and intimacy. In marriage therapy, you have a safe place to talk about sex, physical touch, foreplay and your emotional needs.

Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind offers just that—a safe, sacred space to heal what’s taboo in your childhood. At Wisdom Within Counseling, you can learn to have a voice. And, you learn to speak up rather than continuing to silence your sexual self.

With the guidance of Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, you can rediscover each other through honesty, trust, and love.

Click below to start with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist who helps couples build a secure, meaningful bond after trauma.

Couples therapy can be a transformational space where you and your partner begin to reimagine what sex truly means. Now, sex is not a goal-oriented act or obligation, but as a shared, fun, playful, and connective experience.

With a therapist like Katie Ziskind, who specializes in sex therapy-informed couples work, the conversation gently shifts from pressure and performance toward emotional intimacy and mutual pleasure.

You learn that sex doesn’t need to follow a script or end with ejaculation for it to be meaningful, fulfilling, or deeply pleasurable.

In many relationships, especially long-term ones, sexual intimacy can become routine or even strained by misunderstandings, unmet needs, and shame-based beliefs from childhood, religious upbringing, or exposure to unrealistic media like pornography.

Couples therapy opens the door to talk about these influences and how they may be impacting your connection now. It becomes a safe space where female pleasure is not just acknowledged, but honored—and where foreplay is no longer rushed or skipped, but expanded and deeply valued.

When therapy encourages longer foreplay, it’s not just about adding time—it’s about creating presence. You’ll learn how emotional and physical connection before sex—such as talking, cuddling, massaging, playful teasing, and kissing—are not separate from sex, but are sex.

Katie Ziskind teaches you how to slow down, to read each other’s emotional cues, and to build desire together, rather than racing to a finish line.

This creates safety, trust, and deeper arousal, especially for the female partner, whose body often takes longer to warm up.

Couples therapy also helps shift the goal away from ejaculation as the measure of success, and toward shared eroticism, presence, and pleasure. This allows both partners to enjoy the moment, explore different types of touch, and express desires more openly. Sex becomes playful again—not pressured. You may laugh, breathe together, experiment, or simply explore what feels good without having to do anything perfectly or “complete” the experience in a certain way.

Katie Ziskind’s trauma-informed approach means that emotional safety is central.

If you or your partner have experienced past sexual trauma, body shame, or sexual rejection, these topics can be held with compassion, and slowly worked through with care.

In marriage therapy, female pleasure is no longer a mystery or a taboo topic.

Sex is something you learn to talk about together, and openly. You let go of obligation, shame, guilt, fear, and gain healthy, accurate sex education. In couples therapy, you can learn to celebrate you sexual expression, and prioritize sex in a balanced way that meets both your needs.

Ultimately, couples therapy helps create a new sexual script that’s about connection, not sexual performance. You’ll come to understand that pleasure—especially female sexual pleasure—isn’t linear. As well, from marriage counseling, you can learn that being erotic or sexual together doesn’t always end with orgasm or ejaculation. Sexual pleasure is a positive, playful, fun dance. And, real life sex is not what you see in pornography.

Sometimes, the most intimate sexual experiences are the ones where you simply feel safe, seen, and connected. You’ll also learn to repair from past sexual disconnection. Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, helps you develop new sexual rituals and emotional rituals of closeness that keep the emotional and physical sparks alive.

Whether you’ve struggled with mismatched libidos, boredom in the bedroom, or misunderstandings about how your partner experiences desire, therapy gives you the tools to explore sexuality as something fun, creative, and emotionally rich.

It can reawaken your passion—not just for sex, but for each other. You’ll develop a shared language for erotic expression. Emotionally and sexually, you can begin to feel more like teammates. From counseling with Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, you learn to work together. Marriage counseling helps you co-create moments of joy, relaxation, and connection.

Most importantly, couples therapy with Katie Ziskind helps you let go of pressure and perfection. These are trauma responses that develop a very young in life.

Learning to be a perfectionist isn’t something that happens overnight. When you have an anxious attachment style, you’ve had to be a perfectionist. This can come off as criticism to your partner both emotionally and sexually. In couples therapy, you learn about the connection between having highly critical parents to sexual performance pressure.

Katie Ziskind, avoidant and anxious attachment style couples therapy specialist, gives you a strong emotional foundation to develop security, closeness, and emotional intimacy.

If you are fighting, feeling hopeless, hurt, rejected, and like nothing you do is good enough, you are not alone. You get the help of an expert and professional when it comes to building a secure attachment.

You may have never seen a secure attachment, conflict resolution skills, or healthy communication growing up.

Your mother and father argued, yelled, or thrown dishes.

But, they avoided and ignored conflict after the fact. Maybe, you have a memory of your parents getting into an intense, screaming argument. Was there road rage too? As a child, you felt scared.

However, your parents never talked about it afterward or showed you healthy resolution. They avoided discussing conflicts and emotions.

Another example of avoidance is a parent who uses alcohol. Having a parent who is an alcoholic means you have a parent who avoids emotions. To note, an emotionally avoidant father or mother never teaches you emotional intelligence skills. So, attachment style marriage therapy is a safe place to play fully develop these skills. You receive expert counseling to shift from an anxious attachment style and an avoidant attachment style, into security. Let’s develop loving, healthy conflict resolution skills in attachment style marriage therapy.

Talking openly about your sex life and physical intimacy are wonderful parts of anxious attachment style couples counseling.

