Are you and your spouse getting into intense, high conflict fights where you feel hopeless and hurt afterwards? Or, are you shutting down entirely, not speaking, avoiding conflict altogether, and pretending like your conflicts are not even there, but there really is an elephant in the room? Wondering more about how anxious and avoidant attachment styles play a role in your marriage disconnection? Did you know there are childhood traumas and deeper childhood wounds that drive anxious and avoidant attachment styles? Marriage counseling that is emotionally focused, and Gottman and Imago-based can help you co-create true intimacy, security, and connection. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. She specializes in teaching couples how to shift from anger, hurt, and fear and into connection, vulnerability, playfulness, and security.
If your wife struggles with anxiety, PTSD, or trauma and you often withdraw to keep the peace, you’re likely caught in an anxious-avoidant cycle.
Katie Ziskind, a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, helps couples break this painful pattern through emotionally focused, holistic therapy. She guides you both in understanding how childhood wounds shape current conflicts, while teaching nervous system-regulating tools for deeper connection.
Her nature-based, trauma-informed approach resonates especially with women who are sensitive, holistic, and value emotional safety. Working with Katie Ziskind can help you and your partner build trust, stop the cycle of yelling and shutdown, and rediscover emotional intimacy together.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Katie Ziskind is a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
If your marriage is full of high-stakes arguments, emotional shutdowns, or waves of intense disconnection, you’re not broken—and neither is your relationship. Your spouse tends to be more anxious than you are. From research you’ve done on the Internet, you know that you have an avoidant style when it comes to dealing with conflict head on.
Your wife is bringing up the divorce word, and it breaks your heart. It is making you research couples therapists specializing in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. You are looking up what your wife’s anxious attachment style means and how she developed it. And, you are researching and wanting education on your own avoidant attachment style.
In your marriage fights, rather than talking about uncomfortable feelings, you would rather pretend it’s not happening. When your spouse yells or raises their voice, you find yourself shutting down, pulling away, and isolating. The more that you withdraw and shut down, the louder and louder your spouse gets. It feels like a negative feedback loop. Though you are aware of this painful pattern in your marriage, you know that you need a professional on your team. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Did you know that the arguments and disconnection you’re experiencing is the emotional residue of your childhood showing up in your marriage?
All the powerlessness, anger, loneliness, hurt, anxiety, and rejection you both are experiencing actually have roots in abuse and neglect from your younger years.
Part of creating a positive cycle of communication and a secure bond in couples therapy means addressing your childhoods. We all have needs from childhood that went unmet. To add, the wounds that shaped you early in life don’t just disappear when you become an adult.
As a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, Katie Ziskind works with couples who are exhausted from trying to “just communicate better.”
These childhood reaction styles and survival mechanisms live in your nervous system, your body, and your patterns of love. But healing your fight cycle and trauma is possible through marriage counseling.
Katie Ziskind is a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles with couples in crisis.
You might not realize that what’s sabotaging your intimacy is unresolved trauma from long ago. To note, trauma impacts how you trust, connect, talk, and handle conflict.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
How Does Childhood Trauma Shape Adult Love and How Can Marriage Therapy with Katie Ziskind Can Help?
Maybe you grew up in a home where love was conditional. If you had narcissistic or alcoholic parents, your emotional needs were probably overlooked, minimized, or mocked.
As well, you may have had to become “the good child,” the caretaker, or the one who kept the peace.
Or maybe you had to shut down your needs entirely just to survive and get through. These childhood roles become attachment styles in adulthood. Manytimes, your spouse will anxiously clinging to connection. And, you avoid closeness and intimacy to self-protect and stay safe.
Religious trauma can also be a deep undercurrent in your relationship today.
Not only does having an alcoholic parent create an anxious or an avoidant attachment style, but religious trauma does too. Being raised in a strict, conservative, and shame and fear-based culture can have a big impact. Maybe, you were raised in a high-control religious environment that taught you that your sexuality was sinful or that your body was shameful.
If you grew up being told what to think and who to be, you may now struggle with guilt during intimacy or feel paralyzed by fear of doing it “wrong.”
These emotional scars often play out in your sex life and in the bedroom—and in arguments—when you’re trying to be close to your partner.
Do you know about the negative impacts of non-contact sexual trauma?
Sexual abuse doesn’t have to be contact-based to create trauma. You might have had a neighbor, older cousin, or adult in your life who made sexual comments.
Maybe, someone stared at your body, exposed their genitals to you, or created an unsafe sexual environment. Perhaps, you were exposed to pornography or sexual images at a very young age.
These non-contact sexual experiences can distort your sense of safety and cause anxiety around touch, vulnerability, or physical closeness—even in a safe relationship.
Maybe, you experienced emotional abuse from a parent or sibling who constantly criticized, gaslit, or belittled you.
Or perhaps you were bullied by relatives at every holiday—mocked for your weight, interests, or emotions.
These betrayals in early relationships form the blueprint for how you now relate to your spouse.
If your wife has experienced anxiety, PTSD, religious trauma, or sexual abuse, marriage counseling breaks the pattern of staying stuck in an anxious-avoidant cycle.
Katie Ziskind offers a holistic, somatic, body-based, emotionally focused trauma therapy for couples. She often works with anxious women with anxiety who are highly sensitive.
Couples she sees are nature-loving people, and who have a desire to stay together. But, these couples have trauma and PTSD get into massive fights that don’t feel well. She intense fights, anxiety, helps couples who are seek security, safety and healing in their marriage. With Katie Ziskind’s expertise, you and your partner can begin to validate one another’s pain. From marriage therapy for PTSD, you can team up to repair emotional ruptures, and co-create the secure, loving bond you’ve both been craving.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Looking for a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles who can give you skills for meaningful connection and help you feel seen?
Now, in your marriage, you just feel tired and hurt.
Right now, you are looking for a professional who can help you cope create a secure bond with your partner. Your spouse used to be your best friend. But, overtime, you feel like you are living on two different planets.
As well, you feel misunderstood, unseen, taken for granted, ignored, rejected, and quite frankly, tired.
In your marriage, you may find yourself feeling overly responsible. As well, you feel chronically afraid of being a burden, or emotionally numb and distant in times of stress.
Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. She helps couples in crisis learn to love deeply, more deeply than ever before. You want to close, secure, safe, and held tight.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
When You’re on the Brink of Divorce: How Attachment Styles May Be Tearing You Apart—and How We Can Help You Heal
At Wisdom Within Counseling, our therapists specialize in guiding couples in crisis. Maybe your partner has asked you for a divorce, but is open minded to counseling. You want to try to work through this for your children. Deep down, you both still long to understand each other and rebuild.
