ABSTRACT
This chapter considers and proposes clinically advantageous features of the MSSDT—that is, Therapeutic, Experiential Process; Clinical Assessment; and Treatment Progression Values. Several case vignettes illustrate how participation in the MSSDT, an arts-based therapeutic enhancement tool, allowed for the safe expression of potentially overwhelming psychological experience. These young persons were enabled to identify, clarify, and therefore begin to bring conscious awareness to their diverse self-states. This, in turn, is proposed to have encouraged self-agency and the therapeutically beneficial, personality integrating process of mentalizing. The vignettes also demonstrate how the MSSDT provided a linkage between assessment and treatment by facilitating the therapeutic alliance, in addition to promoting clinically relevant discernments and understandings of each client’s problematic and well-functioning self-experience. The MSSDT process furthermore provided a structure within which collaborative treatment approaches and recommendations could be advanced for the young client individually and/or for the family.
