Cognitive Behavior Therapy with Gifted Adults: A Guide to Personality, Diagnostics, and the Therapeutic Relationship

This book presents a cognitive behavior approach to therapy with gifted adults, providing insight into and offering practical tools for diagnosing and working with the often unseen and unrecognized problems of these clients.

The book starts with a systematic outline of practical screening for giftedness and diagnosis of specific personality traits, discussing the common traits of giftedness along with the visible and invisible strengths and downsides of the diagnosis. It then offers a practical cognitive behavioral model for working with clients to understand and improve self-image, high sensitivity, creative stagnation, and interactional problems. Readers will learn how to create a case conceptualization, functional analysis, and treatment plan, as well as how to adapt goals and techniques for and with one’s client. Specific attention is given to potential pitfalls and dysfunctions in the therapeutic relationship, and tools are provided to help the therapist specifically analyze and manage these. Practical case studies illustrate the methodology and provide further clarity for the reader.

The book will help any psychotherapist and mental-health-care professional to better support, work with and help gifted adults in their professional practice.

Adriaan Sprey is a clinical psychologist/psychotherapist and in his private practice for education he gives supervision, psychotherapy, diagnostics/personality analysis and post-academic training and education on psychodiagnostics and psychotherapy (www.adriaansprey.nl).