Psychotherapists’ self-protective attachment strategies

This study examined links between the unresolved loss of a significant person and current functioning in marital and parenting relationships. Participants were 80 women who had experienced loss, their husbands, and their preschool children. Unresolved loss was assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview, and individual, marital, and parenting adaptation was assessed through videotaped observations and women's self-reports. As predicted, women with unresolved loss displayed less positive emotion and more anxiety and anger with both their husbands and children, compared to women who were not unresolved. They also displayed less authoritative and more authoritarian parenting styles with their children. Yet unresolved women did not report more individual or relationship difficulties, suggesting that direct observations are needed to assess the implications of unresolved loss for family functioning.

Objectives: The relationship between patients' attachment strategies and the effectiveness of psychotherapy is empirically well established. However, studies on outcome measures other than symptomatic change are mostly lacking. The present study investigates if attachment anxiety and avoidance predict changes in personality functioning at the end of inpatient psychotherapy. Method: In two independent samples (the first sample consisting of N = 967 diagnostically heterogeneous patients, Fachklinikum Tiefenbrunn, and the second sample comprising N = 344 patients with personality impairments, Rehaklinik Bad Grönenbach), personality functioning was assessed by means of the short version of the OPD structure questionnaire OPD-SQS (OPD-Strukturfragebogen 12-Item-Screeningversion, OPD-SFK) at admission and discharge in a naturalistic study design. Data on the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-32) were evaluated as additional outcome measures in the first sample. Patients' attachment strategies were assessed at admission using the German short version of the Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR-RD 12). Results: Attachment avoidance at baseline was inversely associated with improvements in personality functioning, psychopathology, and interpersonal problems. In the sample of patients diagnosed with personality disorders (sample 2), we found a negative association between attachment anxiety and improvements in the ability to make contact with others. Conclusions: Considering the limitations, our results underline the relevance of attachment for the treatment outcome of inpatient psychotherapy. The assessment of patient's attachment strategy as part of standardized diagnostics can be helpful in clinical practice regarding prognosis, therapy planning as well as the adjustment of the therapeutic relationship while treating patients suffering from impairments in personality functioning.

The current study examined whether adolescents' attachment representations were associated with differences in emotion regulation during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1996) and during a mother-adolescent conflict interaction task (Family Interaction Task [FIT]; J. P. Allen et al., 2003). Participants were one hundred and fifty-six 14-year-old adolescents. Dismissing adolescents showed less interbeat interval (IBI) reactivity (indicating less stress) during the AAI than secure adolescents. However, during the FIT, dismissing adolescents showed more IBI reactivity. No differences in physiological reactivity were found between individuals with resolved or unresolved loss or trauma during the AAI or FIT. The results indicate that dismissing adolescents may effectively use a defensive strategy during the AAI but less so in direct conflict interaction with their attachment figure.

Family therapists understand that children presenting for treatment are often bearers of symptoms signalling relational problems within the family system. Rather than addressing the children's symptoms in isolation, family therapists typically take those relational problems as their starting point in therapy. This study used the School-aged Assessment of Attachment (SAA) to assess the self-protective (attachment) strategies of the siblings of children presenting for psychiatric evaluation and also of the siblings of control children drawn from the normative population. Siblings of children in the clinical group were much more likely than siblings of control children to use at-risk self-protective strategies and to have markers suggestive of unresolved loss or trauma. School-aged siblings were found to use a broad range of strategies, and the pattern of change from first born to later born involved either a reversal of strategy or a shift to a more complex strategy. The study highlights that siblings of children presenting to mental health services are significantly affected by family relational stress. A family systems approach to assessment, one that enquires about the wellbeing of all family members, will ensure that the emotional needs of siblings are also addressed during the therapy process.

Counselors make important contributions to the counseling relationship, and their attachment organizations can influence the strength, quality, and effectiveness of the working alliance (Bucci et al. 2015). This study explored first year counselor education doctoral students’ (n = 7) experiences of being interviewed with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George et al. 1996) as a means of supporting self-awareness and fostering effective counselor-client working alliances. Four superordinate themes emerged: (a) reactions to the AAI interview process, (b) process with AAI feedback, (c) AAI and intrapersonal process, and (d) AAI and interpersonal process. Findings suggest that the AAI is an effective tool in supporting counselor self-awareness regarding attachment strategies and can provide multiple personal and professional benefits, such as increased awareness of conflict and stress management strategies. Implications for clinical practice, counselor education, and future research are discussed.

Disorganized attachment is most prevalent among high-risk populations, such as maltreated children. Recent attachment literature has demonstrated that one of the best predictors of attachment disorganization is an “Unresolved” parental state of mind regarding a loss or an abuse in the parent's own attachment history. However, although classification in the Unresolved (U) category is always accompanied by specification of the type of trauma that is unresolved (loss, physical abuse, or sexual abuse), much of attachment research has focused on unresolved attachment as one category. The current paper reviews the empirical literature on the parenting outcomes associated with different subtypes of U. The literature demonstrates that parents who have experienced loss or abuse in childhood, which remains unresolved, exhibit atypical care-giving behaviors. Specifically, a history of loss or childhood sexual abuse is found to be associated with more passively withdrawn parental interactions, whereas a hist...

