What is Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)?

Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) is primarily a theory and practical working model which describes human development and functioning as being a product of the relationship between the body, mind and relationships. Another term for it is relational neuroscience. IPNB describes how the brain and mind are shaped, or developed, and how they function based on the interplay of genes in the context of relationships. IPNB is heavily rooted in attachment theory.

IPBN is a practical and functional model designed to help people in the relational professions, including lawyers, litigators, mediators, judges, doctors, medical professionals, law enforcement (including hostage negotiators), clergy, educators, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals.

Created initially by Dr. Dan Siegel, IPNB now has a wide array of support from professionals and authors with books published as part of Norton Publishing’s Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology (50+ books). The Mindsight Institute offers courses and workshops. UCLA hosts an annual IPNB conference. Portland Community College offers an online Foundations in IPNB program that is 6 months long at climb.pcc.edu/IPNB (previously, Portland State University offered a one-year graduate credit certificate program). IPNB is also supported by the Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology (GAINS), at MindGains.org.

Good places to start learning about IPNB are YouTube video lectures by Dr. Dan Siegel, and the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology (2012). ICCI offers CLE/CEU formatted IPNB overview training for professionals.

The concept of “integration” for IPNB is significant, and the Integrative Client-Centered Model (ICCM) incorporates the same concept, although the ICCM is based on both a broader and more specific set of theories relevant to client counseling. Integration refers to a person’s use of all parts of the brain system (more specifically the entire interconnected brain and body neural system), rather than subsets such as the fight-flight-freeze subset.

Dr. Siegel offers a set of counseling tools and approaches in his book The Mindful Therapist (2010), which are functional for any helping professional, including lawyers. The ICCM incorporates many of Siegel’s concepts, but is more specifically geared towards professionals using a client-centered approach to problem solving who are working with clients in the midst of conflict, making decisions under pressure, or involved in high conflict relationships. The ICCM also offers additional tools based on other theories and research.

IPNB is similar in many ways to the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM). Both are transdisciplinary meta-models incorporating many fields of science to help understand human functioning, and both are heavily reliant on attachment science and theory. The DMM grew specifically from Dr. Patricia Crittenden’s research in attachment theory, and from her work with attachment founders Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby.

IPNB examines neuroscience and other sciences with more detail. The DMM probably focuses more on information processing and memory, and certainly offers the most advanced and detailed theory of attachment, from which specifics of the great information processing divide are better elucidated. Both models identify this primary and basic division in human functioning with the top level words cognition and affect. (IPNB also uses the “popular press” terms rigidity and chaos.) While IPNB can provide practitioner’s an excellent and useful attachment framework, it cannot describe with particularity how self-protective behavioral strategies and patterns of information processing differ between cognitive and affective-oriented patterns. The DMM’s specificity allows, for example, an understanding of and guidance to specific parenting techniques of what a parent might do if their child is using attachment “A” or “C” self-protective strategies, or what a counselor might do if their client is using adult A (cognitive) or C (affective) patterns of information processing.

Both models distance themselves from the DSM, nevertheless IPNB continues to maintain some connection to describing human functioning in terms of DSM type personality patterns and disorders, such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The DMM describes human functioning in terms of self-protective behavioral strategies and patterns of information processing. DMM research is beginning to show how traditional personality descriptions can be better described with the DMM classification model. (For a summary, see the PDF on personality disorders at Dr. Crittenden’s site or at  the Family Relations Institute.)