Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationshi

Christine B.L. Adams, MD is a child and adult psychiatrist practicing in Louisville, Kentucky. She is co-author with Homer B. Martin, MD of Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships. This is a nonfiction book for general readers about the automatic knee-jerk thought, emotion, and behavior patterns present in all of us that we learn early in life and transmit generation after generation, leading to relationship difficulties, impaired judgment, misunderstandings, and emotional illnesses.

Dr. Adams is a graduate of the University of Florida College of Medicine. She completed her General Residency in Psychiatry and also her Fellowship in Child Psychiatry at The University of Louisville School of Medicine. As a Fellow she received the National Psychiatric Endowment Fund Award She is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and a Life Member of the American Psychiatric Association. She was an examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology in both Child and Adult Psychiatry.

During her career Doctor Adams was a forensic child psychiatrist and expert witness in court cases involving custody and childhood sexual abuse. She taught at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, was an appeals examiner for the Social Security Administration and was a psychiatric consultant for the Department of Defense.

Doctor Adams conducts independent clinical research, publishes professional papers, presents at national and international psychiatry conferences and contributes to psychiatric textbooks on the topics of: child-rearing difficulties, childhood sexual abuse, women’s sexual development, child custody disputes, parent-child alienations, mental health stigma, frontal lobe brain pathology and childhood aphasia.