Dr. Kendra Doychak is a Doctoral Lecturer and Director of the MA Program in Forensic Psychology. She joined John Jay College’s Psychology Department as faculty in 2023. Dr. Doychak’s research interests are largely related to the criminalization of victimhood. She conducts research in the area of gender-based violence, complex trauma, and interpersonal abuse dynamics. She considers psychological—as well as broader sociocultural and political—factors in research development, design, and interpretation.  Over the last ten years, she has focused on coercive control and what she argues is one of the potential consequences of this abuse dynamic: a trauma-coerced attachment marked by dissociative splits in consciousness, identity, and relational and cognitive capacities. In particular, she has developed and examined trauma-coerced attachment in the context of commercial sex exploitation, intimate partner violence, and cults. Dr. Doychak is interested in understanding the processes through which victims develop TCA, as well as how we can distinguish normative dependency from traumatic bonding. Her research has been used in the legal field by expert witnesses and DOJs and has been cited in amici curiae and case law. Current projects include examining coercive control and/or trauma-coerced attachment in IPV, LGBTQ+ populations, and cults.  

Dr. Doychak is also a licensed clinical psychologist in New York. She maintains a part-time clinical practice seeing patients for individual psychodynamic therapy and belongs to a group practice conducting forensic assessments. Before joining John Jay, she worked in a variety of settings such as forensic agencies, public hospitals, trauma-based organizations, and psychoanalytic institutes. Her pre-doctoral clinical internship was completed at Elmhurst Hospital Center | NYC Health + Hospitals, Mt. Sinai Services.