Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial & Histrionic Personality Disorders:
Effective Treatments for Challenging Clients
Spend a day with Dr. Gregory Lester exploring the diagnostic frameworks and clinical strategies he applies in his own work with Cluster B personality disorders.
Join Dr. Gregory Lester as he delivers an intensive workshop and seminar designed to provide you with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to identify and treat your most difficult personality-disordered clients. Better understand your clients with Antisocial, Narcissistic, Histrionic and Borderline Personality Disorder — and make a breakthrough in clinical treatment.
- Manage the manipulative and possibly violent Antisocial Personality Disorder in session.
- Overcome the Narcissistic Personality Disorder trait of perfectionism and combat their need to overpower you as the therapist.
- Better understand your clients diagnosed with Histrionic Personality Disorder, whose intense emotions and need for attention will test your patience and compassion.
- Help the Borderline Personality Disorder client deal with their explosive emotions, self-harm tendencies and cravings for chaos.
Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial & Histrionic Personality Disorders:
Effective Treatments for Challenging Clients
If you've ever walked out of a session wondering
what just happened… this is for you.
Let's be honest about what nobody trained us for.
You finish a session with that client — you know the one — and you're not sure if you helped them or got played by them. Again.
You went into this field to help people. You did the schooling, the supervised hours, the licensing exam. You learned the modalities. You can run a textbook CBT session in your sleep.
And then a Borderline client walks in and rips your treatment plan in half before week three.
Or the narcissist who, somehow, has you defending yourself by the second session — in the room you're supposed to be running.
Or the antisocial client your agency keeps assigning you because "you're good with the hard ones" — and you're starting to think "good with the hard ones" means "willing to be exhausted."
Or the histrionic client whose chart says "depression" and "anxiety" and "adjustment disorder" — because three clinicians before you also missed what was actually going on.
Here's the part nobody says out loud:
Most of us got maybe one lecture on personality disorders in grad school. A chapter. A weekend somewhere. Then we got thrown into caseloads where cluster B clients show up far more often than our training prepared us for — and we're running standard interventions designed for everyone except them.
And it's not just frustrating. It's the reason you go home and replay sessions in your head. It's the reason your supervision hour gets eaten up by the same three clients every week.
It's the reason you wonder, sometimes, if you're actually any good at this.
Every topic. Every diagnosis. Every technique.
Understanding personality disorders
- Updates to DSM-5-TR® and future changes
- The real purpose of diagnosis
- Treatment errors and misdiagnosis
- Core vs. surface structures
- Four central components to diagnosis
- Risks and limitations
- Understanding psychopathology
- Developmental progress in childhood
- Oppositional defiance
- Attachment and family of origin
- Primary defenses and affects
- Importance of personal power
- Managing in-session violence
- Suicide attempts and threats
- Blockades — manipulation and power struggles
- Risk analysis to self and other
- Interpersonal theory techniques
- Transference and countertransference
- Lessen destructive behaviors
- Cognitive-behavioral techniques
- Psychopharmacology and applicability
- Case studies and treatment exercises
- Differential diagnoses
- Symptom presentation along the spectrum
- Attachment and family backgrounds
- Feeling identification and behavioral control
- Manage rage, boundaries, self-mutilation and suicidality
- Facilitate pattern recognition, create stability, and build therapeutic collaboration
- Develop true sense of self and lessen maladaptive need for attention
- Underlying wishes and fears
- Build DBT core mindfulness skills
- DBT techniques to dissolve distraction, calm interpersonal upheavals, and focus on the "genuine relationship"
- DBT emotion regulation skills
- Psychopharmacology and applicability
- Case studies and treatment exercises
- Differential diagnoses
- Narcissism and environmental contexts
- Attachment and family backgrounds
- Primary defenses and affects
- Tackle the veneer of perfectionism
- Blockades — power struggles, empathy and criticism
- The narcissistic/borderline client
- Interpersonal strategies for empathy
- CBT techniques to clarify behaviors, values and goals
- Tactics to avoid arguing
- Motivational interviewing to overcome resistance
- Prevent sabotage
- Build a sense of true self
- Psychopharmacology and applicability
- Case studies and treatment exercises
- Differential diagnoses
- Moody to excited to flamboyant: the erratic client
- Attachment and family backgrounds
- Primary defenses and affects
- Coquettish behavior, avoidance drama, inauthenticity
- Dangers of the histrionic client
- Link between emotions and behavior
- Interpersonal strategies for expression of true self
- Enhance sense of self and lessen the "spotlight"
- Motivational interviewing techniques
- DBT techniques
- Interpersonal strategies for positive relationships
- Strengthen self-initiative and independent action
- Psychopharmacology and applicability
- Case studies and treatment exercises
- Differential diagnoses
"Of all the webinar CE courses I have taken, Dr. Lester's was the most interesting and educational I have come across."
