About This Interview
In this three-hour MINDinMIND Legacy Interview, Bert Powell, Glen Cooper and Kent Hoffman join Jane O’Rourke to reflect on the clinical story behind Circle of Security.
Together, they look back at how work with families in serious difficulty drove the development of a model that helps clinicians see the child’s need, the parent’s struggle and the relationship between them.
The recording includes archival footage of Stephanie Holt as a young parent receiving support through Circle of Security. Stephanie, who later wrote Wired for Connection: The Secret Inner Life of a Foster Kid, reflects on that footage, bringing a perspective rarely available in clinical teaching. She offers a parent’s view of what it meant to be seen differently, and how this helped her to begin seeing her own child differently too. For clinicians, the recording offers a chance to see the model at work not only as theory or technique, but as a lived experience that led eventually to significant insight and change.
The interview also features leading attachment researcher Jude Cassidy, whose work helped shape Circle of Security, alongside international clinicians using the model today, bringing perspectives from research and current clinical practice.
You do not need to be trained in Circle of Security to benefit from this recording. For any clinician working with children, parents or adults whose early attachment histories continue to shape how they meet need, the recording offers a chance to hear the founders reflect on where COS came from, what clinical need drove it, and why it continues to matter now.
Why This Matters Now
Attachment theory is now part of everyday clinical language, yet translating its insights into meaningful practice requires more than just familiarity with its terminology. The real test comes in the moment when a parent reads a child’s distress as manipulation, feels accused by the child’s need, or shuts down just when the child is reaching for them.
These are not rare situations in family work. Many clinicians are trying to support parents who are frightened, ashamed, defensive or overwhelmed, while also keeping the child’s needs in view. The child may be pushing adults away and asking for safety at the same time. Services are often over-stretched, and practitioners are asked to make sense of highly charged family distress with limited time and support and very little room for error.
The Circle of Security gives clinicians a way to track those moments. Where is the child on the Circle, what does the caregiver see, and what has been stirred in them that makes the need so hard to meet?
Stephanie Holt brings the parent’s perspective from inside the work itself. As a young parent who sought help through Circle of Security, she can speak to questions clinicians often have to infer from the outside: what does a parent hear when a child cries? What happens when a child’s need is experienced as accusation or threat? What helps a parent move from defending against that need to recognising it, and what kind of therapeutic relationship makes that shift possible?
Jude Cassidy’s attachment research helped shape and discipline the model from the start. Attachment language is now used loosely almost everywhere, and this conversation helps clarify what clinicians actually need to know about security, disorganisation and affect regulation.
International clinicians in the conversation work with COS day to day, in clinics, in family services, in supervision. They bring what the model looks like in current practice: where it works, where it gets adapted, what it asks of practitioners working under different pressures.
What You’ll Discover in the Recording
- How the founders translated attachment research into a model parents and clinicians could use under pressure
- Recognising a child’s attachment need beneath difficult or confusing behaviour
- How a caregiver’s own history becomes activated in the consulting room, the home or the classroom
- How to work with parents who feel blamed, exposed or defensive, and what helps the shift
- What shark music gives clinicians: language for parental fear and shame, without pathologising the parent
- How the Circle diagram can guide clinical formulation, not just parent education
- What it looks like when a parent begins to see her child’s need differently: archival footage of Stephanie Holt as a young mother, with her own reflection on it now
Special Guests
Jude Cassidy
Professor of Psychology, University of Maryland at College Park; Director, Maryland Child and Family Development Laboratory
Jude Cassidy has been an important influence on Circle of Security since its earliest development. The founders have described her as a rigorous intellectual presence who challenged loose claims, sharpened their thinking and brought clarity and scientific discipline to the model.
Jude’s contribution helps clarify the research that shaped COS, including what clinicians need to understand about attachment, disorganisation and the careful translation of research into practice.
Jude has been awarded designation as a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. She is co-Editor of Attachment and Human Development. She is co-Editor, with Phillip Shaver, of the Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, and is a Fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association. Her research focuses on socio-emotional development from infancy through adolescence, the protective effects of secure attachment and early intervention designed to support children’s regulatory capacities and relationships.
Jude brings the research into the conversation, clarifying what attachment studies can and cannot tell us, why disorganisation is so often misunderstood, and how COS stayed close to the evidence while becoming usable for clinicians and parents.
