For the average clinician, individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often represent the most challenging, seemingly insoluble cases. This volume is the authoritative presentation of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), Marsha M. Linehan's comprehensive, integrated approach to treating individuals with BPD. DBT was the first psychotherapy shown in controlled trials to be effective with BPD. It has since been adapted and tested for a wide range of other difficult-to-treat disorders involving emotion dysregulation. While focusing on BPD, this book is essential reading for clinicians delivering DBT to any clients with complex, multiple problems. Companion volumes: The latest developments in DBT skills training, together with essential materials for teaching the full range of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance skills, are presented in Linehan's DBT Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, and DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition. Also available: Linehan's instructive skills training videos for clients--Crisis Survival Skills: Part One, Crisis Survival Skills: Part Two, From Suffering to Freedom, This One Moment, and Opposite Action.

The core of the treatment is the balance of acceptance and change strategies, both within each therapy interaction and over time. For problem solving with borderline personality disorder, the book provides specific strategies for contingency management, exposure, cognitive modification, and skills training. The last component is further elucidated in the companion Skills Training Manual, which programmatically details procedures and includes client handouts for step-by-step implementation. Finally, to enhance interpersonal communication, Dr. Linehan presents three case management sets: consultation to the patient, environmental intervention, and consultation to the therapist. Addressing the most stressful patient behaviors that clinicians encounter, the book includes a step-by-step outline for assessing suicide risk, managing suicide threats, and working with chronic suicidal behavior

The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Personality Disorders helps readers learn and practice eight core skills based in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to overcome the symptoms of a variety of personality disorders, including paranoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

It is increasingly recognized that a significant number of individuals with personality disorders can benefit from therapy. In this new edition - based on the treatment of over a hundred patients with antisocial and borderline personality disorders - Kate Davidson demonstrates that clinicians using cognitive therapy can reduce a patient's tendency to deliberately self-harm and to harm others; it also improves their psychological well-being. Case studies and therapeutic techniques are described as well as current evidence from research trials for this group of patients. Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders provides a thorough description of how to apply cognitive behavioural therapy to patients who are traditionally regarded as being difficult to treat: those with borderline personality disorders and those with antisocial personality disorders. The book contains detailed descriptions and strategies of how to: formulate a case within the cognitive model of personality disorders overcome problems encountered when treating personality disordered patients understand how therapy may develop over a course of treatment. This clinician's guide to cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of borderline and antisocial personality disorder will be essential reading for psychiatrists, clinical and counselling psychologists, therapists, mental health nurses, and students on associated training courses.

Marsha Linehan tells the story of her journey from suicidal teenager to world-renowned developer of the life-saving behavioral therapy DBT, using her own struggle to develop life skills for others. “This book is a victory on both sides of the page.”—Gloria Steinem “Are you one of us?” a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope.” Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story. In this remarkable and inspiring memoir, Linehan describes how, when she was eighteen years old, she began an abrupt downward spiral from popular teenager to suicidal young woman. After several miserable years in a psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow that if she could get out of emotional hell, she would try to find a way to help others get out of hell too, and to build a life worth living. She went on to put herself through night school and college, living at a YWCA and often scraping together spare change to buy food. She went on to get her PhD in psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to change. Linehan included mindfulness as a key component in therapy treatment, along with original and specific life-skill techniques. She says, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking." Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality. Her powerful and moving story is one of faith and perseverance. Linehan shows, in Building a Life Worth Living, how the principles of DBT really work—and how, using her life skills and techniques, people can build lives worth living.

Motivate your BPD clients with values-based treatment! This 16-week ACT protocol will help you get started today. As you know, clients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and emotion dysregulation often struggle with negative beliefs about themselves—beliefs that can lead to feelings of shame, problems with personal relationships, and dangerous behaviors. And while dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is the standard treatment for BPD, more and more, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has shown promising results when treating BPD clients by helping them focus on their core values and forgiveness. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder provides a comprehensive program for delivering ACT to clients with BPD. Using the session-by-session, 16-week protocol in this professional guide, you can help clients work through the main driver behind BPD—experiential avoidance—and gain the psychological flexibility needed to balance their emotions and begin healing. You can use this protocol on its own, or in conjunction with treatment. With this guide, you’ll learn to target the fundamental causes of BPD for better treatment outcomes and happier, healthier clients.

Understanding and Treating Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide for Professionals and Families offers both a valuable update for mental health professionals and much-needed information and encouragement for BPD patients and their families and friends. The editors of this eminently practical and accessible text have brought together the wide-ranging and updated perspectives of 15 recognized experts who discuss topics such as A new understanding of BPD, suggesting that individuals may be genetically prone to developing BPD and that certain stressful events may trigger its onset New evidence for the success of various forms of psychotherapy, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), in reducing self-injury, drug dependence, and days in the hospital for some groups of people with BPD Pharmacology research showing that the use of specific medications can relieve the cognitive, affective, and impulsive symptoms experienced by individuals with BPD, as part of a comprehensive psychosocial treatment plan New resources for families to help them deal with the dysregulated emotions of their loved ones with BPD and to build effective support systems for themselves Yet much remains to be done. Research on BPD is 20 to 30 years behind that on other major psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Despite evidence to the contrary, much of the professional literature on BPD continues to focus on childhood trauma, abuse, and neglect as triggers for BPD -- to the detriment of both patient and family. Families of people with BPD must deal with an array of burdens in coping with the illness, often without basic information. The chapters on families and BPD give voice to the experience of BPD from the perspective of individuals and family members, and offer the hope that family involvement in treatment will be beneficial to everyone. Above all, this book is about the partnership between mental health professionals and families affected by BPD, and about how such a partnership can advance our understanding and treatment of this disorder and provide hope for the future.

Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder By Marsha M. Linehan

Until recently, borderline personality disorder has been the step-child of psychiatric disorders. Many researchers even questioned its existence. Clinicians have been reluctant to reveal the diagnosis to patients because of the stigma attached to it. But individuals with BPD suffer terribly and a significant proportion die by suicide and engage in non-suicidal self injury. This volume provides state of the art information on clinical course, epidemiology, comorbidities and specialized treatments

There are two ways to pursue happiness. There is the 'Western' approach, known as 'optimizing, ' in which we try to bring about the satisfaction of our desires, and there is the 'Eastern' method, known as 'adapting, ' in which we transform our desires so that nothing can hurt us - we become invulnerable, even to such realities as death. In Invulnerability, Steven Luper analyzes the nature of happiness and compares the two strategies: optimizing and adapting. He investigates the claim made by some of the greatest thinkers (including Buddha, Socrates, Epicurus, and Epictetus) that the prospect of dying need not alarm us, and that we may be completely happy no matter what our circumstances. Professor Luper explains in detail how adaptation may be implemented, including the steps we must take if we are to adapt to death and every contingency which might undermine our happiness. He demonstrates that adapting, as a complete strategy, has shortcomings: if we did manage to alter our conception of happiness to guarantee ourselves the possibility of complete happiness despite premature death, our conception of happiness would be impoverished. And yet adapting can often be a useful alternative to optimizing.