Psychotherapy with Adolescent Girls and Young Women: Fostering Autonomy through Attachment

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.