This book provides a guide to using experiential techniques, such as imagery rescripting, chairwork, body work, and mindfulness in metacognitive interpersonal therapy to treat personality disorders and PTSD, along with their many comorbid conditions.
Psychotherapy for patients with personality disorders and their associated symptom disorders needs (1) a tailored case formulation, continuously updated and shared with the patient; (2) the use of experiential techniques to challenge embodied, automatic, hard-to-change interpersonal patterns; and (3) active attention to the therapeutic relationship. This book will help readers work along these dimensions, acting as a guide to constructing a client-first model of their own psychological functioning that can be used as a roadmap to change. It includes specific procedures for addressing problems in the therapeutic contract, devising and enacting imagery rescripting and other techniques, interrupting repetitive thinking, and so on. It also includes real case examples, with rich and detailed clinical exchanges for the procedures described.
This comprehensive text will help practicing clinicians of any orientation in working with patients suffering from personality disorders and their associated symptoms.
Table of Contents:
1. Interactions between experiential techniques and the therapeutic relationship: A classification; 2. Personality psychopathology in metacognitive interpersonal therapy; 3. The therapeutic relationship in MIT: general principles and interaction with techniques; 4. Decision-making and relational procedures: shared formulation of functioning; 5. Decision-making and relational procedures: change promoting; 6. Narrative episodes, early access to healthy parts, and dynamic assessment; 7. Identify the narrative structures underlying the episodes; 8. Reconstruction of coping and beginning work on symptoms when metacognition is poor; 9. Reconstruct functioning and recognize the Interpersonal pattern as such: the completion of the shared formulation; 10. Differentiate and strengthen the healthy parts, recognizing the shifts back to the schema; 11. Pursuing wishes by exploring the environment and interrupting avoidance: counteracting tendencies to return to schemas after successful experiments; 12. Forming a more mature theory of others’ minds: recognizing one’s own contribution to relational dysfunction and building an integrated model of self and others; 13. Dealing with relationship problems, coping, and residual symptoms; 14. Conclusions: technically active yet relationship-conscious
About the Author :
Giancarlo Dimaggio is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session; senior associate editor for the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration; and associate editor for Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. He is a co-founding member of the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy.
Antonella Centonze is a clinical psychologist at the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy.
Paolo Ottavi, psychologist and psychotherapist, is the main developer of two published treatments with empirical support: Metacognition Oriented Social Skills Training and Metacognitive-Interpersonal Based Mindfulness Training.
Raffaele Popolo is a co-founding member of the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy, a trainer at the Società Italiana di Terapia Comportamentale e Cognitiva (SITCC), and a trainer of the psychotherapy school ‘Studi Cognitivi’.