If you’re here, there’s likely a lot of emotional pain between you. You may be feeling exhausted by repeated fights, a lack of emotional connection, or the crushing silence between you.
Often, beneath these painful dynamics are attachment styles. Attachment styles are deeply ingrained emotional patterns from in childhood. They impact how you relate, love, and react in conflict.
When your spouse is anxiously attached and you are avoidantly attached, it creates a deeply painful dynamic. Fights leave you both feeling alone, misunderstood, and hopeless.
But with the right support, from Katie Ziskind, you can begin to repair. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
The Anxious Partner: Always Reaching, Always Afraid of Losing
If your wife is spouse is the anxious partner, they will may feel desperate for closeness, reassurance, and emotional validation.
With an anxious attachment style, they might find themselves in doubt and insecurity. You get asked, “Do you love me? Are you mad at me? Why won’t you talk to me?”
Deep down, they often are feeling rejected, ignored, or fearful of loss. When your spouse has an anxious attachment style, they wonder if they are “too much.” They crave connection and emotional intimacy. Since you have an avoidant attachment style, this overwhelms you. And, you pull away. It can trigger a deep, gut-wrenching panic for your wife or spouse.
Underneath that anxiety is often an old wound. To note, this is a fear that love will be taken away, that they are not enough. Or, a fear that they are fundamentally unworthy of being chosen and stayed with.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
You – The Avoidant Partner: Needing Space, Feeling Overwhelmed
If you’re the avoidant partner, you likely feel smothered or overwhelmed by your spouse’s emotional needs.
You may struggle to express how you feel, shut down in arguments, or avoid intimacy because it feels too vulnerable. Due to your own childhood memories and trauma, closeness can feel threatening. And, you’ve likely learned early in life that emotions weren’t safe or welcome.
So you cope by creating distance and independence.
Some of your closest friends and family members might even say that you are hype independent. You are a perfectionist. And, you make it all look perfect from the outside.
As well, you hold it all together, quietly, not wanting to rock the boat. But, your hyper independence actually damages the intimacy in your marriage. In being avoidant, you unintentionally confirm your partner’s worst insecurities, fears and anxieties.
Are You Stuck In A Painful Cycle of Conflict That Feeds Itself?
Together, this pairing creates a loop that feels impossible to break. The more the anxious partner reaches for connection, the more the avoidant partner withdraws. To add, the more the avoidant partner pulls away, the more the anxious partner panics, protests, and demands.
Both of you feel unseen. And, both of you feel unloved.
The fights start to feel less like arguments and more like emotional wars. If you’ve had this fight 100 times and nothing ever changes, you’re not alone—and you’re not broken. You’re stuck in an attachment cycle. To help you build meaningful connection, emotional intimacy, security, and truly bond, you need the help of an expert. Katie Ziskind uses Gottman marriage therapy, her complex trauma training, emotionally focused couples therapy, somatic yoga therapy for PTSD, and a variety of methods. She is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Did You Know That Your Childhood Shaped the Way You Love and Argue?
At Wisdom Within Counseling, our trauma therapists help couples on the brink of divorce understand that these patterns didn’t start in your marriage—they started in childhood.
You may be wondering, “How can my current conflict with my spouse be rooted in my childhood? What do these fights have to do with my childhood anyway?
Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, will help you both gain this awareness.
Perhaps your anxious partner had emotionally inconsistent or unavailable caregivers, leading them to overfunction in relationships. Or, as an avoidant person, you had parents who dismissed your feelings or punished vulnerability. This made you believe that you were unimportant, so you cope by shutting down.
These definitions of love were shaped long before you met. Through marriage and parenting, these inner wounds and unmet needs show up. And, now that they are they are showing up, these wounds are asking to be healed. As a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, you can come to believe that you and your partner can help heal each other’s traumas from childhood. The love that you have in your marriage becomes a resource for trauma recovery.
Katie Ziskind is a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles that cause high conflict fights and pain of the silent treatment.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Marriage Counseling that Heals the Root, Not Just the Surface
As a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy-informed professional, and Imago and emotionally focused therapy trained clinician, Katie Ziskind specializes in guiding couples through the pain of their patterns to the heart of secure connection.
She won’t just help you fight better—she will help you understand each other’s emotional world.
You’ll learn to identify your triggers, slow down the fight, and name the vulnerable feelings underneath.
In couples therapy for trauma, you’ll discover how to express your needs without blame or shutdown, and how to repair the painful ruptures between you.
We’ll work on rebuilding trust. Couples therapy is about reconnecting emotionally, and creating a safe, secure couple bubble. You both get to feel heard, valued, and emotionally safe.
Is Your Marriage Worth Fighting For?
Yes, it is! If your wife has asked for a divorce, but is still open to counseling, this is your moment. It’s not too late. You may feel lost, but your willingness to try shows there is still hope.
With marriage counseling, you don’t have to keep living in disconnection, resentment, or silence. You can stop walking on eggshells. From couples counseling for trauma, you can have deeper conversations, a richer emotional connection, and even a renewed physical intimacy that doesn’t feel like a chore or battle.
The Invitation
Let’s stop the cycle of blame and silence and learn how to turn toward each other, not away.
If you’re tired of the same argument, marriage counseling for PTSD and trauma is available. You no longer need to deal with distance, or the hopelessness after fights. If you are feeling like roommates or enemies, Katie Ziskind specializes here. This doesn’t have to be the end.
With the right support from Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, this is a new beginning.
Are You Ready to Begin Learning About Your Anxious and Avoidant Attachment Styles?
Take the first step. Book your marriage counseling session to work with Katie Ziskind. We’ll send you a questionnaire to fill out about yourself.
Let’s rebuild the bridge between you and your spouse. You have professional guidance and expertise with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist, specializing in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling specializes in how anxious and avoidant attachment styles cause couples to clash.
She teaches couples on the brink of divorce and separation skills for true intimacy, security, and emotional healing.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
What are sign my spouse has an anxious attachment style that is causing a need for marriage counseling for trauma cycles?
If you often feel like your partner is too much—too emotional, too needy, too reactive—it’s possible they have an anxious attachment style.
You may notice that they text you multiple times when you’re out, want constant reassurance, or get upset when you don’t respond right away.
They may ask questions like, “Do you still love me?” or “Why didn’t you hug me today?”
While you might feel overwhelmed or irritated, there is a logging for safety. Beneath the intensity is a deep desire to feel close, safe, and emotionally secure together.
Your anxiously attached partner fears abandonment—sometimes consciously, often unconsciously.
They may have grown up in an unpredictable household, where love felt inconsistent or came with strings attached.
Maybe they had a parent who left, emotionally or physically, or they were only shown affection when they earned it.
