The cover of a book titled 'The BPD Compass Workbook' with a subtitle describing it as a personalized treatment approach for borderline personality disorder, and mentions the authors and foreword author.
The cover of a book titled 'The BPD Compass Workbook' with a subtitle describing it as a personalized treatment approach for borderline personality disorder, and mentions the authors and foreword author.

What if treatment for BPD wasn’t one-size-fits-all?

The BPD Compass Workbook is a personalized, evidence-based guide for people living with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the therapists who treat them. Instead of working through every skill in the same order, you'll learn how to identify the patterns driving your symptoms and focus on the strategies most likely to help you build a values-aligned life.

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A Treatment Plan That Fits You – Not Your Diagnosis

Finally, a science-backed workbook that helps you identify the patterns driving your symptoms and focus on the skills most likely to help. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you'll learn a personalized path toward managing intense emotions, improving relationships, and building a life that reflects your values.

Two people with their heads together, resting on each other's shoulders in an indoor, well-lit corridor with glass walls.

Is the BPD Compass Workbook Right For You?

If your emotions feel overwhelming, your relationships seem to follow the same painful patterns, or you find yourself making choices that move you away from the life you want…

You’re in the right place.

Want to Learn More?

Download a free sample chapter

Plus exclusive bonus resources designed to help you start putting the skills into practice right away:

Music player interface displaying the song 'BPD Compass Meditations' by Shannon Sauer-Zavala and Matt Southward, with album art featuring colorful, concentric, overlapping head profiles on a blue background.
A printed worksheet with a table for analyzing changing behaviors using the DARS Triad Inventory. The table includes columns for date, situation, undesirable behavior, alternative action, and consequences with values for short-term, long-term, and with value.
Documents titled Therapist Adherence Rating Scale for BPD, sitting on a black surface, with pages slightly fanned out, showing text and form elements.

What You’ll Walk Away With

  • Identify Patterns

    Understand the patterns pulling you off course

  • Respond Differently

    Pause & choose—even in the moments that usually derail you

  • Values Aligned

    Build a life that aligns with your values & the thriving identity you’re building

How It’s Structured

  • Illustration of a clipboard with a checklist containing multiple checkmarks.

    Your Custom Plan

    Take a research-backed assessment to develop your custom treatment plan

  • Icon of a diamond with sparkles.

    Become a Values PRO

    Clarify your values so the changes you're making fit the life you’re trying to build

  • A minimalistic illustration of a human head outline with a light bulb and rays inside, symbolizing ideas or creativity.

    Skills for Thinking

    Learn to think flexibly about emotions, relationships, & triggers for impulsivity

  • Icon of a person running, with motion lines indicating speed, on a circular light purple background.

    Skills for Doing

    Get off autopilot and prioritize behaviors that move you toward your values in the long run

  • Simple line drawing of a person meditating in a seated lotus position with a halo of lines around their head, symbolizing enlightenment or focus.

    Skills for Being

    Develop the capacity to watch emotions, conflicts, and urges without reacting automatically

  • Line art illustration of hands forming a heart shape with a smaller heart inside, within a circular background.

    The New Normal

    Practice applying new skills across contexts until they feel comfortable & automatic

For Therapists Treating BPD

Whether you're a seasoned BPD clinician or encountering borderline personality disorder in your practice for the first time, the BPD Compass Workbook provides a practical, personalized roadmap for treatment. Rather than requiring intensive specialty training, it helps you identify the personality patterns driving each client's symptoms and target the skills most likely to produce meaningful change. If you're looking to build deeper clinical expertise, explore workshops and certification in BPD Compass. →

Praise for BPD Compass

  • David H. Barlow, PhD: Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry at Boston University

    David H. Barlow, PhD

    What has been missing for clinicians is an approach to treatment for BPD that personalizes intervention for each individual patient. The BPD COMPASS approach does just that, and in a user-friendly manner that will be invaluable to clinicians.

  • Melanie Goldman, R.P. Founder of Mind Over Borderline Therapy Clinic, clinician specializing in borderline personality disorder

    Melanie Goldman, R.P.

