Rethinking Personality in Psychotherapy

• Move beyond traditional pathology-based “personality disorder” labels to recognize universal adaptive strategies underlying personality
• See how temperament drives each client’s ways of coping, relating, and growing
• Uncover how attachment experiences lead to low or high levels of personality functioning
• Integrate research linking temperament, attachment, and systems like the Enneagram

You’ll walk away with:
A compassionate, science-informed lens for understanding personality as an adaptive process toward wholeness and human flourishing—helping you uncover new routes to healing, integration, and growth.

Introducing the Attachment and Personality (APP) Model

• Discover the PDP framework as a neurobiologically informed model of personality and adaptation
• Understand how safety, regulation, and integration shape growth across the lifespan
• Identify how temperament and its motivations and attentional orientation form each personality pattern’s foundation
• Recognize how trauma and non-secure attachment leads these adaptive strategies toward lower levels of integration—and what growth-edge work restores balance and cultivates higher adaptive functioning

You’ll walk away with:
A clear, evidence-based framework for mapping personality through psychological development, attachment, and neurobiology—revealing the deeper logic underlying your clients’ behavior.

Bridging Neuroscience and Personality: The Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) Connection

• Translate brain science into tools that transform personality patterns from prisons of chaos and rigidity to playgrounds of connection and possibility
• Use insights from research to build regulation, empathy, and connection
• Combine the personality patterns framework and IPNB models to design interventions for real, lasting positive change

You’ll walk away with:
Practical tools to help clients move toward higher levels of personality adaptation and flourishing, focusing on mind, brain, and relationships—bringing the science of integration directly into your clinical sessions.

Assessment: The 9 Core Patterns and Attachment Dynamics

• Assess personality through a PDP perspective on the impact of neurobiological aspects of temperament and the influence of attachment relationships on levels of adaptive functioning
• Apply the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) to understand clients’ attachment organization and its influence on levels of integration in personality development
• Map AAI findings to your client’s personality patterns, combining PDP-specific growth edges with integrative growth toward a secure attachment stance
• Translate assessment data into personalized treatment and repair strategies
• Deepen your own inner-awareness and attunement as a reflective clinician, building on the notion of “clinician, know thyself”

You’ll walk away with:
A structured, PDP-informed and attachment-based method for assessing both personality patterns and the security of attachment—giving you a reliable roadmap to guide targeted, integrative treatment at both the level of personality functioning and of attachment.

Applying the PDP Framework in Clinical Practice

• Identify and work effectively with all nine core personality patterns
• Trace how early temperament form the foundation of each pattern and how attachment moves the expression of that personality toward low or high levels of adaptive functioning
• Pinpoint each client’s “growth edge” to foster integration and regulation
• Help clients use their Personality Pathways map to prevent burnout and build relational resilience

You’ll walk away with:
A step-by-step clinical framework for transforming entrenched personality patterns into pathways for regulation, resilience, and lasting change.