In this study we examined for the first time the difference between patients with an anxiety disorder and healthy controls in their attachment representation and facial affective behavior during the activation of the attachment system. 13 female patients und 14 healthy women were administered with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Facial affective behavior during 6 selected questions of the AAI was coded using the Emotional-Facial-Action-Coding-System (EMFACS). As expected patients with an anxiety disorder, especially panic disorders, were classified significantly more often as insecure-preoccupied with a high proportion of unresolved loss. Against our assumption anxiety patients, independent of their attachment category, did not differ in their facial affective behavior from the control group. A group comparison taking into account diagnosis and attachment status showed that duchenne smile (happiness) was significantly predominant in control subjects classified as secure. Attachment security in healthy subjects, characterized by an overall valuing of positive or negative attachment experiences and coherent discourse in the AAI, was associated with positive facial affectivity. In contrast insecure anxiety patients could be characterized by showing social smile when talking e. g. about former separation experiences from their attachment figures mostly in an incoherent manner. This could be interpreted as a self-regulating defense. Limitations of the study are the small sample size and the heterogeneous clinical group of anxiety disorders.

This article describes a complex multimodal intervention with a family where inappropriate sexual contact had occurred between Taro and his younger sister Lara, when they were young children. The family presented to clinical services when Lara was brought to hospital with suicidal ideation, traumatic flashbacks and regressed behaviour at 13 years of age. Treatment involved multiple components: family work with all members of the family individual work with Lara, joint work with Lara and Taro, and finally, a brief intervention with Taro. This article focuses primarily on the therapist's work with Taro, the perpetrator of the inappropriate sexual contact. The Adult Attachment interview (AAI), a semi‐structured interview, was used by the therapist to assess Taro's developmental experiences and psychological functioning. Information from the AAI helped the therapist identify both the relationship factors that had contributed to the perpetration of sexual abuse and the self‐protective strategies Taro had come to use in order to elicit maximum comfort and protection from neglectful attachment figures. The therapist used the functional formulation derived from the AAI to structure a time‐limited intervention.

Interventions to improve caregiving may have different effects for persons with autonomous or nonautonomous attachment representations. The current study used the Adult Attachment Interview to investigate attachment representations of professional caregivers who participated in an intervention to improve interaction with children and adults with serious intellectual and visual disabilities. Caregivers (N = 51) completed a video-feedback interaction program. Twice during a baseline period and three times during the intervention period, each caregiver was videotaped during a standard situation with their client. Of the caregivers, 28 were classified as autonomous, 12 as dismissing, and 11 as preoccupied. Unresolved loss or trauma (n = 7) was not included in the analyses. Generally, interaction quality improved from baseline to intervention period as indicated by confirmation of signals, responsiveness to signals, and affective mutuality. Caregivers with dismissing classifications continued to show less confirmation of clients' signals. Caregivers with dismissing or preoccupied classifications improved their responsiveness to the level of caregivers with autonomous classifications. Attachment representations may modify in some ways the impact of interventions to improve caregiving.

We report attachment classifications in a sample of pregnant women incarcerated in a state prison with a nursery program. Analyses were based on 69 women serving sentences for felony crimes who were followed from the birth of their child to completion of the prison nursery co-residence. They completed the Adult Attachment Interview shortly after entering the program and scales measuring depression, perceived parenting competency, and social support at study entry (Time 1) and program completion (Time 2). Incarcerated mothers had higher rates of insecure attachment than previous low-risk community samples. Compared with dismissing and secure mothers, preoccupied mothers reported higher levels of depressive symptoms, lower parenting competency, and lower satisfaction with social support at the conclusion of the nursery program. Higher scores on unresolved loss and derogation were associated with a history of substance abuse; higher scores on unresolved trauma were associated with depressive symptoms at program completion.

This study aims at examining the attachment states of mind in 50 female outpatients with eating disorders compared with 50 matched control participants using the Adult Attachment Interview. Moreover, the differences in attachment states of mind among eating-disordered women with and without borderline personality disorders' diagnosis were explored. The results showed an over-representation of insecure-dismissing and unresolved states of mind in clinical group compared to controls. Patients with both diagnosis showed higher scores on involving anger and unresolved loss compared with those with only eating disorder. Implications for further research and clinical practice are discussed.

