Psychotherapy With Personality Disorders
Since personality represents who someone is at the deepest level, it is understandable that many people with personality disorders resist the idea that they have maladaptive patterns of personality traits. Even when clients acknowledge that their personality issues are at the heart of their interpersonal problems, they often find it difficult to change. As a PMHNP, how do you overcome this challenge and effectively counsel these clients?
This week, you examine psychotherapeutic approaches for treating clients with personality disorders.
Learning Objectives
Students will:
- Recommend therapeutic approaches for treating clients with personality disorders
- Recommend strategies to support the therapeutic relationship in individual, family, and group modalities of therapy
Assignment: Therapy for Clients With Personality Disorders
Individuals with personality disorders often find it difficult to overcome the enduring patterns of thought and behavior that they have thus far experienced and functioned with in daily life. Even when patients are aware that personality-related issues are causing significant distress and functional impairment and are open to counseling, treatment can be challenging for both the patient and the therapist. For this Assignment, you examine specific personality disorders and consider therapeutic approaches you might use with clients.
To prepare:
- Review this week’s Learning Resources and reflect on the insights they provide about treating clients with personality disorders.
- Select one of the personality disorders from the DSM-5-TR (e.g., paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic). Then, select a therapy modality (individual, family, or group) that you might use to treat a client with the disorder you selected.
The Assignment:
Succinctly, in 1–2 pages, address the following:
- Briefly describe the personality disorder you selected, including the DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria.
- Explain a therapeutic approach and a modality you might use to treat a client presenting with this disorder. Explain why you selected the approach and modality, justifying their appropriateness.
- Next, briefly explain what a therapeutic relationship is in psychiatry. Explain how you would share your diagnosis of this disorder with the client in order to avoid damaging the therapeutic relationship. Compare the differences in how you would share your diagnosis with an individual, a family, and in a group session.
Support your response with specific examples from this week’s Learning Resources and at least three peer-reviewed, evidence-based sources. Explain why each of your supporting sources is considered scholarly. Attach the PDFs of your sources.
Learning Resources
Required Readings (click to expand/reduce)
Wheeler, K. (Ed.). (2020). Psychotherapy for the advanced practice psychiatric nurse: A how-to guide for evidence-based practice (3rd ed.). Springer Publishing.
- Chapter 18, “Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Complex Trauma”
Required Media (click to expand/reduce)
