Rewiring the Brain: Treatment Techniques for Obsessive Compulsive, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Borderline Personality Disorders – Kristina Hallett

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Imagine your sessions with clients with personality disorders.

What comes to mind?

Challenging? Overwhelming? Frustrating?

What if you had the tools to make each session feel more productive and that you’re actually making progress? Discover how you can help your client become:

• More emotionally stable
• More empathetic
• More flexible in the way he/she thinks and reacts in trying situations
• Less reactive

All this is possible once you have developed the skills to help your client modify the rigid, maladaptive traits of obsessive compulsive, narcissistic, antisocial, and borderline personality disorders. You can learn how to utilize the motivations and defenses of these disorders to create lasting improvement. In this recording, Kristina Hallett, Ph.D. teaches you practical treatment techniques grounded in cutting-edge neuroscience. Using techniques from DBT, Mindfulness, CBT and EMDR, your clients can learn to rewire their brain to live a healthier, more stable and productive life. 

1. Select therapeutic methods for neural repair based on the neuroscience of implicit traits and temperamental characteristics of 5 personality disorders.
2. Teach clients with Antisocial Personality Disorder how to manage impulsivity and high-risk behavior through training of the “wise mind.”
3. Develop dialectical constructs to enhance awareness and motivation in narcissistic clients.
4. Incorporate techniques that help the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality identify and express emotion.
5. Determine how borderline clients should use journaling techniques to discover and work through implicit memories that create mood and behavioral instability.
6. Integrate tools from EMDR to help all clients move past obstacles posed by histories of trauma or abuse.

Part 1: The Development of Personality Disorders

• Biology and temperament
• Agency and a desire to be affiliated
• Anxiety and harm avoidance
• Interpersonal Neurobiology – The concept of neural repair and neural integration

Part II: Treatment Strategies

I. Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Anxiety and APD
  • Develop harm avoidance
  • Utilize active relaxation
  • Anxiety in disguise: Find anxiety and tame Anger with the anger diary
  • Anger escalator tools for anger management
• Depression and the Antisocial PD
  • The hidden emotion
  • Cost-benefit analysis of behaviors
  • Use HALT tips to modulate expression
• Interpersonal Relationship and APD
  • Turn agency into positive paths
  • Journaling to identify implicit memory to increase awareness
  • Train the “wise mind” for better self-control
  • Storytelling for attunement and empathy

II. Narcissistic Personality Disorder

• Anxiety and NPD
  • Diminish the intensity of harm avoidance
  • Teach appropriate assertiveness
  • Worry management strategies
  • Energy therapies and self-soothing
  • Dispute irrational fears of humiliation
• Depression and NPD
  • Increase agency
  • Accept responsibility for vicious circles of grandiosity and loss
  • Battle grandiosity by increasing achievement
  • Improving awareness of and attunement to others
  • Mindfulness techniques and cost-benefit analysis
• Interpersonal Relationships and NPD
  • Using desire for affiliation
  • Reframe indifference to others and motivate connection with dialectical constructs
  • Genuine contributions: The path to legitimate self-worth

III. Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

• Anxiety and OCPD
  • Breaking the rule of harm avoidance
  • Identify the conflict with inner values
  • CBT to change worry and rumination
  • Real self-focusing techniques to find feelings
  • Discharging anger – the underlying trigger of anxiety
  • Learning to tolerate anxiety of making mistakes
  • Breaking free from “technology slavery”
• Depression and OCPD
  • Increase positive agency
  • Change derogatory self-talk
  • Interrupt and dispute compulsive behavior
  • Prescribe fun!
• Interpersonal relationships and OCPD
  • Affiliation and anger
  • Mindfulness practices to increase attunement to others
  • ”I” statements and negotiation skills
  • Deflate resistance to increase self/other honesty
  • Systems therapy strategies
  • Eliminate passive aggression

IV. Borderline Personality Disorder: The Quest for Connection

• Anxiety and BPD
  • The forgetfulness of harm avoidance
  • Fill in skills deficits: Teach and practice conflict resolution skills
  • Ground techniques to increase emotional stability
  • Journaling techniques
• Depression and the BPD
  • The forgetfulness of agency
  • Interrupt self-injurious behavior
  • EMDR practices to loosen the grip of the past
  • Minimize catastrophic rumination w/CBT
• Interpersonal Relationships
  • Craving affiliation and its destructive impact
  • Improve therapeutic relationships
  • Relationship histories
  • Practice assertiveness vs aggression

Limitations of the Research and Potential Treatment Risks

• RCT’s, efficacy studies and related research
• Thinking outside the box, while maintaining a scientific basis
• Tried and true treatment strategies

Please Note: PESI is not affiliated or associated with Marsha M. Linehan, PhD, ABPP, or her organizations.