As a result, they may be hyper-attuned to changes in your tone, body language, or mood. Even a neutral response from you might feel like rejection to them. When they don’t feel close to you, they panic inside.
With an anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style dynamic, your partner’s anxiety often triggers your need to pull away. They get louder, and you get quieter.
Your spouse leans in, and you back off. It’s not because you don’t care. It’s because you feel smothered.
They’re begging for connection, and you’re desperately trying to protect your emotional space. But neither of you is truly getting your needs met. You both end up feeling misunderstood, hurt, and stuck in painful fight cycles.
Working with Katie Ziskind, a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, Imago therapy trained, and emotionally focused couples therapy expert, can help you both see what’s really going on beneath the surface.
Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, creates a space where you stop fighting each other. In marriage counseling, you can start fighting for your connection. You’ll both gain tools to slow down your reactions, communicate more openly, and express your needs without fear or shame.
Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, will help your partner understand their anxious attachment wounds. Understanding is about removing criticism and blame. Understanding each other’s childhood gives you both insight into why you both feel so desperate for closeness and validation.
Your anxiously attached partner will learn how to self-soothe. Counseling help an anxious spouse express their needs calmly, and build confidence in their worth without depending entirely on your reassurance. And, as an avoidantly attached person, you’ll learn how to stay emotionally present even when you want to withdraw.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind, trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, helps couples build closeness, security, and playfulness.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
In emotionally focused couples therapy, Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, helps you recognize how your nervous systems are reacting to old childhood pain.
Does your partner’s or wife’s anxiety quickly turned into anger? When you see that your partner or wife is yelling and angry, do you feel like withdrawing and being avoidant? Understanding this domino effect is part of working with a trauma trained couples therapist who understands and specializes in attachment styles.
Furthermore, your partner’s fear comes out as anger. But, this fear of abandonment is likely rooted in feeling unseen or unloved as a child.
And, your avoidant responses are likely tied to feeling overwhelmed, controlled, or emotionally suffocated. You’ll start seeing each other not as enemies, but as two people protecting old wounds. That’s where healing with a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles begins.
Together, you’ll learn how to create emotional safety.
You’ll practice being vulnerable. For instance, expressing fears like “I’m scared you’ll leave.” Or, “I don’t know how to get close without losing myself.”
As well, you’ll shift from blaming to bonding. And slowly, the emotional walls will come down. Instead of being stuck in reactive cycles, you’ll co-create a relationship where both your needs can exist side-by-side.
As well, Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, will also introduce Gottman marriage skills.
Gottman skills to improve your emotional communication, rebuild trust, and turn toward each other rather than away.
With Imago techniques, you’ll explore how your past is showing up in your present.
And, with her trauma-informed sex therapy lens, you’ll reconnect not just emotionally, but physically. In couples therapy, you can learn how emotional safety leads to deeper, more fulfilling intimacy.
If you’re exhausted from trying to fix this on your own, you are in the right place. Or, if you’ve hit a wall in your marriage, start at Wisdom Within Counseling today. And, if your partner’s anxious reactions only seem to push you further away, this is your sign to start in counseling.
You don’t have to keep repeating the same painful pattern. At Wisdom Within Counseling, you get to work with a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Katie Ziskind specializes in helping couples like you—those with an anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style—moving couples in counseling from crisis to connection.
You deserve a relationship where you both feel seen, heard, and safe. With Katie Ziskind’s expert guidance, you can learn how to stop triggering each other and start healing together.
You’re on the brink of divorce and just desperate to understand each other again. Holistic couples therapy with Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, is the lifeline your relationship needs.
She is a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Book your couples therapy session online and take the first step toward the connection you’ve both been craving.
Does your spouse have an anxious attachment style, and how does your avoidant attachment style cause fights and emotional distance?
When your partner has an anxious attachment style, and you lean toward avoidant behaviors, it can feel like you’re caught in a painful loop you don’t know how to get out of.
Every time she reaches for you, you pull back. Emotionally, physically, or verbally, you feel overwhelmed. You shut down, or like you’re being attacked. This is the avoidant attachment style.
So, you pull away to find peace. But that pulling away? It’s exactly what triggers her worst fear: abandonment.
That fear makes her louder, more emotional, more desperate to be heard—and the trauma fight cycle repeats.
Katie Ziskind teaches couples how to be sensitive and gentle with each other. Couples in therapy after trauma cycles learn how to attune and be playful with each other. Learning these emotional bonding skills support deep intimacy. Rather than re-trigger each other’s worst fears, you learn to validate each other’s emotions.
Your spouse’s anxious attachment style comes from a past where emotional presence from a parent was unpredictable or conditional.
Maybe, for her, love felt like it had to be earned, and security was never a guarantee.
So now, even as an adult, she fights for closeness with you. When you go quiet, walk out of the room, or emotionally detach, her nervous system goes into panic mode.
It’s not that she’s trying to criticize or control you—she’s trying to feel safe. And, your silence feels like rejection to her. The pain of her childhood all over again. Making her believe she is unworthy of love, and to blame for all the abandonment she has experienced.
On the other hand, your avoidant style didn’t appear out of nowhere either.
You probably grew up in an environment where emotions were too intense, too ignored, or even unsafe. As well, you learned to self-soothe by shutting down, going inward, or focusing on tasks instead of feelings. You are a perfectionist and preform well at work.
So now, when your wife’s anxious emotions run high, you don’t know what to do. You need expert guidance. And, you feel like you currently protect yourself by withdrawing. But even as you pull away, part of you longs to feel safe in connection too. You’ve just never been taught how. Especially by narcissistic, emotionally avoidant parents. Katie Ziskind, trauma couples counselor, teaches you how to truly connect and validate.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
This dynamic—her pursuing, you withdrawing—is painful for both of you.
She feels like she’s begging for love. You feel like you can never get it right. She needs reassurance, and you need space. But what if you could both get what you need? Couples therapy helps you do so, not by fighting. But, by learning how to co-create safety, understanding, and playfulness again.
In couples therapy with Katie Ziskind, a trauma-informed relationship specialist, you’ll learn how to break this cycle.
Katie Ziskind helps couples uncover the deep emotional wounds underneath the fight. This is not about the content of the arguments, but the root feelings driving them.
You’ll learn how your body responds to stress and how your nervous systems are trying to protect you. And, couples counseling helps you learn how you can start responding to each other from a place of security, not fear.
Katie Ziskind’s approach blends Gottman tools, emotionally focused couples therapy, and Imago communication to teach you how to really hear each other.
