Amazon.com description: Product Description: Explore and understand new approaches in Borderline therapy Most persons with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have endured massive empathetic failure at the hands of mental health providers. Empathetic Treatment of Borderline Personality: A Disorder of Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation offers a new sympathetic, relational approach to treating this much maligned and misunderstood disorder. Presented along with a new reading of the origins and psychodynamics of the condition are treatment examples that can be readily applied to research and clinical practice. This text helps to clear a path through the enigmatic symptoms that often leave both patients and therapists bewildered and frustrated.

In addition to being a critical reexamination of traditional theories, Empathetic Treatment of Borderline Personality: A Disorder of Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation addresses BPD in light of recent research on relational trauma, child development, and dissociative processes. This provides a better understanding of the disorder's evolution and an updated definition to work within. Through vivid case studies and understandable, research-based theory, an innovative vision of the therapist-patient bond is brought to light. This new approach to BPD therapy meets patients at the level of their own experience to provide them with a more secure base of attachment and supportive relationship. These unique, wide-ranging discussions and rational treatment techniques are readily useable and create the foundation for a more effective and empathetic alliance between those afflicted with BPD and their therapists.

Topics addressed in Empathetic Treatment of Borderline Personality: A Disorder of Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation include:

the etiology of BPD
de-pathologizing historical concepts of BPD
the trauma/dissociation spectrum and multiple self states model
relating BPD and chronic relational trauma
BDP and post-traumatic symptoms
victim and abuser states
passive attachment and rage
disorganized attachment and development of dissociated self-states
dissociative processes in borderline defenses
transference and countertransference
alternating victim and perpetrator self-states and treatment
current approaches to treatment
the therapeutic alliance

Empathetic Treatment of Borderline Personality: A Disorder of Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation is an important resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, counselors, marriage and family therapists, and students, researchers, and academics in the mental health field.