Personality Disorders and Affect Regulation e-learning course
e-learning course
Speaker: Dr Gwen Adshead
Product: e-learning course
Price: £125
CPD Hours: 5
Instructions on how to access the e-learning course will be included in a downloadable document in your booking confirmation email (under ‘Download’). The e-learning course becomes available within 24 hours from placing the order and online access remains available for 2 years from the date you receive the e-learning course.
Early childhood adversity, neglect and childhood sexual abuse are just some of the risk factors that can directly impact behaviours we associate with Personality Disorders. An explanation for such linkage is that clients with personality disorders experience great difficulty in establishing and sustaining interpersonal relationships that require good affect regulation. Their inability to regulate negative affects increases the likelihood of unregulated hostility and angry responses. This actually puts such clients at an enhanced disadvantage – not only do they tend to alienate caregivers, but they are likely to do so at times of greatest need.
All of our course times are shown for Melbourne / Sydney so check what time this course will be on in your time zone using the time zone checker.
Full Course Information
At this practical seminar which would be especially relevant for psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors and psychiatrists, Dr Adshead suggests that it is impractical to provide therapy for behavioural manifestations without a proper understanding of underlying cognitive schema and neurobiological basis. She presents evidence on the development of affect regulation within attachment relationships that explains both the symptoms of and effective therapeutic strategies for personality disorders. By viewing personality disorders through the lenses of attachment and affect regulation, she equips us to recognise the multiple challenges faced by clients: heightened perception of threats, inability to repair emotional states stimulated by threat or fear and the shift in locus from external to internal affect regulation. We comprehend the specific nature of affect dysregulation for personality disorders according to clusters:
- Cluster A: paranoid personality disorders
- Cluster B: borderline personality disorders
- Cluster C: anxious / avoidant personality disorders
By drawing our attention to Affect Regulation as not the only one, but arguably the most critical aspect of personality disorders, Dr Adshead helps us inform our therapeutic approaches when working with mild to moderate disorders across the spectrum.
About the speaker
Dr Gwen Adshead is a psychotherapist, group analyst and forensic psychiatrist. She trained as a psychiatrist, and then as a forensic psychiatrist after completing a master’s Degree in medical law and ethics at King’s College, London. She was lecturer in victimology at the Institute of Psychiatry, where she studied interpersonal trauma and its effects; then trained as a psychotherapist, with a particular interest in Attachment Theory. She first started work at Broadmoor Hospital as a senior psychiatric trainee in 1990; and over the last twenty years has worked as a responsible clinician, as well as a consultant psychotherapist.
Her research interests include moral reasoning in psychopaths and antisocial men; the attachment narratives of abusive mothers; and how psychotherapies work with violent people. Gwen has published over 100 papers, book chapters and commissioned papers; co-edited three books and is working on three more.
Gwen’s principle training is group dynamic; but she also has experience of cognitive approaches to therapy, DBT, and mentalization based therapies.



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