Stephanie Holt
Author of Wired for Connection: The Secret Inner Life of a Foster Kid
Stephanie Holt grew up in foster care and writes about what it means for a child to grow up without a reliable experience of safety, belonging or being kept in mind.
She first encountered Circle of Security as a young kinship caregiver, trying to offer her children something she had not received herself. At 19, she took custody of her younger sister. She later helped raise her sister’s children, adopted two of them, and is now raising her great-nephew and helping to raise her great-niece.
Stephanie also brings professional experience in child welfare and family support. Earlier in her career, she worked therapeutically with children and families involved in the child welfare system, including children at risk of removal, children moving through repeated foster care placements and adoptive families facing possible disruption. Her work has focused on helping caregivers make sense of children’s behaviour in the context of fear, attachment and unmet need. She holds qualifications in human services, family studies, human development, social work and chemical dependency counselling.
This recording includes archival footage of Stephanie during her early experience with Circle of Security. Stephanie reflects on that footage, giving clinicians an unusual opportunity to see the model at work and to hear what changes when a parent begins to understand both the child’s need and her own reactions differently.
Her contribution brings the conversation back to the families who helped shape Circle of Security, and to the question at the heart of the model: what helps a parent see the child’s need without being overwhelmed by shame, fear or defensiveness?
Joe Coyne
Clinical and Developmental Psychologist, Consultant and Trainer for Circle of Security International
Joe Coyne brings the view from Australia, where Circle of Security has become part of clinical practice, family support and university training. His contribution helps us think about what happens when COS moves beyond its original setting: how it is taught, supervised and used with families in everyday services.
Joe is an Endorsed Clinical Psychologist and Endorsed Educational and Developmental Psychologist in Australia, with thirty years’ experience in child and family psychology and adult psychotherapy. He trained as an accredited Circle of Security Intensive therapist and supervisor in 2010 and 2011, and has since become one of the most experienced COS practitioners and trainers outside the United States.
From 2010 to 2024, Joe was on the staff of Queensland University of Technology, where he coordinated the Master of Psychology (Educational and Developmental) and the Master of Clinical Psychology, and trained graduate students in COS Assessment and Formulation. He now works as a consultant and trainer for Circle of Security International and in private practice, and lives in Brisbane.
Francesca Manaresi
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Francesca Manaresi is an Italian clinician and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who has been central to the dissemination of Circle of Security in Italy. She brings a European clinical perspective to the conversation, with experience across agency settings, private practice and training.
Through her work, Francesca has helped bring Circle of Security into Italian clinical practice, supporting practitioners to use the model with children, parents and families. Her contribution to this Legacy Interview helps explore how COS travels across cultures: what remains constant in the language of attachment, caregiving and parental fear, and what has to be translated when the model enters a different clinical and social context.
Ida Brandtzæg and Stig Torsteinson
Norwegian Clinical Psychologists
Ida Brandtzæg and Stig Torsteinson are Norwegian clinicians and leading figures in the dissemination of Circle of Security in Norway and Scandinavia. Working together over many years, they have helped translate the model into clinical practice across services, training and parent-child work.
Their contribution brings an important international perspective to this Legacy Interview. Through their work, Circle of Security has become part of the clinical language in Norway, offering practitioners a way of thinking about children’s attachment needs, parental fear and the relational patterns that shape caregiving. In this conversation, Ida and Stig reflect on what happens when COS moves beyond its origins in the United States and becomes embedded in another clinical and cultural context.
About the Founders
Kent Hoffman, Bert Powell and Glen Cooper
Co-founders of Circle of Security
Bert Powell, Glen Cooper and Kent Hoffman are the co-founders of Circle of Security, an attachment-based model now used internationally across clinical, educational, social care and community settings.
Circle of Security was not developed in a university office or as a training package. Bert Powell, Glen Cooper and Kent Hoffman built it through years of work with families, foster carers and young parents in serious difficulty. They drew on attachment research, psychoanalytic thinking, family therapy and close videotape observation, but the model was continually tested against the realities of parent-child work.
Glen and Kent first worked together in the Catholic Worker movement in Los Angeles, in settings shaped by homelessness, poverty and practical care. Later, with Bert, the work developed through years of friendship, debate, videotape review and shared clinical puzzling, with each bringing something different to the model that emerged.