Introduction: Recent literature has shown that the good outcome of adoption would mostly depend on the quality of adoptive parenting, which is strongly associated with the security of parental internal working models (IWMs) of attachment. Specifically, attachment states-of-mind of adoptive mothers classified as free and autonomous and without lack of resolution of loss or trauma could represent a good protective factor for adopted children, previously maltreated and neglected. While most research on adoptive families focused on pre-school and school-aged children, the aim of this study was to assess the concordance of IWMs of attachment in adoptive dyads during adolescence.Method: Our pilot-study involved 76 participants: 30 adoptive mothers (mean age = 51.5 ± 4.3), and their 46 late-adopted adolescents (mean age = 13.9 ± 1.6), who were all aged 4–9 years old at time of adoption (mean age = 6.3 ± 1.5). Attachment representations of adopted adolescents were assessed by the Friend and Family Interview (FFI), while adoptive mothers’ state-of-mind with respect to attachment was classified by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Adolescents’ verbal intelligence was controlled for.Results: Late-adopted adolescents were classified as follows: 67% secure, 26% dismissing, and 7% preoccupied in the FFI, while their adoptive mothers’ AAI classifications were 70% free-autonomous, 7% dismissing, and 23% unresolved. We found a significant concordance of 70% (32 dyads) between the secure–insecure FFI and AAI classifications. Specifically adoptive mothers with high coherence of transcript and low unresolved loss tend to have late-adopted children with high secure attachment, even if the adolescents’ verbal intelligence made a significant contribution to this prediction.Discussion: Our results provides an empirical contribution to the literature concerning the concordance of attachment in adoptive dyads, highlighting the beneficial impact of highly coherent states-of-mind of adoptive mothers on the attachment representations of their late-adopted adolescent children.

Although attachment theory has become an influential approach used for the study of mental disorders, hitherto little has been known about the relation of attachment to somatoform disorders. In this study 15 patients with a somatoform pain disorder were compared with 15 non-clinical control participants. Attachment representations were measured by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Compared to the control group, the patient group describes parental behavior as less loving and more rejecting, expresses more anger towards the mother, shows more signs of unresolved loss and trauma, and their interviews are markedly less coherent. None of the patients is classified as secure; the majority falls within the unresolved category. The findings of this study can contribute to a better understanding of the often described adversities in the therapeutic alliance with these patients.

Education makes a difference and teacher educators are an important part of that circle. However, there is very little research done in Finland on teacher educators’ professional development. The main purpose of this study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of three scales that measure the components of teacher educators’ professional development, namely (a) developmental needs, (b) preferred ways of fulfiling those needs and (c) hindrances to fulfiling developmental needs. The differences between different occupational groups were also discussed. The survey was distributed in May 2019 to all eight Finnish universities that offer teacher education. The final sample size was 354. Using scale development techniques, we succeeded in generating items to all three inventories. We also tested the psychometric properties and the construct validity of the inventories. Our study revealed that teacher educators are not a homogenous group. Different occupational groups have different professional development interests.

This article illustrates two statistical analysis procedures that provide options for handling multiple perspectives on same variable. We used Differentiation in Family System Scale to assess boundary maintenance in from three members' perspectives. The first procedure, multitrait multimethod matrix with correlated uniquenesses, suggested that best model was one in which six dyadic subscales formed distinct factors using three perspectives. The second procedure, triadic social relations model, provided further evidence of agreement. Mothers' views tended to be most shared, whereas fathers' were least shared. As one person exhibited differentiated behavior, other also tended to elicit same behavior. Key Words: data analysis, differentiation, multiple perspectives, multitrait multimethod matrix. This article illustrates two statistical analysis procedures that allow for multiple perspectives of members on same variable. Recently, Bartle-Haring and Gavazzi (1996) demonstrated utility of using confirmatory factor analysis with multiple-perspective data for family-level variables. The objective of our investigation is to extend this line of work by again using a confirmatory factor analysis with triadic-level data (three members of same commenting on how members treat self, how self treats others, and how other members treat other members) rather than dyadic-level data (two or more members of a commenting on how members treat self and how self treats others). We demonstrate a second analysis technique, triadic social relations modeling. Both techniques can incorporate multiple perspectives on same construct and measure how much raters agree about particular construct of interest while controlling for rater bias. In all too many studies, information we have on families is from one person's perspective only. Although information from one informant is valuable, such a perspective may be idiosyncratic view of one individual, rather than consensual reflection of what a particular is. With a single informant, researcher cannot assess extent of agreement between members or extent to which they share a reality. Teachman, Carver, and Day (1995) and Hauser (1988) have suggested models that include paired data that partition variance into individual and common factors with sibling data. Others have demonstrated that three members' perspectives on variables can also be used and that it provides useful information (Cole & Jordan, 1991; Martin & Cole, 1993). Having information from more than one person in a seems essential if researcher is to understand the family as a family, rather than as just one person's perspective of that system (Sabatelli & Bartle, 1995). Before delving into details of these statistical methods, we need to understand importance of theory in applying them. The rationale for using these statistical techniques must come from theoretical conceptualization of constructs of interest. If construct of interest is not defined as a system-level property or at least as a relational property, these techniques may be irrelevant. Thus, to demonstrate utility of these techniques, we outline theoretical conceptualization of construct of interest, in this case differentiation. THEORETICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF DIFFERENTIATION Family System Differentiation As a marker of distance regulation in systems, differentiation construct is considered an important component of functioning. Bowen (1976, 1978) defines differentiation at individual level and family-system level. At a system level, differentiation manifests itself as family's tolerance for individuality or difference and its tolerance for intimacy or belongingness (Anderson & Sabatelli, 1990). …