The mechanism of emotional change is central to the field of mental health. Emotional change is necessary for healing the long-standing pain of character pathology, yet is the least studied and most misunderstood area in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. Changing Character at its heart is about emotion,how to draw it out, recognize it and make it conscious, follow its lead and, equally important, use cognition to guide, control, and direct our emotional lives. This treatment manual teaches therapists time-efficient techniques for changing character and helping their patients live mindfully with themselves and others through adaptive responses to conflictual experiences.Leigh McCullough Vaillant, a nationally recognized expert on short-term dynamic psychotherapy, shows therapists how to identify and remove obstacles in one's character (ego defences) that block emotional experience. She then illustrates how the therapist can delve into that experience and harness the tremendous adaptive power provided by emotions. The result? She shows us how to have emotions without emotions having" their way with us. Vaillant's integrative psychodynamic model holds that the source of psychopathology is the impairment of human emotional experience and expression, which includes impairment in drives and beliefs but is seen fundamentally as the impairment of affects.In this short-term approach, psychotherapists are shown how to combine behavioural, cognitive, and relational theories to make psychodynamic treatment briefer and more effective. Vaillant illustrates how affect bridges the gap between intrapsychic and interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy. Affect, she argues, has the power to make or break relational bonds. Through the regulation of anxieties associated with affects in relation to self and others, therapists can help their patients undergo meaningful character change. A holistic focus on affects and attachment has not been adequately addressed in either traditional psychodynamic theory or cognitive theory. Clearly and masterfully, Vaillant shows therapists how to integrate the powers of cognition and emotion within a dynamic short-term therapy approach.

This hands-on manual from Leigh McCullough and associates teaches the nuts and bolts of practicing short-term dynamic psychotherapy, the research-supported model first presented in Changing Character, McCullough's foundational text. Reflecting the ongoing evolution of the approach, the manual emphasizes affect phobia, or conflict about feelings. It shows how such proven behavioral techniques as systemic desensitization can be applied effectively within a psychodynamic framework, and offers clear guidelines for when and how to intervene. Demonstrated are procedures for assessing patients, formulating core conflicts, and restructuring defenses, affects, and relationship to the self and others. In an easy-to-use, large-size format, the book features a wealth of case examples and write-in exercises for building key clinical skills. The companion website (www.affectphobiatherapy.com) offers useful supplemental resources, including Psychotherapy Assessment Checklist (PAC) forms and instructions.

Can the effects of early childhood traumas traumas that may have seemed small at the time but that have affected personality development be overcome in short-term therapy? Here, leaders in the field of short-term therapy present a definitive statement on state-of-the-art intensive dynamic short-term psychotherapy. While they have approached these questions from different perspectives, the renowned practitioners in this book note points of contact and overlap among their ideas about the underlying causes of depression, maladjustment, marital discord, character pathology, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Each outlines the precise methods he or she uses with patients to create emotional growth and reintegration, illustrating these with cases and transcripts. Their methods can be proven scientifically valid, taught to others, and reliably reproduced by effectively trained psychotherapists with a wide variety of patients. Readers will find variations on the theme of short-term therapy for long-term change. Habib Davanloo was a colleague of Malan s and has influenced Neborsky, Alpert, and McCullough. While Neborsky has devoted himself to refining and presenting clearly Davanloo s theory and method, Alpert has developed a method of accelerated empathic treatment and McCullough has designed an anxiety-regulating therapy that is the subject of several research studies. Solomon has applied dynamic theories to treatment of intimate relationships. Shapiro, using EMDR, approaches Big-T and small-t traumas in what seems initially a quite different way but is shown ultimately to have many similarities to short-term dynamic psychotherapy. With this basis in research and clinical practice, the theories and methods presented here have the potential to revolutionize psychodynamic psychotherapy."