Our Guiding Principles
THE PERSON BEHIND THE WORK
MACP RCC Founder of Corporate Attachment®
CEO | CAAS Workplace Solutions Incorporated
Dr. Abigail Silva is a Workplace Relationship Specialist, mediator, and the developer of Corporate Attachment® - a proprietary framework that has changed how leaders, teams, and organizations understand the relational dynamics beneath every human interaction at work.
Her path to this work was not straightforward. It was forged through a childhood shaped by systemic injustice, a clinical career spent in the room with people in genuine pain, and decades of organizational work that revealed a pattern no one else was naming clearly. What she built from those experiences is not a theory. It is a body of practice - tested, refined, and registered - that has transformed workplaces across North America and beyond.
The conviction at the centre of everything she does is simple: people are wired for connection, and when that connection is broken, everything suffers.
Her life's work is learning how to fix it.
"We are not separate beings who happen to work together. We are relational creatures who bring our entire selves — including our wounds — into every professional relationship we inhabit."
HER STORY
Where It Began — South Africa
Born into a system designed to diminish
Dr. Silva was born in South Africa during the Apartheid era - a political and social system built on the systematic denial of human dignity, belonging, and worth. Growing up in that environment did not produce resentment. It produced clarity. A deeply informed, bone-level understanding of what it costs a human being to be told they do not belong. What it does to identity. What it does to trust. And what extraordinary things become possible when people are seen, included, and treated as fully human.
That foundation has never left her work. The Corporate Attachment® framework is, in part, an expression of what she learned before she had language for it - that belonging is not a luxury, and its absence is never merely inconvenient.
The Clinical Years
In the room where people break and rebuild
Years of clinical practice - working with couples, individuals, and families in genuine distress - gave Dr. Silva something that organizational theory alone cannot: an intimate understanding of
how human beings actually behave under relational pressure. Not how they say they behave. Not how they believe they behave. How they actually respond when connection feels threatened, when trust has been broken, when the need for safety overwhelms the capacity for reason.
Attachment science became her primary lens - because it worked. Reliably. Across different people, different histories, different kinds of pain. The moment she began seeing those same patterns in organizations, the question that would become Corporate Attachment® became unavoidable.
INTERNATIONAL WORK
Crisis, complexity and the weight of restoration
Dr. Silva's career has taken her into some of the most demanding human contexts imaginable. Her international work - including engagement with post-conflict recovery in Sri Lanka and involvement with the aftermath of the Swiss Air Flight 111 disaster - brought her face to face with trauma on a scale that tests every professional framework. What she learned in those contexts was not theory. It was about the irreducible human need for restoration, and the specific conditions under which healing becomes possible.
Her background in restorative justice deepened this further - the conviction that repair is possible even after profound rupture, and that the process of repairing relationship is itself transformative. These insights are embedded in every aspect of Corporate Attachment® practice.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL TURN
The same patterns, a different room
As her work expanded into organizations, the recognition was immediate: the relational dynamics she had spent years studying in clinical settings were present everywhere in workplace life. Leaders withdrawing under pressure. Team members pursuing connection in ways their colleagues misread as neediness. Conflict escalating not because of what was said, but because of what was felt beneath it.
The difference was that organizations had no framework for understanding what they were seeing. They were diagnosing relational problems as performance problems, communication problems, attitude problems - and reaching for tools that could not address the actual driver. Corporate Attachment® was built to give organizations that framework.
WHAT GUIDES THE WORK
Three convictions that run through everything
SECTORS AND REACH
Where the work has been applied
Corporate Attachment® has been applied across sectors, organization sizes, and national contexts - from privately held and owner-managed businesses to large institutional employers, from healthcare systems to federations and non-profits.
