AIT Personality Disorder (Character Structure) Treatment Seminar
Every person has character structure: the unconscious defensive foundation formed early in life, holding identity, protection, and reality-testing in place. Most people carry places where those foundations were wounded, whether or not they meet criteria for a personality disorder. What clinical language calls personality disorder sits at one end of a continuum; character structure runs through all of us. It is not something we have, but something we experience as being who we are.
This seminar offers AIT protocols for reaching character structure at the depth it was formed, at the layer the client experiences as self.
BENEATH WHAT THE CLIENT EXPERIENCES AS SELF
There are clients who do not move despite considerable work by them and by the clinician. They want change and reach for it repeatedly, but what they meet is not defense against treatment. It is character structure that has fused with the client's sense of self. Even experienced clinicians can lose their footing here, not for lack of skill, but because what the client cannot see about themselves, we cannot reach.
A depth-psychology approach reads this territory differently. The resistance is a defensive foundation formed when protection was survival, still doing its work long past the moment it was needed. Reached at the depth it was formed, character structure becomes workable, not by dismantling what the client experiences as self, but by treating the foundation beneath it.
inside the seminar:
- AIT Character Structure Process: Treat character structure at the foundation of personality disorder traits.
- Unwillingness to Change: Address the entrenched inner opposition that keeps character structure locked in place.
- Ego Development and Strengthening: Advanced protocol work with ego defenses, ego functions, and situations where an archetype functions in place of the ego.
- PD-Specific Transferences: Work with transference psychosis, the negative symbiotic parent transference, and splitting idealization.
YOU WILL ALSO LEARN:
The archetypal patterns underlying each character structure, with detailed charts of archetypal activity and polarities that become an ongoing working reference in your practice.
Focused protocols for the specific patterns most commonly encountered in personality-disorder work: Perfection, Projection, Distrust, Abandonment, and Empathy.
There is a level in some clients at which even considerable work stops. Character structure lives below where depth work has been able to reach. Often what holds is the ego itself, defensively protecting something so long-held that the protection has become part of the client's sense of self. What feels like self will not question itself. Treated where character was formed, what has held becomes workable, and what has felt like an impasse begins to move. The clients most therapists are trained to avoid become clients whose depth can be met.
JOIN THE NEXT ONLINE TRAINING!
AIT Personality Disorder (Character Structure) Treatment Seminar
Live Online via Zoom
November 7, 8, 14 & 15
9:30 AM–3:30 PM EST
Teacher: Lisa Bowker, AIT Teacher & Supervisor
Prerequisites: AIT Basics & MAP
Early Bird Tuition: $645 if paid in full by October 7
Regular Tuition: $750