We recently connected with Adam Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Adam, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

One of the hardest couples to ever come to me was a young husband and wife expecting a child. She was pregnant and he was actively cheating on her. She wanted to fix their marriage and he wasn’t sure which woman he wanted to be with, her or his mistress.

The catch: They had never felt emotionally close to each other. Both of them jumped into this relationship to feel good. When they stopped feeling good, he strayed. Now she wanted to build their marriage to be better than it was before, and he didn’t believe better was possible.

In the first session I taught them what love is supposed to look like. Both were completely floored. They’d never had it spelled out so clearly, and they finally saw the goal they should have been aiming for. I taught them about attachment theory and how their ability to connect and trust had been broken in early childhood, and how we were going to fix that in their marriage. They were skeptical, but agreed to do the work.

It took 2 more sessions plus contact between sessions for them to learn how good it feels to give and receive real honesty and love with your spouse. Over the course of just 3 weeks they started fixing their attachment issues, opening up to each other deeper than they’d ever done with any other person, and learning to trust the other with vulnerability. Very quickly he realized his fling with the other woman was shallow and could never approach what he was building with his wife. And that allowed him to change internally so that he could show her he would never cheat again, allowing her to drop her guard enough to trust him again.

Two more sessions and the two of them were more in love than they’d ever been. They rededicated themselves not only to being honest and truthful, but in raising their child to start with secure attachment like they’d never known themselves. Having a working model for what family and marriage should look like set them both up to be ready to teach their child, and to build a life together that would show their child what to expect in love.

Adam, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Adam Lane Smith, the Attachment Specialist. I’ve spent 15 years studying and practicing Psychology and relationships to help people overcome their worst life challenges.

I grew up an anxious and insecure child. I craved approval, feared abandonment, and felt powerless in my own life. I faced my worst fears as a young man, and the relief was so huge that I dedicated my life to helping others do the same.

I started out training to be a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, first getting my masters degree and then apprenticing under other clinicians to gather a range of experiences and perspectives. After getting my license I worked in a clinic for at-risk families, helping resolve the worst traumas and divisions that could keep families apart. My solution-focused approach and knack for driving fast results earned me the reputation as the therapist other therapists sent their hardest clients to, when it seemed impossible. Over time, I specialized into severe trauma and attachment, and especially the way those two issues fit together.

But during my work, I discovered that most therapists lacked any training in attachment theory. Attachment theory is the belief that we learn in childhood how to connect with and trust others. This can get broken, and causes us to either fear abandonment or to run away from bonding to keep ourselves safe. Most therapists and other healthcare providers do not learn about this enough to help their patients fix the underlying issues that cause most mental health diagnoses.

Attachment issues is what had caused my insecurity as a child. I had fixed my own attachment, but it was such a hard experience that I wanted to make this the core of my professional focus. I wanted to help free others from the insecurity and fear I’d fixed in myself.

I began leading seminars and trainings not only for other healthcare providers but also for my followers on the internet. I published books on attachment issues and how to fix them, and people started posting about their amazing results from following my method. Other therapists around America and Canada wrote to me telling me they were using my book Slaying Your Fear to treat their patients in ways their schooling and licensure process hadn’t prepared them to do.

I reached a point where my online work offered opportunities to help hundreds of thousands of people, but that required me to end my license and switch to coaching instead of therapy. I made the change and have since gone on to help thousands of people across all my platforms and in personal coaching. My private community The Attachment Circle offers multiple group coaching events each week to a thriving collection of people who are fixing their attachment issues together and learning to trust again. And I’ve condensed my 15 years of training and experience into my Attachment Bootcamp video course to walk viewers through my proven method for learning to give and receive love.

My entire life is now focused on building secure attachment and better relationships for those around me. I coach clients and my private group, and I raise my four children with better attachment than I had as a child. I am most proud of the emails I get every day from past clients or from followers to tell me they felt life was hopeless before discovering my book or my coaching. And now they have hope and a pathway forward. Helping people find hope is the most rewarding part of this job, and getting their wedding photos after they learn to connect to others and meet the love of their life is a close second.

I love to help. I will talk to any human being about fixing their problems, regardless of politics or personal circumstances. And I’m ready to help everyone.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My training in mental health taught us two wrong lessons. One, to focus on diagnoses as the issue instead of seeing the attachment issues underneath. Two, that men need the same depression treatment women do.

Attachment issues create a belief that a person is all alone in the world and can never get any help. This causes massive chronic anxiety and separation from others. Over time, those two factors lead to the majority of other mental health diagnoses in the DSM. But most therapists are taught to the diagnoses to account for insurance and treatment models, not to the underlying attachment issues themselves. This is why most therapy follows the disease model and is meant to offer longterm management of symptoms versus resolution of the core problem.

As for male and female depression, in my 15 years of training and experience I have found most men feel depressed through helplessness and powerlessness. Male depression is nearly always a result of learned helplessness, but health providers treat it like female depression and try to make men feel loved instead of powerful. Men find therapy pointless because they don’t want to feel better, they want to regain power and control over their life and their pain. So they either avoid therapy or burn out when it feels like they won’t get better.

In my coaching now, I focus on resolving the core issues of attachment that keep a person stuck, and in helping men find purpose and power in their life. These two approaches often drive results where five or more previous therapists have failed a client.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Most coaches or therapists are afraid to be directive and teach a client exactly what to do. Part of this is training that says you can get sued for being wrong. But the mental health model in America also emphasizes the client as the expert. This is why so many therapists will ask, “What do you think you should do about this problem?” Clients don’t want this approach. Clients want results. They want to be guided to the answer, not left to figure it out for themselves.

I changed this approach early on to give clients answer, and also to explain why that answer was important. My clients learn what to do but also why, so they can begin generalizing those answers to similar circumstances. Over time this creates a more resilient client who does not need me long-term. This should be the goal of all providers so that our clients are not dependent lifelong on our services.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://adamlanesmith.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/attachmentadam/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdamLaneSmith
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheBrometheus
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBO093GsMmnA9tb8lZPhbgg
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@attachmentbro

Image Credits
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