This recording offers a chance to hear the three founders reflect on where CoS came from, how they worked as collaborators and what they think clinicians most need to understand now.
Glen Cooper
Clinical social worker and co-founder of Circle of Security
Glen Cooper has been involved in social services for over fifty years, with experience that runs from working with the homeless in downtown Los Angeles to ten years as a treatment foster parent. Early in his career he worked part time so he could participate in the day-to-day experience of being a foster parent and, later, parenting his own children, and he describes this period as a foundation for his clinical work. He has extensive training in family therapy, object relations and attachment theory.
Glen drew on his experience as a treatment foster parent, preschool director, therapist and long-term Head Start consultant, keeping the model close to the realities of parents and children rather than allowing it to become an abstract application of attachment theory. Before moving into private practice, he worked with preschool children, foster families, sexually abused children and their families, and spent more than twenty-five years consulting with Spokane Head Start. His work with Head Start teachers led to the development of Circle of Security in the Classroom.
Kent Hoffman
Clinician, attachment researcher and co-founder of Circle of Security International
Kent’s work has centred on helping families under stress find a way back to connection. In the founding trio, Kent often brought the image or phrase that allowed a complex idea to land emotionally, while Bert and Glen helped test and refine it clinically. His gift for simple, memorable language helped give Circle of Security its distinctive emotional and reflective quality: phrases such as shark music and bigger, stronger, wiser and kind carry complex developmental and relational thinking in a form parents and clinicians can use under pressure, without being shamed or overwhelmed by theory. In Kent’s words, the Circle offers a kind of simplicity on the other side of complexity.
His book Raising a Secure Child, published in 2017, is widely used by clinicians and parents working with the model. Kent travels across North America, Scandinavia, Europe and Australia, teaching clinicians, educators and social workers. His TEDx talk, Infinite Worth, reflects his continuing interest in what helps people recognise value, connection and security in themselves and others.
Bert Powell
Clinician and co-founder of Circle of Security
Bert Powell has devoted his career to understanding how people struggle and succeed in negotiating emotional security in their lives. He began as an outpatient family therapist in a community mental health centre in 1974, working with high-risk families, and learned early that the key to intervention is not behavioural change alone but change in the quality of intimate relationships. He trained in Family Therapy through the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic and is certified in psychoanalytic psychotherapy by the Masterson Institute of New York.
Within the founding group, Bert brought a particular capacity to track processes. Glen has described how Bert helped him see that families might arrive each week with a different crisis, but that underneath the changing content the same relational pattern was often repeating: who sided with whom, where authority broke down, and how the family system held itself together. That attention to process became central to COS, looking beyond the presenting behaviour to the relational pattern that keeps pulling parent and child into the same painful position.
Bert has provided training and clinical supervision for early intervention research at universities including Virginia, Maryland, Tulane, Hamburg, Queensland and Louisiana State, and for Norway’s National Network for the Study of Infant Mental Health. He has served as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Gonzaga University and as International Advisor to the editorial board of Attachment and Human Development. His work with families in Washington State has been recognised with the Governor’s Child Abuse Prevention Award.
Perfect For
- Child and adolescent psychotherapists working with children, parents and families
- Parent-infant psychotherapists and infant mental health clinicians
- COS practitioners wanting to hear the founders on the origins and clinical depth of the model
- Clinicians from any therapeutic modality who want a clearer way to understand families in need, especially where behaviour, fear, shame and attachment history are difficult to disentangle
- Attachment-focused therapists, supervisors and trainers
- Family therapists and systemic practitioners
- Clinical psychologists, counsellors and psychotherapists working with parent-child relationships
- Social workers, and foster care and adoption professionals
- Teachers, school counsellors and education professionals interested in relational approaches to behaviour
- Trainees seeking a clearer sense of how attachment theory becomes clinical practice
- Mental health professionals interested in trauma, shame, rupture, repair and intergenerational patterns of care
- Clinicians working with adults whose early attachment histories shape dependency, withdrawal, protest, fear and relational expectation
Interviewer
Circle of Security is in conversation with Jane O’Rourke.
Jane O’Rourke is a Child, Adolescent and Family Psychotherapist, broadcaster and Founder of MINDinMIND. Through the MINDinMIND Legacy Interview Series, she records the thinking, clinical wisdom and intellectual history of major figures in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, attachment, trauma and developmental science.
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