— PsychologistI know how busy you are. Ever since the pandemic, mental health demand has gone through the roof. I practice in Texas and Colorado and I don't have a single colleague with an opening. My guess is your world looks pretty similar.
So here's my flat-out promise: this day will be well worth your while.
Personality disorders are my thing. Have been since 1984. They're my interest, sort of my passion — what I have a knack for and what I'm good at, quite frankly. I've spent decades training human services professionals on this topic — hundreds of cities, tens of thousands of clinicians. I share that so you know what you're about to learn isn't one person's pet theory. It's been refined through a lot of rooms.
Here's why you're considering this seminar: you already know the secret nobody likes to say out loud. Traditional models often need to be substantially adapted for these clients. Medication doesn't touch the personality itself. Cognitive therapy on its own has historically run into limits here — Aaron Beck himself wrote about that in 1990. Most of the approaches you learned in grad school benefit from significant adaptation before they consistently move the needle. And nobody trained you in the adaptations.
That's part of why difficult clients feel so difficult. The tools many of us were handed weren't built specifically for this problem.
In one day, I'm going to show you what a personality disorder actually is — not the textbook checklist, but the underlying structure. Once you see it, my hope is you'll have an "oh, that's why the standard stuff doesn't always work" moment.
Then we'll get practical. We'll talk about how I think through, in one intake, whether the client in front of me is someone I'd lean toward treating versus managing. We'll talk about the published research on retention with this population. We'll talk about the drama hooks each cluster B can throw and how I try to side-step them without going cold or punitive. And we'll talk about the role of the observing ego in clinical work — a topic many clinicians tell me they received limited training in.
Here's what I hope you'll take away: a clearer conceptualization of what you're looking at, a framework for the management-versus-treatment question, and some specific clinical language you can adapt to your own practice.
Come spend the day with me. I'll see you in there.
What 200,000+ clinicians have said about Dr. Lester's trainings.
"Of all the webinar CE courses I have taken, Dr. Lester's was the most interesting and educational I have come across."
— Psychologist"This is the best program that I have ever attended."
— Psychologist, Community/Mental Health"Excellent presentation. One of the best ever."
— Social Worker, K-12"Whole conceptualization has changed."
— Psychologist"One of the most helpful and concise conferences I have attended — and I am a very old man."
— Psychologist"Wonderful — challenged my traditional thinking of how personality disorders are linked to trauma related disorders."
— Counselor/Psychotherapist"I received so many useful tools in this seminar. I would definitely take a course with him again."
— Social Worker, Child/Adolescent"I learned a new way to think about personality disorders — and more effective ways to treat them."
— Social Worker, Community Mental Health"Amazing speaker! I have already purchased additional trainings of his."
— Counselor/Psychotherapist"Would highly recommend this course to others. Very useful, easily digestible — but so much depth to the content."
— Social Worker (General)"Truly excellent speaker. Informative and engaging."
— Social Worker (General)"I can now recognize how one of my clients in the past has manipulated me tremendously."
— Social Worker (General)
Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial & Histrionic Personality Disorders:
Effective Treatments for Challenging Clients
Build your clinical toolkit for working with Cluster B clients.
Determine how the changes with the DSM-5-TR® impacts diagnosis and treatment of the Cluster B Personality Disorders.
Differentiate symptom overlap, effective treatment and emotional management of each Cluster B Personality Disorders client type.
Choose strategies to manage the manipulative and potentially violent behaviors with your clients diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder in session to make therapeutic progress.
Utilize CBT techniques to clarify behaviors, values and goals with clients diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Apply techniques to decrease explosive emotions, self-harm tendencies and cravings for chaos for clients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Utilize MI and DBT techniques with clients diagnosed with Histrionic Personality Disorder to help manage cognition and improve emotional regulation.
What clinicians have said this program prepared them to work on.
Approach intake with greater awareness of Cluster B presentations — including how personality disorders may be obscured by surface diagnoses.
