Karl Stenske, MA, LMFT

Built on attachment science. A precise account of how childhood emotional neglect and disrupted caregiving shape a person from the inside out

A lifetime of feeling like something is inherently wrong with you.

The feeling that somehow you are broken, flawed, hard to love or easy to leave.

Like you were set up to fail, especially in relationships. And even though you were set up to fail

it still somehow feels like your fault.

The Developmental Sequence

A framework of childhood emotional neglect, disorganized attachment, and the patterns they produce.

The Caregiving Base Is Disrupted

Something happens early in the primary caregiving relationship. A caregiver is lost, absent, or unable to be consistently there. It may be a single defining event or something pervasive that builds over time. Either way the foundation the child depends on for safety and belonging becomes unstable. This is the territory other models name with terms like childhood emotional neglect or developmental trauma. DCB describes what actually happens inside it.

The Critical Cycle Engages

From that disruption the child's system does what it is built to do. It reaches toward the caregiver for what it needs. Something comes back. Or does not. Or comes back sometimes and not others. That exchange, the reaching and what comes back, repeats over and over throughout development. It is not the disruption itself that forms the wound. It is what happens every time the child reaches out after it.

This is the mechanism beneath what gets labeled disorganized attachment.

A Survival Truth Forms

Through that repeated experience the child's system arrives at a deep unspoken conclusion about themselves and about relationships. Not a conscious thought. Not a decision. A felt sense that can settle in before there are words for it. Something about whether they are worth showing up for. Whether people can be trusted to stay.

The Formed Identity

The whole person who emerges from that process is real and genuine. Their strengths, their patterns, their ways of moving through relationships and through life. By adulthood the survival truth does not feel like a conclusion that formed. It feels like reality. Like just who I am.

About Karl

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Irvine, California, holding graduate degrees in both Marriage and Family Therapy and Adoption Studies. My own experience as an adoptee and the fractured caregiving that followed led me to twenty years of specialized clinical work with individuals and families affected by adoption, early loss, and disrupted caregiving. That work produced Disrupted Caregiver Base, a clinical framework for understanding how those early experiences shape the whole person.

I work with individuals and couples. I also consult with and train clinicians.

How I Work

This work begins with relationship. Not distance, not technique, not a checklist of questions. A genuine conversation between two people, one of whom has spent twenty years understanding the specific territory you are carrying. The clients I work with are most often adults whose lives have been shaped by childhood emotional neglect, disorganized attachment, or other forms of developmental trauma that conventional approaches have struggled to reach.

The goal of every session is for you to feel that someone finally gets it. Not just the pain. The origin of the pain. Why it formed, why it makes complete sense, and why it has been so difficult to reach through conventional approaches.

That precision matters. You are not just being held through the difficulty. You are being understood within it. The framework behind this work gives both of us a more exact map of what you are carrying, where it came from, and what the work of changing it actually requires.