Conference Agenda

Fear of death is a universal human experience, yet it is often avoided in psychotherapy. Clients rarely present with explicit death anxiety; instead, existential fears commonly emerge through health anxiety, separation anxiety, relational distress, or pervasive concerns about meaning or control. This presentation offers an attachment-informed framework for understanding how individuals experience and manage fear of death, and how therapy can respond more effectively to these concerns.

Drawing on attachment theory, terror management theory, and empirical research on mortality salience, this presentation outlines how attachment security provides a foundation for tolerating existential threat. Secure attachment is conceptualised as a source of "felt security" that allows individuals to regulate death-related anxiety through relational closeness, meaning, and care for others. In contrast, anxious and avoidant attachment patterns are shown to shape death fears in distinct ways. Anxiously attached individuals tend to experience heightened, conscious fear of death centred on abandonment and being forgotten, while avoidantly attached individuals often suppress conscious death anxiety but show elevated physiological and subconscious fear focused on loss of control.

Clinical implications are emphasised throughout. The presentation highlights how therapy can function as a secure base for exploring existential fears, normalising death anxiety, and supporting clients to draw on relational resources rather than defensive avoidance or escalation. Reflective practice is also addressed, inviting clinicians to consider their own attachment-based responses to mortality and how these shape therapeutic work.

This talk does not present original empirical data or novel theory, but offers a clinically grounded synthesis of existing research, providing practitioners with a clear, attachment-informed framework for working more directly and compassionately with fear of death.

Grief is a universal yet deeply personal experience shaped by individual, social, and cultural factors. The present study examines how attachment styles, coping mechanisms, and resilience impact both grief intensity and the ability to find meaning after a loss, within an Egyptian sample. While previous studies have explored the experience of grief, few have looked at these factors within a Middle Eastern cultural context. A total of 140 bereaved Egyptians who experienced the loss of a loved one within the past three years completed standardized measures assessing grief intensity (Prolonged Grief Disorder-Revised; PG-13-R), coping strategies (Brief COPE), meaning-making (Grief and Meaning Reconstruction Inventory; GMRI), resilience (Brief Resilience Scale; BRS), and attachment styles (Experiences in Close Relationships ScaleRevised; ECR-R). Results indicated that insecure attachment styles (i.e., anxious and avoidant attachment styles) and avoidant coping were associated with less adaptive meaning-making following a loss, while emotion-focused coping and resilience fostered greater meaning-making. Avoidant attachment, avoidant coping, and problem-focused coping were associated with higher grief intensity, whereas resilience served as a protective factor. Anxious attachment showed no correlation with grief intensity. Mediation analyses identified avoidant coping as a full mediator and resilience as a partial mediator between grief intensity and meaning-making. Contextual factors such as experiencing multiple losses in the past three years, degree of closeness to the deceased, and lack of support further exacerbated the struggle in finding meaning. These insights highlight the nuanced interplay between internal and external factors in shaping the experience of grief. These findings emphasize the need for culturally attuned grief interventions that address attachment patterns, foster adaptive coping, and strengthen resilience to support the meaning-making process following a loss.

Emotional awareness and emotional clarity are key in the development of emotion regulation skills, the understanding of the self and the development of healthy bonds and connectedness. And the individual´s context and culture deeply shape the way they are expressed and prioritized. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the lack of emotional awareness (i.e., being unaware of what you are feeling, and not acknowledging your emotions) and the lack of emotional clarity (i.e., being confused on how you feel, unclear about your feelings) and family environment among Mexican undergraduate students. More specifically, family environment in this study includes: (a) levels of cohesion (i.e., degree of commitment and support family members provide to one another), (b) levels of expressiveness (i.e., extent to which family members encourage the direct expression of feelings), and (c) levels of conflict (i.e., amount of openly expressed anger and conflict among family members). Investigating this relationship is important for the development of prevention programs and interventions that promote emotion regulation skills and healthy relationships tailored to Mexico´s context and collectivist culture. Participants were 457 undergraduate students, ages 19 to 34 years old (M = 20.39, SD = 2.55). Participants completed an online survey, including the Spanish versions of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-E; Gratz & Roemer, 2004; Marín-Tejeda, Robles, González & Andrade, 2012), with Lack of Emotional Awareness and Lack of Emotional Clarity subscales, and the Family Environmental Scale (FES; Moos & Moos, 2009) with Cohesion, Expressiveness, and Conflict subscales. For each sample, descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations between DERS-E and FES subscales will be presented. Furthermore, the t-test results comparing gender for each measure subscales, and the regression analyses will be presented. Results will be discussed within diverse contexts and a protective factor of an individual´s wellbeing.

Shame is a complex and often underestimated emotional process in attachment-based clinical work. Although commonly experienced as an intrapsychic emotion, shame is fundamentally relational: it emerges within attachment relationships and within the social contexts to which individuals seek to belong. In therapy, shame frequently manifests through withdrawal, compliance, perfectionism, or emotional numbing, and can quietly obstruct emotional engagement, growth, and change.

This presentation offers an attachment-based framework for understanding shame as an interpersonal process rooted in the evolutionary need for belonging. Integrating attachment theory, affective neuroscience, and contemporary clinical research, shame is conceptualized as organizing around a central attachment question: “Do I belong?” When attachment security is threatened, shame functions as a powerful regulatory signal that shapes emotion, behavior, and self-experience in the service of preserving relational bonds.

Participants will learn to identify distinct shame states and recurring shame cycles as they unfold within therapeutic interactions. Using clinical video excerpts, the presentation will illustrate how shame patterns are co-constructed and co-regulated within the therapeutic relationship, and how they influence both client and therapist responses. Particular attention will be given to recognizing markers of shame in the therapeutic relationship itself and to understanding how unaddressed shame contributes to therapeutic impasses.

The presentation will also demonstrate attachment-informed clinical interventions that support the restructuring of selves organized around chronic or destructive shame. By working with shame as an attachment-signaling process rather than as an individual deficit, therapists can facilitate the development of a more coherent, compassionate, and positive sense of self, promoting emotional engagement, relational safety, and movement toward secure attachment.