Navigating Personality Dynamics in Complex Trauma Therapy - Exploring the overlap between trauma, personality, and therapeutic process (Workshop with Kathy Steele February 2025)

Personality dynamics can be some of the most challenging terrain to navigate in therapy—especially when shaped by complex trauma. What looks like resistance may in fact be deep protection. What presents as avoidance may be the best strategy the system has found to survive.

This workshop with Kathy Steele offered a compassionate, structured, and deeply insightful lens on how to work with these patterns—especially in clients who have been given or are exploring a diagnosis of personality disorder.

Personality Dynamics & Complex Trauma

What we call personality disorder is often the intersection of two things: inherent sensitivities (sometimes genetic) and developmental environments that didn’t offer the right support. High perfectionism, sensitivity, or hypervigilance might show up as traits—but they’re also shaped by what happened, or didn’t happen, in early caregiving.

Add in trauma—especially chronic or relational trauma—and you often get systems that are both vulnerable and defended. Clients may show up with rigid relational strategies, black-and-white thinking, impulsivity, chronic emotional dysregulation, and difficulty adapting to change. But these are not moral failings. They are survival strategies. Often ego-syntonic—meaning they feel natural, even if they’re causing harm.

The work of therapy is not to attack or shame these patterns. It’s to explore them with compassion, increase safety, and help clients begin to recognise what’s no longer working.

As Steele put it: “It’s not the vulnerability that’s the problem. It’s the safety of the vulnerability.”

In other words—it’s not that someone has vulnerable parts (we all do). It’s that when those vulnerable parts showed up in the past, they weren’t safe. They were punished, shamed, rejected, ignored. So the system learned to defend against them. Now, even in therapy, vulnerability feels dangerous.

The goal is to re-establish safety—so that the system can risk opening up again.

Challenges in Therapy

Clients with entrenched personality dynamics often come to therapy with a mix of hope, fear, and resignation. They want help—but often expect disappointment. Or they want help on their terms—without needing to change. This can make the early work especially difficult.

Some common patterns:

• Hostile–helpless dynamics

• Idealisation and devaluation

• Avoidance masked as disinterest

• A push-pull around intimacy, attachment, and autonomy

• Externalising blame

• Chronic crisis cycles

  
  

All of this can activate something in the therapist. We may feel the urge to rescue, fix, over -function—or withdraw entirely. Part of the work is tracking our own reactions, holding firm boundaries, and staying curious about what’s playing out between us—not just within the client.

Setting the Frame

Strong boundaries are essential. Not as punishment, but as scaffolding. They allow the client to test, push, and trust—within a safe frame. Some reminders from the training:

• Set expectations early.

• Define your role clearly (“I’m here to help you make the changes you want to make.”)

• Be consistent.

• Frame therapy as a collaboration.

• Name relational dynamics directly and compassionately.

  
  

Steele emphasized the importance of stabilisation before trauma processing. Many clients will want to “get to the trauma”—but until emotional regulation improves, that work can be destabilising. Goals should be realistic, specific, and co-created.

Reflection from Practice

I also work part-time in a residential care setting supporting individuals with personality disorders. What I see, again and again, is that change is possible—but it takes time, containment, and a therapeutic relationship that can hold both boundaries and belief.

Often, clients are meeting someone who truly sees them for the first time—not as a set of behaviours or diagnoses, but as a whole person with strengths, struggles, and a system that’s trying, in its own way, to survive.

That’s the beginning. And sometimes, that’s enough to begin a shift.