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 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.

In this much-needed book, two renowned borderline personality disorder (BPD) experts offer simple, easy-to-use skills drawn from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to help you address the most common issues of BPD, such as intense feelings of anger, depression, and anxiety. For many, having BPD is like living in emotional overdrive. And whether you are feeling depressed, anxious, worried, or angry, you might struggle just to get through each day. So, how can you start balancing your moods and managing your symptoms? This helpful guide addresses over fifty of the most common struggles people with BPD face every day, and offers accessible, evidence-based solutions to help you feel better and get back to living your life. You'll discover powerful DBT and mindfulness skills to help you set personal limits, manage intense emotions and moods, and address issues like substance abuse and doing harm to yourself and others. In addition, you'll learn how to deal with the inevitable negative self-talk, feelings of paranoia, and self-invalidation. If you’re ready to take charge of your BPD—instead of letting it take control of you—this book will be your go-to guide. Perfect for everyday use, the practices within will help you manage your symptoms as they arise.

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

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.

This landmark work was the first to present a cognitive framework for understanding and treating personality disorders. Part I lays out the conceptual, empirical, and clinical foundations of effective work with this highly challenging population, reviews cognitive aspects of Axis II disorders, and delineates general treatment principles. In Part II, chapters detail the process of cognitive-behavioral therapy for each of the specific disorders, review the clinical literature, guide the therapist through diagnosis and case conceptualization, and demonstrate the nuts and bolts of cognitive intervention.

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