What Happens to Our Attachment Patterns When We’re in a Group?

What happens to attachment patterns when therapy moves from a one-to-one relationship into a group?

In this episode of Attached Together, attachment-based psychotherapist and supervisor Georgina Sturmer is joined by psychotherapist, author and group facilitator Sarah Dosanjh, widely known as The Binge Eating Therapist.

Drawing on Sarah’s experience of running therapy groups, support groups, courses and workshops, they explore attachment in group therapy and the extraordinary amount that can become visible when people are relating not only to a therapist, but to one another.

Sarah describes the importance of creating a clear purpose for a group and preparing people for what participation will actually involve. She also shares one of the questions she asks new members: “Who are you in a group?”

It is a deceptively simple question.

People arrive in groups with a lifetime of experience of belonging, adapting, caregiving, staying quiet, taking up space, managing conflict and protecting themselves. For some of Sarah’s clients, people-pleasing and caregiving can create a warm and supportive group while also making it easier to focus on everyone else rather than themselves.

The conversation explores what makes a therapy group different from a support group, including Sarah’s repeated invitation to notice what is happening internally even while somebody else is speaking.

Georgina and Sarah also consider rupture and conflict, the therapist’s own reactions when tensions emerge, and the things that may remain unsaid when group members find disagreement difficult to tolerate.

They look at the particular experience of online groups, boundaries around contact outside the group, and why an emotionally intimate connection created within therapy does not necessarily translate easily into friendship elsewhere.

And then there are endings.

Sarah describes what can happen when somebody announces that they are leaving: the group member whose immediate thought is, “Was it me?”, the different ways people approach goodbye, and the therapist’s own attachment responses to departures.

There is also an unusually candid exploration of therapist fallibility. Sarah recalls making a comment to a group member that she intended as teasing but realised had landed with a bite. Rather than allowing the moment to disappear, she returned to it, acknowledged what had happened and invited the group to explore its impact.

The episode offers a thoughtful reminder that therapeutic safety does not require a therapist to become a perfect facilitator. Rupture, uncertainty, endings and mistakes can themselves become part of the work.

For therapists curious about starting a group, Sarah also shares practical observations from years of group work, from defining a clear niche and setting a start date to establishing boundaries and commitment.

Above all, the conversation explores why group therapy can offer something that individual therapy cannot quite replicate: attachment patterns unfolding between peers, in real time.

Optima Attachment Training:
https://www.optimaattachment.co.uk/

Listeners can access a CPD certificate and reflection pack for this episode here.