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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy for Passive–Aggressive Personality Disorder, Dr. Lorna Smith Benjamin shows her approach to working with clients who exhibit this disorder. Interpersonal reconstructive therapy assumes that maladaptive personality patterns such as passive–aggressive behavior are a repetition of behavior that was once appropriate to the client within the context of his or her childhood family experiences. Therapy involves recognizing these repeated patterns and understanding where they come from and why they continue. Read about precipitating events, stimulus questions, and notes on preceding sessions with the client
Interpersonal reconstructive therapy is based on the assumption that every psychopathology is a gift of love, that is, people develop problematic patterns in an effort to stay connected and loyal, at least intrapsychically, with the important people from their past, particularly their parents and other childhood caretakers. More often than not, persistent "maladaptive" personality patterns represent a repetition of familiar behavior and perspectives that were appropriate given family dynamics during childhood but that have lost their adaptive quality in adulthood. Even clients considered "untreatable" can be helped if the clinician focuses consistently on the underlying attachments that organize the maladaptive patterns.
Lorna Smith Benjamin, PhD, received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1960. Her primary advisor was Harry F. Harlow. After 4 years of internship and postdoctoral clinical training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, she became a faculty member in the department. For the next 18 years, she taught and supervised psychology interns and psychiatry residents while maintaining a full-time private practice.
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