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

by Elizabeth Perl

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.

198 pages, Hardcover

First published February 11, 2008