Prelude to “Attachment, Trauma, and Organisations”

In the almost fifteen years since I presented this article at The Bowlby Centre Open Forum, I have continued to be involved at The Bowlby Centre as a member, teacher, psychotherapist, and clinical supervisor. In addition, for the last five years I have been the CEO and a psychotherapist at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies (CDS UK) in London and have continued to be interested in the impact of working with abusively traumatised clients on the way that an organisation functions at all levels and the ways in which an attachment-based thinking and approaches can help with such challenges.

One area I have been interested to explore and understand further is the way in which the parallel process (Hora, 1957), originally considered in regard to the clinical supervision relationship, is unconsciously active in team and organisational relationships. As Philip Stokoe (2021), who has worked with CDS UK for many years as an organisational consultant has said to us, the unconscious material from our clients inevitably gets into and is enacted in the relational dynamics (feelings, expectations, and interactions) of individuals, teams, and the organisation and sometimes with other organisations working with us.

We work with people who have usually experienced terrorising, severe, and ongoing sexual and physical abuse throughout their childhood, often into adolescence and sometimes into adulthood. A significant number of the people we work with have had experiences of organised abuse and for some this abuse has been ritualised, often as a way of terrifying children, and has very significant power and control over them. All of the feelings (terror, hate, anger, sadness, etc.) and the relational positions (perpetrator, victim, survivor, rescuer, bystander, etc.) can not only be present in the therapeutic relationships but also find their way into the activities and interactions that take place in the organisation.

A further specific area that we aim to understand in o