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This workbook was written to complement Listening with Purpose: Entry Points into Shame and Narcissistic Vulnerability (Danielian and Gianotti, 2012). The earlier volume, a dense theoretical text, explored the intricate, deeply split and self-deceptive ways in which relationally injured people create personal worlds of ostensible safety that become isolated bastions of misery. We know such patients as “narcissistic.” Their self-systems resist change by repeating patterns that keep their misery dissociated and projected outward. In Listening with Purpose, Danielian and Gianotti also made a comprehensive case for an empathic mode of listening that slowly helps these patients make contact with the vulnerable self-experience that shames and terrifies them. Such listening allows authenticity - the experience of a genuine, worthy core self - to replace hidden misery bit by bit.
The workbook begins with that optimistic vision, advertised boldly in its title: a resilient core will be uncovered; authenticity will emerge. The rigidities of “narcissism” (as defined by relational psychoanalysis, not by DSM symptomology) can, indeed, be treated successfully in psychotherapy; the workbook carries this optimism forward with the promise to show us how it can be done. In straightforward persuasive language, Gianotti and Danielian repeat major ideas from their previous work, offering video vignettes and questions for discussion that help elaborate principles of practice around each idea.
The major ideas tell a coherent story: Persons are born with a natural resilience that moves toward actualizing an authentic self. They are also born needing secure attachment to support this developing self and are therefore vulnerable to attachment trauma and ensuing shame about their