Personality-Guided Therapy Over Time

In ""Personality-Guided Therapy Over Time"", Dr. Jeffrey J. Magnavita demonstrates his unified model of conceptualizing personality dysfunction and focusing treatment using four well-established constructs as pattern recognition tools. His approach tailors psychotherapy to each client, systematically interweaving therapeutic modalities, strategies, and interventions using a biopsychosocial perspective. There is a unified framework that allows for the holistic blending of many therapeutic strategies by selecting from the array of evidence-based approaches. In this title, a systemic perspective is used to organize the many levels of analysis possible in therapy and to see which therapeutic technique or model works best for an individual client. In this series of six sessions, Dr. Magnavita works with a woman in her 40s to uncover her feelings about her family distancing themselves from her after she came out as a lesbian. During the initial interview it also emerges that she uses alcohol in a destructive fashion to deal with her emotions. Treatment centers on helping the client recognize her self-defeating patterns emanating from issues related to growing up in a dysfunctional family and resolving the emotional attachments that keep her stuck. Over the course of six sessions, she becomes more aware of her feelings and discovers more adaptive ways to deal with them in order to extricate herself from these repetitive patterns. Personality-guided relational psychotherapy offers a unified framework that encompasses four domains of human functioning to conceptualize personality dysfunction and focus treatment. These four levels begin at the micro-level of analysis and become increasingly more macroscopic in focus, and can be conceptualized as nested aspects of relational systems. The four levels are: biological - intrapsychic matrix; dyadic - interpersonal matrix; relational - triadic matrix; and, sociocultural - familial matrix. All human psychopathology is an expression of a dysfunctional personality system broadly conceived. Within each of these matrices, there is an array of methods which can be incorporated to enhance differentiation and integration among the various component subsystems, and thereby create a more functional personality system.