You’ll practice slowing down, naming your emotions, and reconnecting even when you’re hurt. With Katie Ziskind, trauma couples therapist and C-PTSD specialist, you’ll both learn how to recognize the moment the fight starts. And, instead of letting it escalate, you’ll have communication tools to pause, reflect, and reach for each other in a healthier way.
She will help you build emotional intimacy. Emotional closeness is the kind of intimacy that feels safe and connected without pressure.
You’ll explore where your love languages came from, what safety looks like to each of you, and how to bring back moments of shared laughter. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. She helps you both experience presence, lightness, and joy—even in your relationship that’s been in pain for a long time.
Emotional intimacy doesn’t have to feel scary or forced. With expert guidance, it can become the doorway to the secure connection you’ve both craved for years.
Katie Ziskind also teaches couples to co-regulate, which means learning how to calm each other down instead of triggering each other.
Imagine being able to say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed,” and having your partner respond with comfort, not conflict.
Or, “I feel like you’re pulling away and it scares me,” and instead of defending yourself, you can lean in with empathy.
These skills don’t come naturally—but they can be learned. When you had parents who were narcissistic or abusive, they never taught you these.
Working with Katie Ziskind, you’ll both start to understand how your childhood wounds shaped your adult love story. And, you can learn how you can begin to write a new one.
A love that doesn’t feel like survival – A marriage where you don’t have to walk on eggshells. And, a bond where you can play, flirt, laugh, and reconnect—not out of desperation, but out of real trust.
If your relationship feels like a tug-of-war between closeness and distance, know that you’re not broken—you’re just stuck in a pattern that once served to protect you, but now keeps you apart.
Couples therapy with Katie Ziskind can help you create the emotional safety to let your guard down. From marriage counseling for trauma, you can show up as your authentic selves, and build the lasting connection your heart has been craving all along.
What are signs I have an avoidant attachment style that triggers my spouse’s anxious attachment style?
Does your spouse tell you that they hate it when you avoid conflict? Do you pretend nothing is wrong? Finding yourself walking away when your spouse is getting louder and louder?
If you often feel the urge to pull away during arguments, shut down emotionally, or keep your true thoughts and feelings to yourself to avoid making things worse, you have an avoidant attachment style.
You feel overwhelmed by your partner’s intensity, especially when she’s expressing strong emotions like anger, anxiety, or sadness.
If your wife gets louder and yells when she’s upset and pushes hard to connect, you may feel like retreating is the only way to survive the moment.
You’re not doing it to hurt her—you’re trying to protect yourself. But, it causes more hurt and rejection for her. You feel inadequate. Triggering your deepest insecurities, for one, being a failure. Katie Ziskind, Gottman level two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, imago therapy trained, emotionally focused couples therapy trained, specializes with couples in this crisis.
Avoidant attachment often stems from childhood environments where emotional expression wasn’t safe, welcomed, or modeled.
Maybe you were raised to “be strong,” “suck it up,” or not cause trouble. You may have learned to internalize emotions and become hyper-independent because no one really knew how to meet your emotional needs.
So now, when your wife demands connection or shows big emotions, it feels like too much. You get flooded, your body tenses, and the walls go up.
You might pride yourself on being logical, calm, and level-headed during conflict—but underneath that calm is fear.
As well, you’re afraid of getting it wrong, being misunderstood, or having a small misstep lead to a blow-up.
You fear saying something that makes things worse or triggers your wife’s pain.
And, because her communication style might involve yelling or intense emotion, you feel unsafe being vulnerable. So you say nothing, hoping the storm will pass. You give the silent treatment.
But from her side, your silence feels like abandonment. Your withdrawal and avoidance triggers her anxious attachment. Anxiety is rooted in a fear of being left, not prioritized, or unloved.
She gets louder to get your attention, and you pull back to protect your peace.
This creates a painful loop that leaves both of you feeling hurt, unheard, and alone. It’s a classic anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style dynamic—and it’s deeply frustrating for both of you.
Emotionally, avoidant attachment can feel like you’re always walking on eggshells.
You might constantly try to “keep the peace” by avoiding certain topics. As well, you feel tired from managing everyone’s emotions. And, you have a tendency to stay agreeable even when you feel misunderstood.
But all this peacekeeping comes at a cost—you begin to lose your voice. You feel inadequate, emotionally shut down, or like you can never truly win. Over time, this builds resentment and distance in your marriage.
Working with Katie Ziskind, a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, Imago therapy trained, and emotionally focused couples therapist, you get the tools to break free from this painful pattern.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Also, Katie Ziskind specializes in helping couples just like you—where one partner is anxiously attached and the other avoidant—rebuild safety, connection, and understanding in the relationship.
Katie Ziskind is a Gottman level two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, imago therapy trained, emotionally focused couples therapy trained. She can help you begin to understand why you shut down. And, she teaches you how to re-engage in a way that feels safe.
You’ll learn how your nervous system is trying to protect you, and how to speak from a place of vulnerability rather than defensiveness.
She’ll also help your anxious wife understand that when you pull away, it’s not rejection. It’s fear, inadequacy, and emotional overwhelm. This mutual understanding begins to heal the fight cycle.
Through emotionally focused couples therapy, Katie Ziskind will guide you and your wife to uncover the childhood wounds that are playing out in your marriage today.
She’ll help you express your fear of conflict and being “not enough,” and support your wife in expressing her fear of abandonment in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, helps couples be gentle with each other.
You’ll begin to move from reactivity to empathy—seeing each other’s pain instead of just the surface behaviors.
With Imago therapy, Katie Ziskind, Gottman level two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, imago therapy trained, emotionally focused couples therapy trained will help you reflect each other’s feelings with compassion and clarity.
You’ll begin to feel heard, even during hard conversations. And with the Gottman approach, you’ll gain practical skills to de-escalate arguments, repair quickly, and create rituals of connection that rebuild trust.
From couples therapy for trauma, you’ll no longer be stuck in the pursuer-distancer trap. You’ll find new ways to turn toward each other with tenderness.
If you’re tired of shutting down, couples therapy builds emotional connection. And, if you are tired of feeling like you’re failing your marriage, marriage therapy helps you co-create peace, connection, and safety. Holistic, somatic couples therapy for trauma is your path forward.
The anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style cycle doesn’t have to define your future. You need the help of a professional and specialist.
With Katie Ziskind’s expert guidance, you and your wife can finally feel secure in each other’s arms—not through perfection, but through understanding, vulnerability, and love.
How does an avoidant attachment style develop for someone like you?
When you grow up with narcissistic parents, your emotional world often feels unsafe, unpredictable, and filled with pressure to perform or please. Did you get praise only when you did well on a test or performed well? Was love unsafe because your explosive, angry father might “lose it?”
