Holding the Hope:
Working with Clients with Borderline Personality Disorder

Location:  Foxborough, MA - Holiday Inn, Mansfield - Foxborough

Want the good news? There are many best practices and promising interventions that give practitioners skills for more effective ways to help clients diagnosed with a Borderline Personality Disorder manage their lives. Once we look through the lens of attachment, the client's behaviors make sense and there is HOPE!

The bad news is that recovery can be challenging since most consumers will demonstrate serious impairment in several areas such as work/school, family relations, judgment, thinking, mood, and daily living. Working with these individuals can leave treatment providers feeling stressed and carrying the client's unexpressed rage and hopelessness.

This workshop emphasizes practical strategies that you can immediately use in helping clients age 18 and up with physical and emotional self-regulation, distress tolerance, and creating healthy relationships. Using an attachment paradigm for assessment and treatment, we will examine both the evidence-based practices such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and lesser known promising practices incorporating narrative, strength-based and resiliency approaches and mind-body-spirit connections. Destructive behaviors such as substance abuse, violence, suicide attempts, and self-injury will be addressed within the context of relational interventions. Workshop participants will:

• Develop practical strategies for care within an integrated treatment model that combines harm reduction, neurobiological, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, developmental, narrative, and relational perspectives
• Create new skills to design interventions that meet each client at his/her level of change using motivational interviewing and stages of change assessments
• Use metaphor, humor, stories, connection and competence to foster resilience while decreasing the traditional emphasis on problems and pathology in working with this population

Workshop format will include lecture, case examples, and discussion. There will be opportunity for sharing your difficult cases.

Instructor:

Mary Bettley, M.S.W., LICSW, Clinical Director at the Cardinal Cushing Schools has over 25 years of experience working with adults, youth, and families in outpatient, home-based program, residential care, state hospitals, and schools. She is an adjunct professor at Lesley University, has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School's Attachment Conference, and trains nationally on issues of attachment, trauma, and strength-based mental health care across the lifespan. Mary is known for her humor and practical examples.