Think through differential considerations when a presentation could involve trauma, mood, substance use, or personality factors.
Apply clinical strategies discussed in the workshop when working with Antisocial presentations, including manipulation, intimidation, and power dynamics in session.
Use DBT mindfulness and emotion regulation techniques with Borderline clients toward goals of reduced self-harm and improved emotional regulation.
Consider a treatment frame with clearer agreements and consequences as a structural element of clinical work.
Recognize patterns that may inadvertently reinforce target behaviors, and consider alternative session structures.
Bring the workshop's vocabulary and framework into supervision when working with clinicians on Cluster B caseloads.
Discuss approaches to safety considerations for in-session crises, including suicidality and self-harm threats.
Refine your conceptualization of personality disorders with current diagnostic considerations and clinical strategies.
This training was built for the clinician with a real caseload,
not the textbook one.
This is for you if you're a…
- Counselor or psychotherapist — generalist, addictions, K-12 school, child/adolescent, or community mental health
- Social worker — community mental health, child/adolescent, school, or generalist
- Psychologist — generalist, child/adolescent, CMH, school, or addictions/offenders
- Marriage and family therapist
- Psychiatrist or nurse practitioner managing the medication side of Cluster B
- Case manager, rehabilitation professional, or clinical supervisor running point on the hardest caseloads
- Supervisor of clinicians getting chewed up by Cluster B clients — and you need a framework to teach
You'll use this in…
- Private practice — individual sessions and treatment planning
- Community mental health clinics and agency caseloads
- Inpatient and residential settings
- Confined / secure / forensic settings
- Crisis work and threat assessment
- Emergency department social work
- Substance use disorder treatment programs
- Group therapy & school-based mental health (K-12)
- Supervision, clinical training, and primary care behavioral health consultation
Train More. Pay Less. Implement Together.
Bring your team. Save up to 20%. Build a shared clinical framework across your whole practice or program.
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FAQs
"Who was this training designed for?"+
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychologists
- Psychotherapists
- Therapists
- Addiction Counselors
- Marriage and Family Therapists
- Case Managers
- Nurses
- Physicians
- Other Mental Health Professionals
"Where are the in-person trainings held?"+
Fort Collins, CO
Denver, CO
- 7:30 AMRegistration & check-in
- 8:00 AMTraining begins
- — mid-morning15-minute break
- 11:50 AM – 1:00 PMLunch (on your own)
- — mid-afternoon15-minute break
- 4:00 PMTraining ends
Please note: You will have access for 90 days after the program for review. For live CE credit, you must watch the live presentation in its entirety at its scheduled time and complete the CE quiz and evaluation within one week. Please note that this requirement may vary by credit type. Please see detailed credit information for specific requirements for each credit type.
Roughly one in four clients with personality disorders leave treatment prematurely — significantly more often than clients with mood or anxiety disorders — and most who leave do so early in the work. (Iliakis et al., 2021)
The clinical strategies Dr. Lester teaches were built for that reality.
Reframing common assumptions about narcissism.
Clinical conceptualizations of narcissism extend beyond colloquial uses of the term, with attention to image-based defenses, engagement strategies, and considerations for working with criticism sensitivity.
In-session dynamics and safety considerations.
Common interpersonal patterns clinicians may encounter — including ingratiation, intimidation, and boundary testing — alongside safety considerations and clinical strategies for maintaining a working frame.
DBT applications and clinical context.
How DBT mindfulness and emotion regulation techniques may apply with Borderline clients, including considerations for longer-term treatment planning and outcomes documented in the research literature.
Distinguishing histrionic from borderline affect.
Clinical considerations for differentiating between histrionic and borderline affective presentations — both of which involve emotional intensity and shifts — and how that distinction may inform treatment planning.
The role of connection and observation in clinical work with personality disorders.
How verbal interventions and the therapeutic relationship may relate to longer-term clinical work with personality-disordered clients, with reference to relevant research literature where applicable.
Spend a day on the clinical material
most of us never got in training.
A working day with Dr. Gregory Lester on the frameworks, considerations,
and clinical strategies he applies in his own work with Cluster B personality disorders.
100% Satisfaction Guarantee
Register for this intensive training course without risk. If you're not completely satisfied, give us a call at 800-844-8260.
We're that confident you'll find this learning experience to be all that's promised and more than you expected.