Adult Attachment Interview online training (Australia time zone)

The Adult Attachment Interview is a procedure for assessing adults’ strategies for identifying, preventing, and protecting the self from perceived dangers, particularly dangers tied to intimate relationships.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a clinical and research tool that offers reliable and valid assessment of adult attachment. It provides information on (1) an adult’s self-protective strategy, i.e., the way the speaker uses information to organise their behaviour when they feel endangered or believe their children to be endangered, (2) a possible set of unresolved traumatic experiences that distort the person’s behaviour without their being aware of it, (3) an over-riding distortion of the strategy such as depression, (4) a pattern of information processing, (5) an interpreted developmental history of the speaker, and, (6) the Level of Parental Reasoning (LPR, Crittenden, Lang, Claussen, & Partridge, 2000), i.e., how the parent thinks about making caregiving decisions for their children. The course offered is based on an expansion of the Bowlby-Ainsworth theory (Crittenden, 1995) and an extension of the Main and Goldwyn procedure (Main & Goldwyn, in press) as applied to the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1986, 1996).

The Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) approach to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is both a useful research tool and also a potential guide for professionals working with psychopathology. Trainees will learn not only new ways to conceptualise disturbed development, but also ways to identify in adults’ distortions of the mental processing of information, particularly information relevant to disorders of feelings, thought, and behaviour. The techniques for interpreting speech can be useful even if the professional does not formally use the interview itself in practice. For those interested in research applications, the 18-day training is usually sufficient to establish reliability on the major classifications and subclassifications.

Course details

Clark Baim (Trainer)

The course will be delivered completely online using ZOOM as the teaching platform.

Online learning will take place between 1pm and 7pm each day (Australian Eastern time zone) with several breaks, and some variations in exact times.  Additionally there will be approximately three hours of additional reading and practice coding each day of the course.

Dates:

Block 1: 26 April – 1 May 2021
Block 2: 9 – 14 August 2021
Block 3: 8-13 November 2021

Prerequisites: course participants should have completed the three-day introduction to the DMM entitled Attachment, Neurodevelopment & Psychopathology  (A&P) before attending this AAI course. In special cases, we will consider whether participants can attend A&P concurrently.  Berry Street is also offering an A&P online course in Melbourne prior of this AAI course. This will be decided on an individual basis and will not exclude anyone who has completed the A&P.

For more information check the course page.

Applications

In order to be considered to undertake the course, you will first need to complete a course application.  For more information visit the Application Process page on this website and follow the instructions.  Places on the course are limited so we advise you to submit your applications as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.  Applications close: 31 January 2021.

The course is in partnership with