Assessment and Management of Personality Disorders

Personality disorder presentations are often described as “resistant,” yet the behaviors that frustrate treatment may be organized by enduring beliefs and interpersonal “agendas” that clients do not readily recognize. When self-report is limited, symptoms overlap with other conditions, and maladaptive patterns recur across settings and over time, clinicians need a way to look beyond the immediate behavior and understand how the client is interpreting self, others, and the world.

Behavioral health professionals encounter these patterns in clients seeking help for depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use, relationship conflict, or recurrent crises—not only in clients already diagnosed with a personality disorder. Recognizing personality pathology more accurately can clarify treatment planning, support more realistic expectations, and help clinicians respond without personalizing defensiveness, dependency, avoidance, or inflexibility.

Jeff Riggenbach, Ph.D., brings more than two decades of clinical experience treating complex thinking and personality styles. His development of an integrated personality-disorder program drew on an intensive training led by Marsha Linehan, postdoctoral work through the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research with consultation from Judith Beck and Leslie Sokol, and schema therapy training with Dr. George Lockwood. The resulting program has served more than 500 patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and additional patients with other personality disorders, and he has taught the approach to clinicians across the United States and internationally.

Grounded in this integrated DBT/CBT/Schema Therapy model, the training focuses primarily on assessment and surface-level management rather than comprehensive treatment protocols. It examines the limits of categorical diagnosis and encourages spectrum-based thinking, while showing how signs, client language, historical data, cross-context patterns, and in-session process can strengthen assessment when self-report is incomplete. Treatability is considered cautiously, with attention to severity, functioning, and the uneven evidence available across diagnoses.

For each of the 10 DSM-5 personality disorders, formal criteria are connected to the client’s cognitive profile and “hidden agenda” so clinicians can better understand what may be driving target behaviors and choose a more fitting management response. The 18 early maladaptive schemas provide a shared lens for conceptualizing those patterns, while developmental, biological, cultural, and contextual influences remain part of the assessment. Extended attention to Borderline Personality Disorder models a collaborative diagnostic conversation and clarifies commonly confused mood, trauma, and risk presentations, including distinctions among non-suicidal self-injury, chronic suicidality, and acute suicide risk. Motivational, relational, and cognitive tools illustrate how early management can be adapted to readiness, safety, context, and pace of change.

Key Takeaways:

• A stronger assessment lens: Distinguish enduring, cross-context personality patterns from episodic symptoms by combining DSM criteria with observation, history, and dimensional thinking.
• A clearer map of what drives behavior: Connect client language and target behaviors to cognitive profiles, early maladaptive schemas, and the underlying agenda shaping how the client responds.
• Management matched to the presentation: Select practical ways to pace feedback, communicate, set limits, and support movement toward goals without treating every diagnosis—or every client—the same way.

Why this course?

• Personality pathology is easily missed: Traits may be hidden beneath depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use, or relationship crises, leaving clinicians focused only on the presenting symptom.
• Assessment must translate into action: A diagnosis alone does not tell you how to respond when mistrust, avoidance, dependency, emotional intensity, or rigidity enters the room.
• Broad, clinically nuanced coverage: The course addresses all 10 DSM-5 personality disorders, including often-overlooked Cluster A and Cluster C presentations, while acknowledging diagnostic overlap, spectrum severity, and limits in the evidence base.

 Learning Objectives:

• Analyze the diagnostic criteria and explain key differential diagnosis considerations for each of the 10 DSM 5 personality disorders.
• Identify etiological and epidemiological factors associated with each.
• List the 5 characteristics that differentiate PDs from other psychological conditions.
• Assess the treatability of each of the 10 personality disorders.
• Describe the 18 early maladaptive schemas driving target behaviors, including historical, cultural, and other environmental risk factors influencing them.
• Plan management strategies for all 10 DSM 5 personality disorders.

Register to strengthen your ability to recognize personality pathology, discuss diagnoses collaboratively, and choose management responses that fit the client’s cognitive profile and treatment context. For counselors, social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, addiction professionals, and other behavioral health clinicians, this course offers a practical foundation for clearer assessment and steadier, goal-oriented work with presentations that are often misunderstood or difficult to manage.