As a child, you may have learned that your feelings didn’t matter—what mattered was keeping your parent happy, not rocking the boat, and staying small.
You probably got love and attention only when you achieved, acted perfectly, or suppressed your own needs.
Over time, you learned the safest way to survive was to not need too much, not feel too much, and to stay in control.
This is how your avoidant attachment style began to form.
Emotionally, life felt lonely as a child. You walked on eggshells, and experienced your own trauma, leading to your avoidant attachment style.
You were surrounded by people, but no one truly saw you.
Sensing that your parent’s love was conditional, you were quiet, helpful, and successful.
A big part of you was withdrawn though. You never could express sadness, anger, or confusion to your parents. It wasn’t acceptable to be weak.
To protect yourself, you likely pushed down those big, vulnerable emotions and built a shell of self-sufficiency. You became the child who didn’t ask for much. The one who held it together, and who learned to count only on yourself.
That shell helped you survive childhood trauma—but it also taught you that closeness equals danger. Fights in your marriage are about closeness.
So now, as an adult, when your partner wants emotional intimacy, affection, or deep conversation, it feels threatening. It’s not that you don’t love your partner. Really, it’s that your nervous system has been wired to see intimacy as overwhelming or even unsafe.
You might find yourself shutting down, becoming silent, changing the subject, or walking away. To note, these behaviors of yours make fights worse, and esclate. These are the same survival tools that protected you back then—but now they create distance in your marriage.
If your partner has an anxious attachment style, your avoidant tendencies are especially triggering for them.
Your silence makes your wife yell louder – your withdrawal makes your spouse chase.
Their desire for closeness can feel like suffocation to you, even though they’re just trying to feel loved.
This painful dance—anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style—creates emotional fights that spiral. You both end up feeling lonely, unloved, and hopeless, even though you desperately want to connect.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
This is where emotionally focused couples therapy with Katie Ziskind can completely shift your relationship.
Katie Ziskind helps you understand that you’re not broken or cold—you’re protecting the child inside you who had to be strong to survive. She creates a non-judgmental space where you can finally unpack the wounds from your childhood, the trauma of being unseen, and the beliefs you internalized about love, worth, and intimacy.
Working with Katie Ziskind, you’ll learn to recognize the exact moment you shut down—and instead of disappearing emotionally, you’ll begin to practice staying present. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. She helps couples bond, develop emotional intimacy, and understand each other’s deeper needs for security.
You’ll have tools to slow your body down, name your fears, and move toward your partner with honesty and self-compassion.
From marriage counseling for trauma, you’ll begin to say things like, “I’m overwhelmed right now.” Or, “This closeness is hard for me, but I want to try.”
These are healthy communication statements that open the door to intimacy instead of slamming it shut.
Katie Ziskind will also help you rewire your nervous system, so intimacy no longer feels threatening.
Through emotionally focused couples therapy, you’ll begin to associate connection with safety, not danger.
You’ll explore what healthy vulnerability feels like. Not the kind where you’re blamed, guilt-tripped, exposed or humiliated like you may have been as a child.
But, you can co-create healthy love together. The kind where you’re seen, accepted, and loved for who you are. You’ll feel less guarded, less reactive, and more emotionally available to your partner.
As your emotional safety grows, you’ll discover that you no longer have to avoid closeness to stay safe.
You’ll start taking emotional risks—sharing feelings, asking for comfort, and showing affection. This change occurs because you’ll finally believe that your needs matter, too. And your marriage will become a place of security, not pressure.
With Katie Ziskind’s trauma-informed approach to marriage counseling, you’ll also learn how to communicate in a way that breaks your old cycle.
She’ll teach you and your partner how to co-create emotional intimacy that feels good for both anxious and avoidant styles.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, you’ll practice deep listening. Couples in therapy gain skills for repair after fights, and small moments of connection that build trust over time. These tools aren’t about perfection—they’re about presence, empathy, and healing.
If you’re tired of of carrying the weight of your past into your marriage, start in counseling today. Marriage therapy with Katie Ziskind rewrites your love story.
You can learn how to soften the armor you had to wear as a child. At Wisdom Within Counseling, you can learn how to meet your partner in the middle.
And, couples therapy helps you learn how to create a relationship that honors both of your attachment needs. Instead of conflict, your anxious and the avoidant attachment styles evolve into a secure bond.
Healing frustrating cycles of conflict is possible with Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Healing Childhood Trauma in Marriage Counseling For Trauma Bonds
If you and your partner are stuck in painful, high-conflict fights, you are in the right place. Or, you feel like you’re living more as roommates than romantic partners.
Many angry, hurt couples in crisis who come to me at Wisdom Within Counseling are on the brink of divorce.
You may be tired, overwhelmed, and unsure how you even got to this place.
How Does Couples Therapy with Katie Ziskind Can Help You Break the Fight Cycle and Reconnect?
What most couples don’t realize is that these conflict patterns didn’t start in your marriage—they began in childhood. We start with the roots, to then build meaningful connection in your marriage.
If you grew up in a home with emotional neglect, narcissistic or alcoholic parents, or survived childhood trauma or sexual abuse, your brain and nervous system were shaped by survival.
Without realizing it, you may be over using alcohol or have developed alcoholism yourself. You might be following in the footsteps of your alcoholic parents and repeating generational patterns. By talking about your childhood in therapy, you can connect with the emotional side of yourself. Couples therapy helps you decide what patterns you want to bring into your next generation. You get to be even better parents from couples counseling.
From growing up with angry, anxious, or alcoholic parents, you both may have developed what’s known as an anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment style to protect yourself emotionally. These strategies worked when you were a child, but now they’re sabotaging your adult relationship. People who are anxiously attached typically find and couple up with people who are avoidantly attached.
Some people have a blend of both anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, complicating fights more.
Anxious attachment often shows up as emotional intensity.
To note, there is fear abandonment, crave reassurance, and feel triggered when your partner pulls away or gets quiet. You might find yourself needing to talk things through right away, even if your partner isn’t ready. This urgency comes from a deep place of wanting to feel safe, seen, and not left behind.
On the other side, avoidant attachment often stems from childhood environments where you had to suppress your feelings, stay strong, and keep your emotional world to yourself.
If this is you, you may shut down during conflict, avoid difficult conversations, or feel overwhelmed when your partner comes at you with big emotions.
You’re not cold or uncaring—you’re trying to keep the peace and avoid further hurt.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
In marriages where one partner has an anxious attachment and the other has an avoidant attachment style, these old protective behaviors create a painful loop.
The more one of you pushes for closeness, the more the other pulls away. This triggering cycle builds resentment, emotional exhaustion, and hopelessness—leaving both of you feeling lonely and misunderstood, even though you’re desperate to reconnect.
