ABSTRACT
Th e treatment of personality disorders (PDs) has increasingly become a pivotal concern for healthcare providers. Recent studies have linked the eff ects of PDs to a broad spectrum of dysfunctions stretching across disturbances in concepts of self, impairments in cognitive, social, and occupational functioning, increases in violence/suicide risk, medical utilization, and substance abuse, as well as heightened prediction of poor treatment response (for a review, see Smith and Benjamin 2002). Furthermore, PDs are not only diffi cult to treat, but given their high comorbidity rate with Axis I disorders, they also complicate and sometimes impede the successful treatment of other disorders (e.g., Shahar, Blatt, et al. 2003). Hence, the need for developing eff ective ways to treat PDs is becoming evident as a key prerequisite to resolving both the aforementioned dysfunctions and to facilitate the treatment of other pathologies, even when PDs do not seem to be the main concern.
