Healing resources are needed to create safe connections or secure attachments, which in turn will allow a person to face their innermost pain and fear yet without the need to dissociate or cut off from their painful feelings. The steps needed to build such a secure attachment are carefully guided by the psychotherapist to build a resourceful scaffold of several resources.

Amongst these resources, such as different breathing techniques, secure attachment figures are used. CRM proposes that resourceful attachment figures are not familiar figures, like a grandparent, a school friend, or indeed the therapist. It is clear that when observing the process of finding secure attachment it turns out that secure attachment to immediate friends and family may not offer the secure enough attachment a client needs when dealing with emotional pain.

This proposition sets CRM apart from other therapies where external attachment figures are implicitly or explicitly invited.

The attachment figures that clients work with in CRM are power animals, sacred animals, a place in or a part of nature, for example a tree or rock. The use of such figures is intended, through their emotional soothing, to activate parts of the brain linked to safety and trust. This is also, why, power animals are not young animals, such as kittens or puppies because young animals can trigger an urge to protect rather than feeling protected.

The aim is that such an attachment figure can effectively conjure the internal resources needed to face deep trauma. This leads to a level of self-reliance and self-determination, that existential thinkers, like Kierkegaard and Sartre have called for already a long time ago. Thus, it is possible to look at CRM as a neurobiological application of existentialis