Main description:

Adolescent girls and young women in therapy--even those who genuinely desire change--often are highly ambivalent and difficult to engage. This book provides fresh insights and powerful clinical tools for understanding a young woman's conflict between her attachment and dependence on her parents and her efforts to be autonomous, and how this may play out in seemingly treatment-rejecting behavior. Rich case material illustrates innovative ways to embrace resistance, rather than fight it, to build a strong therapeutic relationship that can get to the root of self-defeating patterns. The book is unique in addressing clinical work both with teens and with women in their twenties and beyond, who frequently struggle with unresolved adolescent issues.

Contents:

1. The Mother-Daughter Bond and Its Implications for Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship

2. Embracing Resistance and Building Attachment

3. When Parents Collude with Their Daughter's Resistance

4. Challenging Resistance and Sustaining Attachment

5. The Going Gets Tough When the Patient Gets Angry

6. When Attachment to a Therapist Is Not Therapeutic: Recognizing Malignant Regression

7. Beyond Idealization: Fostering Genuine Intimacy and Mutuality

8. Repetition as a Path to New Experience

9. Allowing for Attachment after Therapy Ends