This Clinician’s Manual describes the Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique (MSSDT), a unique, arts-based, trans-diagnostic clinical assessment tool and treatment approach for children and adolescent psychotherapy patients. The MSSDT incorporates contemporary research-based neuroscience perspectives of multiple self-states theory. Psychologically overwhelming and traumatic experiences that our young patients may have endured, can lay the groundwork for dissociated, shame-based, and disavowed emotional states – rendering distressed young persons as not fully known to themselves. The MSSDT provides a novel opportunity to help bridge the gap in youngsters’ awareness of their discrete emotional states through their artistic expression and telling of their personal stories. Emotionally dysregulated, trauma-based, and dissociative self-states are compassionately and creatively explored, while a focus on adaptive, resilient states of well-being is promoted. In that sense the MSSDT offers a strengths-based approach that can encourage self-understandings, foster the therapeutic bond, and help inform the practitioner of definitive life experiences of the child or teen, in a supportive, non-threating atmosphere. In reading this book, clinicians will learn about key concepts of trauma treatment such as affect regulation principles, attachment relationship, the continuum of dissociation, cultivation of mentalization skills in young patients, the value of art activity, fostering new self-narratives, the clinicians’ therapeutic stance, and how to practically apply the MSSDT across preferred treatment modalities, in one’s psychotherapy practice.
This course is based on the book, The Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique: Creative Assessment and Treatment with Children and Adolescents created by Susan C. Parente, Psy.D. in 2020.
