Dan Siegel
CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY, AUTHOR
Dan Siegel is the executive director of the Mindsight Institute and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, where he was also co-principal investigator of the Center for Culture, Brain and Development and clinical professor at the School of Medicine.
An award-winning educator, Dan is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and other books which have been translated into over forty languages. The founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, he has overseen the publication of over eighty textbooks in this transdisciplinary framework focusing on the mind and mental health.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dan completed his postgraduate training at UCLA specializing in pediatrics, adult, adolescent, and child psychiatry. He was trained in attachment research and narrative analysis through a National Institute of Mental Health research training fellowship focusing on how relationships shape our autobiographical ways of making sense of our lives and influence our development across the lifespan.
Presentation One with Q & A - Dan Siegel - Cross-Generational Trauma and Personality: How overwhelming experiences, genetics, and epigenetic inheritance shape who we are and who we can become
This presentation will explore the Patterns of Developmental Pathways (PDP) framework of personality and how traumatic
attachment experiences may interact with innate temperament—influenced by both genetic and epigenetic factors shape
the enduring patterns of emotion and its regulation, thinking and meaning-making, and behavioral habits that we call
“personality.” Understanding the role of subcortical influences on motivation and affect can greatly help in gaining insights
into how overwhelming experiences early in life may impact the cortical learning that contributes to our adaptive strategies
of survival. Practical applications of this PDP approach to working clinically with those who’ve experienced various
challenges to secure attachment including developmental trauma will be explored. Cultural influences on how each of
these patterns of personality express themselves in life will be discussed.
Learning Outcomes:
1. Outline three sub-cortical motivational networks underlying patterns of developmental pathways
2. Name three forms of “attendency” that shape the direction of attention
3. Describe how traumatic attachment influences the intensity of temperament
4. List nine patterns of developmental pathways
5. Identify the relationship between attachment and temperament in the formation of personality
