The Adult Attachment Interview – online training – September 2025-June 2026

Sep 16 2025 - Jun 11 2026

The Adult Attachment Interview – online training – September 2025-June 2026

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Overview

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a procedure for assessing adults’ self-protective strategy using the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM). The DMM is an expansion of the Bowlby-Ainsworth theory of individual differences in attachment (Crittenden, 1995, 2008, 2016). The DMM discourse analysis method as applied to the AAI (Crittenden & Landini, 2011) associates self-protective strategies with transformations of information that motivate adaptive and maladaptive behaviour. Knowing a person’s self-protective attachment strategy can guide treatment decisions in efficient ways while reducing the probability of misapplied, harmful treatment approaches.

This course teaches discourse analysis and classification for the AAI, for non-risk and (mild) out-patient clinical applications of the AAI, using the DMM method.

It involves 18 days of full-time effort coding transcripts.

Following the basic course students may take a fourth 8-day unit that covers very complex patterning.

Benefits to clinicians of taking the AAI course:

• Provide crucial history about danger and its impact on personal adaptation, particularly as it affects psychological treatment
• Change the way you hear language, especially in treatment
• Change the way you use language, especially in treatment
• Establish a shared knowledge base with your client/patient
• Create compassion where there was blame or doubt
• Create a way of working together in treatment
• Jumpstart the treatment or restart a stalled treatment
• Set the speaker’s mind in motion
• Enable therapists to find the person’s ZPD regarding their child
• Enable the therapist to avoid blind alleys
• Permit reliable coders to classify the strategies used by individuals.

Note: coding reliability and earning a coding certificate usually requires more effort than this 18 day course.

Read More About Training in The Adult Attachment Interview