The Clinical Use of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)

Called the “most important assessment of attachment styles in the last 20 years, the AAI has been famously labeled as the “gold standard” assessment.  This brief course will give you a clinical understanding of the AAI and its respective findings and how to properly, collaboratively, and ethically share results with clients and patients.  For those of you who don’t have the large amount of time and money to get officially “reliable,” this will be a way for you to use this instrument, knowing that you are not creating any harm or using it when it is contraindicated.

Your instructor, Dr. Zack Bein, is the sole author of a chapter in the upcoming sequel to the above seminal book edited by the Steeles.  The chapter goes into some detail about how to conceptualize and understand the use of the AAI in a one-on-one clinical context, such as in Integrative Attachment Therapy.  He is also “reliable” to code for AAIs through the AAI Institute.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985), a semistructured interview of 18 questions, concentrates on eliciting a sense of what probably happened to individuals in childhood and a picture of the degree to which they have evaluated those experiences. As a clinical intake tool, the AAI yields a relatively deep social history at the level of experience and symbolic representation, with a particular focus on attachment-related experiences. “Deep” in this context refers to material that reflects both early memories and modes of responding to (or coping with) experience stored at diverse levels of awareness. In this gathering of information, the AAI allows for the assessment of the following three features of the respondent’s inner world: (a) the nature of the speaker’s probable childhood experiences with his or her parents; (b) the nature of the speaker’s mental representations of each parent, including their emotional stance toward them; and (c) the extent to which loss or other traumatic events or life circumstances have influenced their development and current personality organization (Steele & Baradon, 2004). 

If the AAI is a tool that you’d like to begin using with your clients/patients, without becoming fully “reliable,” this is a great group for you as you will learn how to use it effectively and ethically to impact your clinical practice.  There has been some confusion about how to use it effectively and ethically and this group intends to clear up that confusion and teach the state-of-the-art assessment and the highest standard of care.

We will be concentrating a lot of material into the three days so be ready!  It would be of benefit to register early so one has as much time with the pre-workshop reading material.

Dates: March 27-29, Fri – Sun, 11:30 AM to 2:30 pm pacific time

Day 1 – Morning – Administering the AAI/Role Play a “difficult” AAI
Afternoon- Identifying Secure/Autonomous Transcripts (F1 – F5)

Day 2 – Morning – Signs of Preoccupied Transcripts (E1 – E3)

Afternoon – Signs of Dismissing Transcripts (Ds1 – Ds4)

Day 3 – Morning – Assessing for Unresolved abuse, loss, or trauma vs Cannot Classify
Afternoon – Putting it all Together

There are 2 ways to register.  You can pay all-at-once for the 3-day workshop for $450, or you can elect to pay in 3 installments of $165.