Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach [Paperback]

Theodore Millon (Author), Seth Grossman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0471717711 | ISBN-13: 978-0471717713 | Edition: 1

A revolutionary, personalized psychotherapy approach for the treatment of Axis II personality disorders, by renowned expert Dr. Theodore Millon

Acknowledging the primacy of the whole person, Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach takes into account all of the complexities of human nature--family influences, culture, neurobiological processes, unconscious memories, and so on--illustrating that no part of human nature should lie outside the scope of a clinician's regard.

Part of a three-book series, this book provides you with a unique combination of conceptual background and step-by-step practical advice to guide your treatment of Axis II personality disorders.

Detailed case studies are provided throughout the text to illustrate the strategies of personalized psychotherapy for:
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The Needy/Dependent Prototype
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The Sociable/Histrionic Prototype
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The Confident/Narcissistic Prototype
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The Nonconforming/Antisocial Prototype
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The Assertive/Sadistic Prototype
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The Conscientious/Compulsive Prototype
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The Skeptical/Negativistic Prototype

Destined to become an essential reference for trainees and professionals, this book makes a revolutionary call to return therapy to the natural reality of each patient's life, seamlessly guiding you in understanding the personality and treatment of the whole, unique, yet complex person.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"deals with the more benign resistant disorders such as dependent personality disorder.... excellent examples of the Millonian writing style that will be familiar to his many readers…highly structured, well organized, yet quite readable, offering well-reasoned logic as well as wonderful case examples. The descriptions of the various personality disorders and their subtypes must compete for the absolute best characterizations of those disorders available in the clinical literature....fine work that will engage the reader into process-oriented clinical supervision for the most difficult patients. In our view, they make a major contribution to the treatment planning of character-disordered adolescents and adults." (PsycCRITIQUES, 7/30/08)

"Miller and Grossman summarize the logistics of personalized psychotherapy in the introduction to their book then proceed to demonstrate the usefulness of Personalized Therapy applicable to the different personality patterns. The text is complemented by graphs and tabulations." (The Pediatric Neuropsychologist; 8/07)

From the Back Cover

A revolutionary, personalized psychotherapy approach for the treatment of Axis II personality disorders, by renowned expert Dr. Theodore Millon

Acknowledging the primacy of the whole person, Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach takes into account all of the complexities of human nature—family influences, culture, neurobiological processes, unconscious memories, and so on—illustrating that no part of human nature should lie outside the scope of a clinician's regard.

Part of a three-book series, this book provides you with a unique combination of conceptual background and step-by-step practical advice to guide your treatment of Axis II personality disorders.

Detailed case studies are provided throughout the text to illustrate the strategies of personalized psychotherapy for:

• The Needy/Dependent Prototype

• The Sociable/Histrionic Prototype

• The Confident/Narcissistic Prototype

• The Nonconforming/Antisocial Prototype

• The Assertive/Sadistic Prototype

• The Conscientious/Compulsive Prototype

• The Skeptical/Negativistic Prototype

Destined to become an essential reference for trainees and professionals, this book makes a revolutionary call to return therapy to the natural reality of each patient's life, seamlessly guiding you in understanding the personality and treatment of the whole, unique, yet complex person.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471717711
• ISBN-13: 978-0471717713
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #655,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-Have for the Would-be PD "Expert", June 12, 2010

By 

Rodger Garrett "SighKoBlahGrr" (Loma Linda, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach (Paperback)

With this, I've now waded through four of Dr. Millon's (and his various colleagues') tomes on the character disorders... and uniformly found them all to be terrifically informative and useful. But from the git (with his =Personality Guided Therapy=, 1999), I wondered why it was that Millon and his teams have had so precious little to say about the etiology of the specific disorders.

I may be a "neuropsychological cognitive-behavioralist" in the trenches, but psychodynamic principles have always helped me to deepen my empathy, emotional congruity and unconditional regard for troubled - and troubling - patients. And those Rogerian qualities have reliably proven to be entirely necessary to finesse the process of cognitive restructuring, as well as convincing the patient to surrender his will and his life to the higher power of EMDR, SIQR or some other messing about with his limbic system.

Blame it on Alice Miller, Claudia Black, Pia Mellody, Richard Kluft and Frank Putnam, I suppose. But it really does help (me, anyway) to have a firm grip on "what happened way back when" that's driving the patient's compulsions to repeat the trauma with his relentlessly dysfunctional defense mechanisms.

Over time, and surely with help from Beck's and Freeman's lists of what the specific personality disorder tends to believe, I began to figure that narcissistic injuries of one sort or another had occurred, and that it was likely that the perpetrators demonstrated no mean degree of the same sort of thing that I was seeing and hearing right there in front of me. Some time after that I began to sense that what had worked "well" for the perps was now working "well" for the patient, too.

And that moved me to theorize etiologies that I could then explore in real collaboration with the patient even as we moved right into identifying, exploring, questioning and revising their core beliefs, values, idea(l)s, assumptions, convictions, and attitudes. Millon and Grossman =touch= here and there on childhood suffering in this and the companion volume, =Moderating Severe Personality Disorders=; I suppose I just wish for the sake of those who are newer to the game that they'd expanded those notions a bit further.

Beyond that, there are some especially dandy sections in ORPD, including a fine treatise on the specific differences between the narcissistic and antisocial personalities, on the antisocial's specific mechanisms of imitating his abusers, and on the (obsessive-) compulsive's ironclad fixation with self-abuse driven by "learned perfectionism."

I know that the APA's knocked out a pretty slick (and comprehensive) tome of their own on the PDs, and one does well =as= well to look at Livesley, at Stone, at Clarkin and Lenzenwegger, and at the aforementioned Beck and Freeman. If one asserts oneself to be a true "expert" on the Axis II disorders, however, considerable exposure to Dr. M. seems warranted.