This is exactly where Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, specializes. Katie Ziskind is a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, Imago therapy trained, certified sex therapy informed professional, and emotionally focused couples therapy specialist.
She works with couples in crisis—those who’ve said “I’m done,” but still have a glimmer of hope that things can change.
In therapy sessions, Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, helps you and your partner understand how your childhood shaped the way you give and receive love today.
Through emotionally focused therapy, Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, guides you to identify what’s really happening underneath the fights. For instance, the fear of being abandoned shows up in fights. The pain of feeling not good enough arises all over again. Or, panic comes up when your partner is pulling away. These deeper emotions often go unspoken but drive the marital disconnection.
Together, in marriage therapy for trauma, you create a roadmap for building a secure attachment.
Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, teaches you how to slow down your rate of speech. This way, your partner can hear your needs better and more effectively. We talk about tone of voice. Couples don’t realize when they are being critical or snappy, or too direct. And, you gain skills to co-regulate your nervous systems during conflict. Marriage counseling helps you learn how to safely express vulnerable emotions.
Using techniques from Imago therapy, Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, helps you reflect. You gain validation skills in marriage counseling. And, you can empathize with one another in a way that makes each person feel truly heard—maybe for the first time in years.
With her sex therapy-informed training, Katie Ziskind, trauma specialist and marriage therapist, also supports couples in rebuilding emotional and physical intimacy after betrayal, distance, or years of disconnect.
You’ll learn how to cultivate presence, safety, and emotional attunement that restores not just your sex life, but your sense of emotional partnership.
If you’re ready to stop living in constant crisis mode and start rebuilding your marriage from the inside out, therapy at Wisdom Within Counseling can be your turning point. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
You don’t have to stay stuck in the anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style dynamic. Healing the roots of trauma and conflict is possible—together.
Your Childhood Isn’t in the Past if It’s Still Showing Up in Your Relationship
You’re tired. Tired of walking on eggshells. Exhausted of arguments that go nowhere. Tired of wondering how a relationship that once felt so connected, so alive, has turned into a battleground of miscommunication, loneliness, and deep emotional pain.
And maybe, in your quietest moments, you’ve wondered if it’s already too late.
But what if what’s broken in your relationship isn’t you or your partner?
What if what’s broken is the old blueprint you were handed—through no fault of your own—by parents, caregivers, or a traumatic childhood?
As a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, Katie Ziskind knows there’s a reason your marriage feels so hard. And, it has more to do with your unconscious emotional programming than anything else.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
How Does Childhood Trauma Create Attachment Wounds in Adulthood?
If you were raised in a home where emotions were dangerous, unpredictable, or punished, calm, secure love is unfamiliar. You likely never learned what a healthy emotional bond feels like. As well, love came with conditions growing up. You got love only when you achieved, stayed quiet, or took care of others. Now, you may now associate love with anxiety, guilt, or pressure.
Perhaps, one or both of your parents struggled with rage and alcoholism. Or, your mother was emotionally volatile, or your father was distant and cold.
Maybe you were “parentified.” This means that you were expected to be the adult, the fixer, the one who held everything together. And, all while no one asked how you felt.
This is how the anxious attachment style is born:
You may now panic when you feel emotional distance from your partner. With an anxious attachment styles, you may become hyper-vigilant, constantly reading between the lines, or spiraling in thoughts of rejection. You feel things so deeply and sometimes wonder why your partner doesn’t respond with the same urgency. To note, you aren’t “too much.” You’re longing for the kind of reassurance from your spouse you never received as a child.
Is your attachment style avoidant?
You had to shut down your feelings just to survive.
Maybe you were mocked for crying, told to “man up,” or punished for being vulnerable. You learned early that needing others was dangerous. So now, when your spouse expresses emotion, it feels overwhelming. You shut down, pull away, or try to fix things instead of feeling them. As well, you love deeply—but expressing that love feels foreign, unsafe, and overwhelming.
These two styles—anxious and avoidant—often find each other in marriage.
One partner gets louder, needing closeness. The other gets quieter, needing space. You trigger each other without meaning to – you’re both hurting. And you both feel deeply misunderstood.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Religious Trauma, Sexual Abuse, and Emotional Neglect Leave Invisible Scars
Childhood trauma isn’t just about the dramatic or obvious events. It’s also about the pain you never got seen for.
Maybe you were raised in a religious environment that filled you with shame around sex or pleasure.
Or, you were told that your body was sinful, your desires were wrong, or that obedience mattered more than your emotional truth. Now, intimacy feels complicated—or even guilt-ridden.
Perhaps you experienced sexual abuse—whether direct or non-contact.
Maybe someone stared at your body. Or, sexual trauma be someone commenting on your butt, penis size, breasts, or sexual appearance. As well, maybe, someone invaded your space or body in ways that made you feel gross or unsafe. These moments matter. They imprint. And they show up in adult intimacy, whether you want them to or not.
Even if your childhood “looked normal,” you may have endured emotional neglect.
Maybe no one ever asked how you were doing. Or, your family didn’t believe in therapy, feelings, or softness.
As well, you were bullied by a sibling or cousin, constantly made to feel less-than. Or, humiliated, and not allowed to be yourself or have a voice.
That kind of chronic invalidation wires your nervous system to distrust closeness, brace for rejection, or chase approval.
When You Don’t Heal Childhood Wounds, They Hijack Your Marriage
When childhood trauma goes unhealed, it doesn’t just go away. It lives on in your body and your nervous system. Trauma shows up in your relationship dynamics. You might say things you don’t mean during fights.
Or freeze up when you need to talk about feelings. You might find yourself stuck in painful cycles: one of you pushing, the other pulling away.
This is the trauma trap of the anxious attachment and avoidant attachment style cycle.
One of you fears abandonment, the other fears engulfment. One of you gets louder, the other goes silent. As well, one wants to talk about everything; the other wants to hide. And the more you try to fix it, the more misunderstood and alone you both feel. These fight cycles don’t mean you’re incompatible.
They mean you’re wounded—and your wounds are colliding. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
How Working with Katie Ziskind Helps You Break Free
For one, Katie Ziskind is the owner of Wisdom Within Counseling, a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, Imago therapy trained, and emotionally focused couples therapy specialist.
Katie Ziskind helps couples who feel like they’re at the end of the road—those in crisis, contemplating divorce, or stuck in painful high-conflict patterns.
She specializes in working with childhood trauma, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, and attachment wounds. In therapy, you’ll never be blamed or shamed. Instead, she helps you both understand how your pasts have shaped your present and what tools you need to create a new future—together.
Using emotionally focused couples therapy, we get underneath the surface of the fight to the raw, real feelings underneath.
