Dr. Dan Siegel on How Attachment, Trauma & Temperament Shape Personality

These days, if the modern human mind could have a personal translator, PR agent, and cheerleader, that person would be Dan Siegel! Dr. Siegel is founder and director of education at the Mindsight Institute and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, where he was also a principal investigator of the center for Culture, Brain, and Development and clinical professor at the medical school.   He is also the founding editor of the Norton professional series on Interpersonal Neurobiology which has over one hundred textbooks in its transdisciplinary library.

Siegel’s bestselling books have found their way into the hands of millions of everyday people seeking advice on developing awareness, regulating emotions, and raising whole-brain children. Having worked as a therapist and educator for over 40 years, Dr. Siegel understands people and their patterns—on both a individual and relational level. More than any other psychiatrist alive today, he’s changed the way we live, communicate, parent, and think about who we are and who we can become.

In this immersive workshop, you’ll explore an interpersonal neurobiology approach to harnessing the insights of developmental neuroscience to illuminate how early temperament interweaves with attachment experiences in the cultivation of nine patterns of personality.  This exciting new framework is called PDP:  Patterns of Developmental Pathways and offers a deep dive into the ways temperament shapes the emergence of personality—our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving across stages and settings of our lives.

Recent research has revealed an exciting new view of the ways we interact with the world, focus our attention, experience and express emotion, and think. In this workshop, we’ll explore the PDP framework and how it was originally inspired by a system known as the “Enneagram of Personality. ” Working with four other scientists, Dan spent twenty years applying the lens of interpersonal neurobiology that sheds light on the human quest for wholeness and meaning to tens of thousands of oral narratives they were able to explore. For a clinician, this new PDP perspective offers a way to both understand yourself, and your clients, in empowering and illuminating ways.  By discerning the innate temperament we’re born with and the learned mechanisms of adaptation, you can empower clients to transform personality patterns from the prisons of chaos and rigidity they may have become into playgrounds of connection and possibility.

It is fascinating, and often frustrating and surprising, that most of us were not trained in models of personality, only in views on personality disorder.  But temperament we are born with, the innate propensities of the nervous system that are not learned but inborn, do not disappear after our childhood years.  Instead, we develop adaptive strategies to handle these neural proclivities; and it is these strategies of emotion, thought, and behaviour that shape our personality.  This new PDP framework helps us understand both the popular view of the Enneagram system, but also is consistent with a deep analysis of rigorous academic research on personality development.  In this workshop you will become deeply conversant with the details of the PDP model and how to apply it in your daily life and clinical work.

Have your mind blown by our field’s beloved mind expert! This cutting-edge training offers approaches that can be effectively integrated into the clinical assessment and treatment plan of our client population.