Love, Attachment and Intellectual Disability: Meeting Emotional Needs and Developmental Trauma

by Victoria Shimmens, Allan Skelly

Love, Attachment and Intellectual Disability explores a trauma-informed approach to caring for people with intellectual disabilities. It emphasises the importance of the earliest attachments that we forge to meet our basic needs for safety, care and love, and highlights the trauma that can occur if these emotional needs are not met.

Over recent years, the focus in clinical learning disability services has moved away from managing challenging behaviour and towards a trauma-informed, attachment-based approach to caring. In line with this development, Love, Attachment and Intellectual Disability introduces some of the key theories that have informed our understanding of the emotional development of people with intellectual disabilities and the importance of receiving love from an attachment figure from a young age. This is followed by case studies that focus on the lives of particular individuals – sometimes presented as individual therapy sessions, and sometimes as an overview of progress across many sessions. It is relevant to all health and social care professionals who help people with intellectual disabilities, as well as useful for advocates, service commissioners, families and healthcare generalists.

266 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 8, 2024