Using Imago therapy, you explore how your partner is often mirroring what you most needed to heal in childhood. And using sex therapy-informed work, you rebuild physical intimacy from a place of emotional trust.
You deserve a secure, nourishing love and Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, gets you there
No matter how bad things feel right now, there’s hope. Healing your marriage bond is possible. You can learn to feel safe again—in your body, in your relationship, and in love.
As a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, Katie Ziskind guides you step by step to stop the conflict.
You gain skills to reconnect emotionally after trauma. And, in couples therapy, you can co-create the safety and emotional intimacy you both long for—but never learned how to build.
She wants you to know that your marriage is not beyond repair. But healing won’t come from ignoring the pain. It starts by facing it—together, with compassion.
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
In couples therapy, Katie Ziskind helps you and your partner identify how these painful past experiences are playing out in your marriage.
If you have an anxious attachment style, you may feel easily triggered, abandoned, or terrified of emotional distance. Or, if your partner has an avoidant attachment style, they might withdraw, shut down, or struggle to express their needs.
When both styles clash, you fall into the same fight over and over—feeling stuck, lonely, and hurt.
Katie Ziskind is a Gottman Level Two trained marriage therapist, certified sex therapy informed professional, Imago therapy trained, and emotionally focused couples therapy specialist.
She specializes in helping couples who are in deep crisis—but not ready to give up.
In marriage therapy work together, you explore the root of your emotional reactions, not just the surface behaviors.
She creates a space where you can safely process your childhood trauma while learning how to show up differently in your relationship. Katie Ziskind helps you and your partner understand your nervous systems, develop co-regulation tools, and build new patterns of emotional safety and trust.
As a trauma focused couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, she guides you both back to connection.
Katie Ziskind helps you learn to speak to one another’s deeper needs, instead of reacting from fear. Together, we turn your marriage into a secure base where both of you feel valued, heard, and emotionally safe.
If you’re ready to break out of the same painful loop, heal old wounds, and create a relationship that feels nourishing instead of draining, let’s do it together.
If you’re ready to do the deep work and save your relationship from the inside out, book a couples therapy session at Wisdom Within Counseling. Healing begins with one brave step.
When you’re caught in painful patterns of yelling, silent treatment, or constant misunderstandings, it can feel like there’s no way out.
You might feel like your partner never hears you, or that everything you say gets twisted. You’re trying to connect—but the more you try, the more disconnected you both feel. If this sounds familiar, working with a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles can help you break the cycle and rebuild trust.
You may be stuck in the anxious-avoidant dance.
One of you craves closeness and reassurance, often through intense emotion or confrontation. The other pulls away, needing space, shutting down to avoid further hurt. The result?
A heartbreaking loop of emotional abandonment, misunderstanding, and fear.
But here’s what you may not realize yet: this pattern isn’t just about what’s happening today. It’s deeply rooted in your past. A trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles will gently help you uncover the connection between your present struggles and your childhood wounds.
In couples therapy sessions, you’ll begin to understand how your early experiences with emotional neglect, abandonment, rejection, or enmeshment shaped how you now give and receive love.
Maybe you learned to yell or get angry because your emotions were ignored growing up. Maybe you learned to shut down because expressing feelings led to punishment or ridicule. A skilled therapist helps you and your partner trace these patterns back to their origins—without blame, without shame. With compassion, you begin to see each other’s pain instead of just the surface behavior.
You’ll learn specific tools to replace yelling, stonewalling, and disconnect with validation, curiosity, and emotional safety.
Katie Ziskind, a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles will help you slow down conflict.
In marriage therapy, you learn to identify your primary emotions (like fear, shame, or rejection), and teach you how to express them in a way your partner can hear.
Instead of saying, “You never care about me!” you’ll learn to say, “I feel scared when I can’t reach you. I need to know you’re here.”
To begin, click below to book with Katie Ziskind, trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
Together, you’ll practice new communication techniques like reflective listening, validation, and emotional check-ins.
You’ll learn how to pause when triggered, how to regulate your nervous systems during conflict, and how to recognize when you’ve entered a trauma response (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn). These are not just surface-level tips—they’re deep, lasting skills that transform how you relate to each other. With each session, you’ll begin to notice the shift from reactivity to connection.
This kind of trauma marriage therapy doesn’t just patch things up—it rebuilds from the foundation.
Your trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles will help you repair ruptures with deep empathy. In trauma marriage therapy, you create rituals for connection, and establish a secure emotional bond that wasn’t modeled for you growing up.
It’s like learning a new language of love, one rooted in emotional safety and mutual understanding.
Over time, you’ll begin to notice that the fights become less intense. The silent treatments become shorter.
You feel more emotionally attuned to each other.
When your partner is hurting, instead of turning away, you’ll know how to turn toward. You’ll each begin to feel seen, known, and safe. Not because you’ve changed who you are. Marriage therapy for PTSD helps you learn how to love each other in the ways you both truly need.
Katie Ziskind, a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles will also help you create rituals of emotional intimacy.
For instance, scheduling time to talk about your inner world, checking in before bed, or holding each other during emotional moments.
You’ll learn that emotional closeness doesn’t have to feel threatening or overwhelming—it can actually feel grounding and healing.
Most importantly, you’ll stop feeling like enemies in your marriage and start remembering that you’re partners.
Allies.
A strong, loving team.
You’ll rebuild a marriage where you can lean on each other, speak your truth without fear, and finally experience the kind of love you’ve always wanted—but never knew how to create.
If you’ve been stuck in painful, repetitive patterns and are ready to make a real change, working with a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles may be the lifeline your relationship needs. Katie Ziskind would love to support you in building a stronger couple bubble.
Are you ready to stop the cycle and start healing together? Reach out today. Your marriage story is not over.
If you’re a man searching for real help in your relationship, especially with a partner who struggles with anxiety, PTSD, and complex trauma, you’re likely carrying a lot right now.
You may feel unsure of how to support her without getting overwhelmed yourself. Maybe your attempts to help only lead to conflict or emotional distance.
If she’s someone who finds peace in the garden, in the woods, or through holistic living, she may be especially sensitive—and your relationship needs an approach that honors both of your nervous systems, emotions, and healing journeys.
That’s where working with a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles like Katie Ziskind can truly help you both reconnect and feel safe again.
Your wife may be incredibly loving and caring, but when triggered, her trauma responses—like panic, shutting down, or emotional flooding—might take over.
She may become anxious, hypervigilant, or reactive. These patterns don’t mean she doesn’t love you. They mean she’s trying to protect herself based on what her nervous system has learned through painful life experiences.
