This image is the cover for the book Reaching through Resistance

Reaching through Resistance

A New Metapsychology of the Unconscious Helps Patients Succeed in Psychotherapy

About half of all psychotherapy clients do not respond--or even worsen--in treatment. Why? They unknowingly use treatment-defeating behaviors, or resistances, that prevent successful collaboration with the therapist. It's as if they cannot allow treatment to succeed. This can be frustrating and demoralizing for both the therapist and the client.

How can you and your client detect and handle treatment resistance? How can you reach through to the person beneath this resistance--the person your client was meant to be?

For treatment to succeed, you need to recognize and challenge treatment resistance from the first session. Reaching through Resistance will help you

• turn a client against his or her own long-held defeating behaviors
• regulate intense anxiety when strong feelings are activated
• activate and process previously avoided impulses and feelings

Using the interventions in this book for handling resistances, you can empower a collaborative, vigorous treatment alliance and mobilize the healing forces within your client.

"Numerous clinical vignettes show how to put theory into practice, leading to enduring change...If you want to know how to help clients change, this book is essential reading."
--David Malan, DM, FRCPsych, noted researcher and author

"Abbass demonstrates how one can reach behind the resistances of even the most repressed and fragile character types and offer them genuine, lasting change...a gold mine of clinical insight."
--Stanley B. Messer, PhD, Dean and Distinguished Professor, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University

Allan Abbass, MD, is a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. He is a highly sought-after consultant, speaker, and clinical supervisor in North America and Europe.

Allan Abbass

Allan Abbass, MD, is a professor of psychiatry and psychology and the founding director of the Centre for Emotions and Health at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.After completing medical school at Dalhousie University, he began his career as a family physician and emergency physician. When he observed that many patients experienced physical and mental symptoms that medications failed to address, he added a year of family medicine residency at McGill University to study a form of short-term psychotherapy.Soon Abbass was immersed in Dr. Habib Davanloo's training and research program, where he discovered that what many symptomatic patients were looking for was an emotional corrective experience with a caring professional. He decided to complete a psychiatry residency at the University of Toronto and then went to the University of British Columbia, where he established a university-based training program in ISTDP and led a provincial tertiary program for people with severe personality disorders.In 1998 he returned to Dalhousie--first as director of psychotherapy and then as director of education for the psychiatry department. In 2013 he was awarded the Douglas Utting Prize for his contributions in the area of major depression. His innovative program to diagnose and treat emotional contributors to medically unexplained symptoms in the emergency department won a quality award and a designation as a "Canadian Leading Practice."Abbass has been consulted widely by governments, universities, and health agencies on the cost-effectiveness and applicability of short-term psychotherapy. In addition, he has been a consultant to the American Psychological Association on the Unified Psychotherapy Project and to the American Psychoanalytic Association, where he serves on the Scientific Committee. He is a visiting faculty member at institutions in the United States, England, and Italy.

Seven Leaves Press