As well, anxious attachment styles and avoidant attachment styles show up in sexual intimacy moments.

From peers, media, movies, pornography, and Hollywood, we are misinformed to think that sex should be easy. We never receive accurate educaiton on female sexual pleasure. Pornography never shows verbal or healthy communication around sex. Our friends and peers often miss lead us as well. If you grew up in a culture where sex is taboo, you may not have a safe place to talk about your sexual needs.

Marriage counseling becomes her safe place to overcoming anxiety about sexual intimacy. And, you can break cycles of sexual rejection and sexual avoidance. These have roots in feelings of not being good enough or not insecurity. As well, childhood trauma and sexual abuse plays a huge role in the anxious-avoidant pattern. And, emotional avoidance from your mother or father about your body and lack of sexual education can make expectations marital sex confusing. You may have had parents that didn’t offer you any guidance or information on sex.

As well, you’ll come to see sex as a journey you take together—not something you have to “get right.” You’ll rediscover the power of emotional foreplay, affectionate touch, and shared vulnerability.

And, from marriage therapy, your emotional and sexual connection can evolve into something more safe. As a result, your sexual and physical becomes soulful, more nourishing, and deeply fulfilling for both of you.

If you identify as a high conflict couple in crisis, and need the help of attachment style expert, Katie Ziskind, you’re in the right place.

Now, do you feel like you’re constantly walking on eggshells? Are you fighting over the smallest things? Or, are you unable to have a calm conversation without it spiraling into a blowout? You are stuck in an avoidant-anxious attachment high conflict cycle and are in crisis.

As well, you probably love each other deeply. But, the way you communicate leaves you both feeling misunderstood, emotionally raw, and disconnected. If this sounds like you, working with an attachment style expert like Katie Ziskind can help you break these painful cycles and rebuild safety in your relationship.

You may notice that the same fight keeps happening over and over again.

Maybe it starts with a simple question or unmet expectation and ends in yelling, withdrawal, or someone storming out. This pattern doesn’t mean your relationship is doomed—it means your nervous systems are triggered, likely by deeper wounds from the past. As a specialist in attachment style couples therapy, Katie Ziskind helps you understand why these fights happen and teaches you how to soothe one another instead of escalate.

You might be stuck in the anxious-avoidant cycle, where one of you pursues, demands, or panics when there’s emotional distance, and the other shuts down, withdraws, or freezes when things get too intense. This creates a push-pull that leaves you both feeling alone, unseen, and rejected. Katie Ziskind is highly trained in working with these attachment dynamics. She teaches you how to create emotional safety, slow down, and build a new way of relating based on vulnerability, validation, and respect.

If you’re finding that one of you gets overwhelmed and the other keeps pushing for resolution, it’s a clear sign that your attachment styles are clashing under stress.

Perhaps one of you says, “We need to talk right now!” while the other feels smothered and says, “I can’t do this.” These moments don’t just come from nowhere—they often come from unresolved childhood trauma, fears of abandonment, or learned patterns from growing up. Katie helps you uncover these roots and turn your pain into connection.

You might be feeling emotionally exhausted, where every attempt at connection ends in misunderstanding. You try to talk, but it ends in one person feeling blamed and the other feeling dismissed. These emotional ruptures add up over time and can create resentment, loneliness, and hopelessness in the relationship. Katie Ziskind doesn’t just listen—she actively teaches you new tools for emotional regulation and helps you both feel heard and supported during sessions.

High conflict couples often feel stuck in roles: the “nagging” partner and the “distant” partner.

But those labels don’t tell the full story. The anxious partner often feels terrified of being left, while the avoidant partner may be terrified of being overwhelmed or controlled. Katie Ziskind helps you understand that these roles are rooted in protective mechanisms, not personal failures. When you see your partner’s behavior through a trauma-informed lens, everything changes—and healing begins.

Another sign that you’re a high conflict couple in crisis is that intimacy—both emotional and sexual—has become strained or nonexistent. You might go days without touching, avoid emotional conversations, or argue about sex without resolution. Katie Ziskind is not only an attachment expert but also a certified sex therapy-informed professional, helping you restore sexual connection in a way that feels emotionally safe, respectful, and deeply satisfying for both partners.

You might also feel like previous couples therapists just let you vent without actually teaching you anything helpful. That’s where Katie is different. She’s direct, compassionate, and will pause you mid-conflict to teach emotional safety in real time. She gives you actionable tools for regulating your nervous system, rebuilding trust, and learning how to repair after a fight. You’ll leave sessions feeling empowered, not confused or defeated.

It’s also common for high conflict couples to feel isolated—like no one understands what it’s like behind closed doors.

You may present well to the outside world, but inside the relationship, there’s pain, shame, and fear. Katie Ziskind creates a safe space where you can take off the masks, speak from your wounded inner child, and finally feel safe enough to let your guard down. She’ll help you rebuild your relationship from the inside out—with empathy, structure, and love.

If you’re constantly fighting, shutting down, crying alone, or thinking about giving up, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. This pattern of conflict means you need expert support. With Katie Ziskind, an attachment style specialist, there is hope for your marriage. You’ll learn how to listen without reacting, speak without attacking. And, you gain positive communication skills to reconnect even when things feel tense. Stop this painful cycle and start rebuilding meaningful connection. Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling guides you there with compassion, wisdom, and a trauma-informed approach that truly works.