You might not always know what to say or do, and that can leave you feeling inadequate or exhausted. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles who brings both clinical knowledge and a grounded, holistic presence to guide couples just like you.
You may find that when she’s overwhelmed, you instinctively pull away or try to “fix” things quickly, but this only makes her feel more alone.
If you’ve grown up learning to stay strong, Wisdom Within Counseling is here to help. Or, if you hold it together, or avoid conflict, let’s start with marriage therapy for trauma recovery. Your responses are unintentionally mirroring her early wounds of abandonment or emotional neglect. Trauma brains make us focus only on negative, fear based memories. Your wife’s anxiety makes her gets louder and more anxious, and you shuts down or withdraw.
Katie Ziskind helps you connect using verbal validation skills and recalling positive memories as well. For instance, a memory of when I felt that you are really there for me was when…
A memory of us I hold close to my heart is…
One thing that you say to me that makes me feel loved is…
Something I appreciate about you is…
A memory of when I felt really safe being vulnerable with you was…
I feel sexy and desired when you…
Katie Ziskind helps you break the anxious fight cycle through emotional communication. She stops you both when you’re caught in what’s known as the anxious-avoidant cycle.
A trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles can help you break free from this cycle with clarity, compassion, and real tools.
What makes Katie Ziskind unique is that she combines modern relationship science—like emotionally focused therapy and Gottman principles—with trauma-informed, holistic methods.
This means she doesn’t just work with your thoughts or behaviors—she helps regulate your nervous system, soothe trauma responses, and repair the emotional bond between you. She integrates nature-based mindfulness, breathwork, and somatic techniques that would resonate deeply with your wife’s love for gardening, hiking, and natural living. This creates a safe, healing space that speaks to both of your values.
With Katie Ziskind, you’ll explore how childhood trauma, attachment wounds, or previous betrayals have shaped your beliefs about love, closeness, and conflict.
She’ll help you understand how your avoidant tendencies, like withdrawing or staying quiet, aren’t wrong—they’re survival strategies you learned as a boy.
At the same time, she’ll help your wife understand how her anxiety and trauma responses are not personal flaws but reflections of deep pain. As a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, Katie Ziskind will help you both feel seen, validated, and less alone.
You’ll learn how to create rituals of connection that are aligned with your lifestyle—like walking together in nature, gardening side by side, or having calming evening check-ins.
Instead of avoiding hard conversations, you’ll learn how to gently move through them without escalation. You’ll rebuild trust, one emotionally safe moment at a time.
If your wife feels safer outdoors than she does in a therapist’s office, Katie Ziskind can meet her where she is emotionally and even suggest ways to bring nature-based healing into your relationship work.
If you’ve felt like the weight of your wife’s trauma is too much to carry, or if you’re tired of feeling like the only thing holding your marriage together is your ability to stay quiet or avoid conflict, you don’t have to stay stuck.
A trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles will teach you how to be emotionally present without losing yourself and how to create a bond that’s rooted in mutual understanding—not fear or defense.
There’s hope for your relationship. You’re not broken—you just need new tools, deeper understanding, and a healing roadmap. Katie Ziskind brings warmth, wisdom, and deep trauma expertise to help couples like you rebuild from the inside out. She’ll guide you to co-create a relationship where your wife feels emotionally safe, and where you feel appreciated, respected, and emotionally connected again.
If you’re looking for a therapist who honors holistic healing, who understands the effects of trauma, and who specializes in helping couples stuck in the painful push-pull dynamic of anxiety and avoidance, reach out today. Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, and she’s ready to help you both find your way back to each other—with heart, safety, and love.
In many marriages, the anxious-avoidant attachment cycle of frustration doesn’t just show up in emotional conflict — it plays out intimately in the bedroom, too.
When the wife is anxiously attached, she may crave emotional closeness and physical touch as reassurance of love, worthiness, and connection. She may feel rejected, unwanted, or unloved when her husband pulls away sexually, becomes disinterested, or rushes through foreplay.
On the other side, the avoidantly attached husband often feels overwhelmed by the pressure to “perform” or fears disappointing his partner. He may shut down sexually, become emotionally distant, or even avoid intimacy altogether to protect himself from feeling inadequate or controlled. This creates a painful cycle of misattunement and misunderstanding.
A trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles like Katie Ziskind can help you both understand how your unique attachment styles, shaped by childhood experiences, trauma, and unmet needs, are playing out in your sexual relationship.
For the anxiously attached wife, sex can become a place where she hopes to feel chosen, seen, and secure.
But, when her partner is emotionally or physically unavailable, it reinforces her fear of abandonment. For the avoidantly attached husband, sex may feel like an obligation or a trap, triggering a fear of being consumed, controlled, or never “good enough.”
Without awareness, this sexual disconnection leads to frustration, resentment, and painful fights. The wife may feel chronically rejected, and the husband may feel constantly criticized or pressured.
A trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles. Katie Ziskind helps you each name your underlying fears and unmet emotional needs that are showing up in the bedroom.
Katie Ziskind uses a body-based, emotionally focused approach to marriage counseling that helps you develop safe, non-judgmental communication around sexual needs and desires.
She helps the anxious partner learn to self-soothe, build secure inner grounding, and express sexual desires without fear of abandonment. At the same time, she helps the avoidant partner build capacity to stay present in intimacy.
Couples therapy gives you skills to feel safe building emotional and sexual vulnerability. Marriage counseling with Katie Ziskind helps you both understand that closeness doesn’t equal losing independence.
Through gentle, guided exercises, you’ll learn to co-create sexual intimacy that feels emotionally safe, playful, and mutually satisfying — not pressured, disconnected, or avoided.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind is a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles.
She can help your sex life become a place of healing rather than re-wounding or avoidance.
Over time, with support, the anxious partner learns not to chase love through sex, and the avoidant partner learns that intimacy can feel spacious, emotionally rewarding, and not overwhelming.
This shift opens the door to deeper sexual connection, more mutual pleasure, and a new understanding of erotic safety. As you rebuild emotional trust, your sexual connection becomes a reflection of the secure attachment you’re now creating together.
If sex has become a source of pain, distance, or shutdown in your marriage, know that you’re not alone.
These are classic symptoms of attachment styles clashing under stress. With guidance from a trauma trained couples therapist who specializes in anxious attachment and avoidant attachment styles, you can transform your physical intimacy from a battleground into a safe place for tenderness, pleasure, and reconnection.
Working with Katie Ziskind, you’ll learn that sexual healing is emotional healing — and when both partners are met with compassion, validation, and practical tools, it becomes possible to stop repeating the old cycles and start building a sexual relationship that is rooted in emotional security, respect, and shared joy.
