Center for Attachment & Trauma Services
Building Healthy Connections for Individuals, Families, Communities and the World
Mission
To provide holistic, trauma-informed care that empowers individuals and families to heal, build healthy relationships, and form secure attachments, while promoting awareness through education.
Our Philosophy
We believe healing begins in the nervous system. That's why we take a bottom-up, body-wise approach to therapy—one that integrates the latest in neuroscience, somatic and movement modalities, and safe relational experiences. We work with the whole family system and believe every person deserves to feel safe, seen, and empowered to change the patterns that no longer serve them.
History
The Center for Attachment & Trauma Services, Inc. (formerly, American Foundation for Family Attachment, Inc. or “AFFA”) was founded in 2005 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The purpose was to provide highly specialized therapeutic intervention and assessment as well as community and professional education about human attachment, the biologically-driven mechanism by which we all connect emotionally with one another. Our earliest attachment relationship provides a template for future relationships.
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In 2014, AFFA was renamed Center for Attachment & Trauma Services, Inc. (“CATS”). Because attachment security and trauma history are oftentimes intricately connected, various trauma-focused therapeutic modalities have been included in our clinical services. Our staff’s clinical competencies continue to expand to allow our organization to better serve the needs of our clients, their families, our community, and our world.
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Founder​
Mary Owen Kerrigan, MSW, LCSW, worked for over thirty years with families as a child and family psychotherapist. Her work focused on helping children and parents form healthy attachments and providing parent guidance. She encouraged family members to build on their strengths, responding to their difficulties with compassion, respect and humor. She has been an instructor for graduate schools of social work and has conducted trainings in the many aspects of attachment to foster and adoptive parents, social services agencies and school staffs locally and nationally.
Believing a secure attachment is the essential foundation for all healthy relationships, she formed American Foundation for Family Attachment, now Center for Attachment & Trauma Services in hopes of giving the community an important resource supporting the well-being of families. Mary now lives in California where she offers parent coaching through her business Peaceful Living Consults and is the Executive Director of Step Up Ventura, a nonprofit providing an attachment-based, trauma-informed therapeutic infant and toddler care and preschool for homeless children ages 0-5 years.
What is attachment?
We’re Wired to Connect. That Wiring Can Be Rewritten.
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Attachment is how humans survive—and thrive. From infancy, the brain builds internal maps of safety, love, and connection based on our earliest relationships. These early experiences shape our nervous systems, our behaviors, and view of ourselves and others. Disruptions in attachment (due to loss, neglect, chronic stress of a caregiver, trauma, or neurodivergence) can lead to emotional and behavioral challenges that we carry with us throughout our lifetime, even when it is no longer helpful.
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We support clients in identifying and healing:
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Insecure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized attachment patterns
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Trust, safety, and regulation challenges
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Nervous system dysregulation rooted in in-utero exposure to substances or stress, and early experiences of abuse and neglect.​
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The good news is that thanks to neuroplasticity, these attachment patterns, and relationship maps are not fixed, and with the right support and guidance, we all have the capacity to rewire these foundational brain networks regardless of our early life experiences.
Understanding Trauma
Trauma Lives in the Body—But So Does the Power to Heal.
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Trauma is not just a memory—it’s a physiological imprint that can be stored without consciousness in our nervous system, the sensory system, and in our emotional brain. It can result from abuse, neglect, loss, medical trauma, systemic oppression, or unmet sensory/emotional needs. We may have no conscious memory of the event(s) but it lives on in our present experience when we encounter relational, sensory or emotion-based stimuli.
At CATS, we use whole-brain interventions to reestablish a state of safety in the brain, and release trauma stored in the body.
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Specialty Focus​
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Developmental and relational trauma
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PTSD and complex PTSD
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Birth trauma and NICU separations
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Trauma in neurodivergent individuals (ADHD, Autism, FASD)
Healing Tools​
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EMDR and Accelerated Resolution Therapy
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Neurodevelopmental Movement
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Expressive and Somatic Modalities
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Play
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Polyvagal Work and the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP)
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TF-CBT
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