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When Loves Goes Awry: Disturbed Early Attachment Relations and their Contributions to Borderline Personality and Suicidality in Late Adolescence
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Fear of abandonment and fear of attack are two differently organized stress response systems that are active in human development, with different developmental sensitive periods. These systems motivate different but contradictory adaptive responses: fear of attack mobilizes fight, flight, or freeze, while fear of abandonment motivates calling and contact-seeking. In the context of a 30-year longitudinal study, this session will focus on the current state of knowledge regarding child and adolescent interaction patterns associated with trajectories toward dissociation, borderline psychopathology, and suicidality, with a particular focus on the separable effects of trauma and disorganized attachment in these trajectories. The session will incorporate video illustrations of controlling, role-confused, and disoriented forms of parent-child communication and consider how both fear of abandonment and fear of attack need to be separately conceptualized in treatment approaches to complex trauma.
Karlen Lyons-Ruth, PhD
Karlen Lyons-Ruth, PhD is a professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, a clinical supervisor for the Cambridge Health Alliance Psychology and Psychiatry training programs and a core faculty member for the first-year Child Psychiatry Seminar for MGH/McLean, Children’s Hospital, and Cambridge Health Alliance fellows. She was a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Duke University and received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University. Before coming to Harvard Medical School, she completed a clinical internship at McLean Hospital and served as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Child Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine
Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Karlen Lyons-Ruth is a professor at Harvard Medical School. She is a staff psychologist and supervising psychologist at Cambridge Health Alliance. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Karlen Lyons-Ruth is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. She is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development; the Massachusetts Psychological Association; International Society for Infant Studies; and the Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Lyons-Ruth is an advisory board member at Infant-Parent Training Institute.
