“The name ReAttach was chosen because of the importance of the attachment theory in my work as an educational psychologist. This name does not indicate that I think that autism is an attachment disorder, nor do I blame the parents of autistic children. ReAttach emerged from the idea that we can learn from healthy child development and the manner in which healthy children process information, emotions and events. We therefore required a multimodal approach. On 26 February 2010 I was reading a manual for schema therapy, a book describing a treatment for adults with trauma and personality disorders. I tried to understand the authors’ viewpoint and to integrate this viewpoint into the concepts that I have built from my own working experience. In my opinion, the behaviour patterns described in this book strongly matched the behaviour patterns of children with early maladaptive schemas. Children are able to cope with their stressful events during play if they have fundamental environmental support that provides them with the confidence and safety to work out their negative emotions through play. As an educational psychologist, for me, playing is processing. Playing made me create an experimental treatment session in which I simulated the optimal conditions needed to process defensive excluded information through play. The results of this experimental treatment were positive, and I started to conduct practical research with traumatized adults. In July 2010, I realized that it should be possible to develop a special intervention for people with autism and to focus on cognitive training to improve information processing and daily life functioning. We made special adjustments for people with autism because we had to overcome their individual problems with arousal regulation and multiple sensory integration processing to be able to teach new social cognitive skills and to improve executive functioning. For the autistic children and adults who voluntarily joined the cognitive training the first results were amazing. We observed improvements in facial expressions and social cognitive skills, and high-functioning adults with autism reported that it felt as if the computer in their brain was updated and now contained multiple processors.”
– Paula Zeestraten-Bartholomeus

What is ReAttach®?

ReAttach® is a non-invasive, short-term intervention that focuses on optimizing stress, emotion regulation, and personal growth. Dr. Paula Zeestraten-Bartholomeus developed the method. She obtained her PhD in 2021 for practice-driven research into ReAttach as a transdiagnostic intervention at Maastricht University.