DOMESTIC AND FAMILY VIOLENCE, ATTACHMENT AND COMPLEXITY - Practice-focused concepts and tools to address risk, perpetration and prevention. (Brisbane)

This year’s newly revised, and final Attachment Seminar Series (5th)—(1) Lifespan Survey, (2) Adult Disorganisation and (3) Attachment and DV—seeks both to update our knowledge/skills and to contribute to closing the research-to-treatment gap for mental health practitioners. [The presenter is retiring at the end of 2022 after contributing a decade of attachment seminars with PDP].

Attachment Theory suffers twin challenges in achieving its therapeutic charge to bring relief for human suffering. First, like many robust theories, coping with permanent expansion and increasing research complexity requires continual updating. Next, empirical successes typically face a ‘research-to-treatment gap’ that resembles similar empirical conundrums in lifespan developmental sciences. In addition to integrating relevant attachment empirical findings for 2021 and 2022, the three workshops will bring greater focus on the underappreciated relevance of research such as the approach to lifespan attachment processes emerging form Karlen Lyons-Ruth and her team within the Cambridge (MA) Health Alliance.

This third DV & Attachment seminar for 2022 brings focus to a pressing and urgent social challenge. Domestic violence is often complex: the intersection of multiple lives, histories and contexts. But it is also damaging to lives, indeed lethal in cases! When it comes to prevention and intervention, heterogeneity—i.e., multiple individual personality and risk factors, lifespan considerations, social cultural and contextual influences—presents formidable challenges.

One promising approach to such complexity—employed in the seminar—has been research into the identification of developmental/attachment pathways and lifespan risks associated with domestic violence (DV) and family violence (FV). As the seminar will demonstrate, such a method provides at least two benefits: (1) an understanding of antecedents and possible exposure risk (sometimes causal ones via longitudinal studies), and (2) a model to comprehend complexity in current experience of Interpersonal Violence (IPV). Of particular relevance will be a current assessment (based on a survey of relevant research through 2022) of IPV typologies and an emerging less controversial, acceptance of differentiations between ‘severe and abusive’ Intimate Terrorism (IT) [which encompasses much of the Duluth tradition] and a less chronic, less severe attachment ‘relationship conflict’ type, Situational Couple Violence (SCV).

The seminar will first explore the risks associated with early and ongoing exposure to DV/IPV and how these may be relationships and evidence-based preventions and interventions 

that seek to support both individuals and relationships. Longer term impacts and perplexing intergenerational risks for future adult close relationships will detrimental to well-being. Impacts on attachment dynamics for child and caregiver are particularly relevant here.  Included are also the impacts on child and caregiver be identified, as well as general treatment options for adults.

The seminar next engages the increasingly insightful value of IPV typologies noted above. After a review of the history and its various controversies—including gender issues—, the specifics of IT/SCV differentiation will be elaborated. This includes prevalence, understanding value for victims’ perspectives, development of needed safety screening requirements for clinical and other settings. The seminar continues with profiles of both perpetrators and victims of IT. Prevalence, clarifications of possible attachment and personality pathways, gender and non-heteronormative relationships will be explored for each. Both less secure and disorganised attachments have been shown to play a role in IT. With concepts and tools in hand, the workshop will turn to a review of the distinct attachment informed and other preventions and interventions for both IT and SCV. With safety in mind, appropriateness of individual, couple and group interventions will be considered. Whereas attachment (and personality) informs the pathways to IT, treatments are nonetheless typically focussed on abuse, severity and recidivism. However, treatment of less severe SCV has recently been taken up by attachment-informed approaches, including Emotionally Focussed Therapy (EFT). Focus here also considers safety, and looks specifically at relational conflicts and unmet attachment needs.

Here’s what people have said recently about Kevin’s training for PDP:

“One of the better presentations/seminars that I have attended in years. Well targeted, excellent pacing.”

“Made it interactive and relevant to people attending.”

“Very well done, valuable subject with application to today’s profession.”

“Thank you – I’d forgotten all the attachment stuff from formal study days – good new and helpful research, particularly dealing with ‘difficult client groups’, giving us and our clients hope.”

“Very interesting, hopeful perspective.”

“Very informative and stimulating! Made me want to explore the area of attachment more and more.”

“Interesting references to the progression of this theory.”

“One of the best seminars I have done! This seminar improved my understanding about attachment theory in a significant way. Kevin is an amazing presenter, he engaged participants from the beginning to the end of the seminar!”

“Always enjoy the high quality and clarity of Kevin’s work. It is well researched, well structured, time is extremely well managed and consistent effort is made to meet the personal needs of all attendees. Gluten free food is good!

“Kevin was an engaging and knowledgeable presenter who demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of his field.”

“PDP staff were amazing, useful, so friendly. Kevin was really great, loved his passion and knowledge. Interesting content.”