    This workbook serves as an innovative resource, seamlessly integrating research, practical tools, and compassionate guidance to foster personal and relational growth. One tool that truly resonated with me is the Relationship Compass. I plan to utilize it both with my clients and for my own personal development to clarify my values, identify my needs and wants, and navigate relationships with intention.

  • A minimalistic illustration of a human head outline with a light bulb and rays inside, symbolizing ideas or creativity.

    Kiki Fehling, PhD

    The BPD Compass Workbook provides something very valuable and rare: an accessible self-help resource for people with borderline personality disorder that is evidence-based and individualized. Readers are provided real guidance on tailoring the workbook to their specific desires, whether that's coping better with their emotions, improving their relationships, or reducing impulsive behaviors. An important workbook that offers concrete skills and hope for living a more fulfilling life.

  • Jennifer S Cheavens, PhD Professor of Psychology, The Ohio State University BPD and DBT researcher and clinician

    Jennifer Cheavens, PhD

    This team of outstanding clinical researchers has developed a triple-threat – evidence-based, accessible, and personalized - intervention for BPD with the COMPASS manual. First, they provide readers with a straight-forward, warm, and actionable manual based on years of their research. Second, they put the treatment in the hands of clients. Finally, the personalized therapy allows every client to create a path forward that works for them. This is an excellent contribution to the BPD treatment toolbox.

  • Ueli Kramer, PhD, Professor in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Past President of the European Society for the Studies of Personality Disorders

    Ueli Kramer, PhD

    With this essential workbook, clients with borderline personality disorder finally have now in their hands a concrete key to help them move towards recovery. Starting from one’s corevalues and goals, over the actual effectiveness of the skills used, towards systematically tracking progress over time, Sauer-Zavala, Southward, Hood and Wilner propose an ultimately flexible, sizeable and modular approach to overcoming client’s problems in daily life.

  • Blaise Aguirre, MD

    Blaise Aguirre, MD

    The BPD Compass Workbook offers a refreshingly thoughtful and clinically sophisticated approach to addressing borderline personality disorder. Rather than treating BPD as a fixed or monolithic diagnosis, this workbook recognizes the profound individuality of each person’s experience and provides a personalized roadmap for change. What makes this book especially valuable is its balance of structure and flexibility: readers are invited to move through the material in a way that fits their own values, needs, and goals. This is an important, practical, and genuinely hopeful resource for people with BPD and the clinicians who support them.

Book’s Argument

Real change comes from identifying and targeting the patterns that actually drive your symptoms.

What makes BPD Compass different?

  • 🧭 Personalized treatment plan just for you

    No two people experience BPD the same way—and this workbook doesn’t treat you like they do. You’ll begin with a brief assessment to identify your primary patterns, then follow a plan tailored to your needs - so you’re not wasting time.

  • 🎯 Targets the Root Patterns–Not Just Symptoms

    Instead of playing whack-a-mole with every symptom, BPD Compass focuses on the personality vulnerabilities that drive their expression. It's more potent and efficient this way – helping you improve fast.

  • 🌱 Simultaneously handles co-occurring conditions:

    The core patterns that drive BPD symptoms are also important for other difficulties—like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more—so the skills you build here lead to meaningful change in all the ways that count.

  • 🏆 Proven CBT tools, tested in clinical trials

    Grounded in cognitive-behavioral science, the Compass approach will teach you effective skills for thinking, doing, and being.

    See the Science →

What Clients Are Saying...

  • I just want to say that this treatment has changed many relationships in my life and I am grateful to have been a part of it. I think everyone should know and practice these skills and I so pleasantly surprised at the course of therapy  as a whole and at myself. Thank you to Shannon. What you do here changes lives and I want you to know it means something.

    Former Client

  • Shannon was wonderful. I felt seen, heard and understood.   I love that this option came open. For someone who doesn't qualify for inpatient/intensive outpatient or is unable to go for, this treatment was great. It gave all the tools I was lacking and I am so grateful. 

    Former Client

  • Thank you! This could help those with BPD who have gone through a topsy-turvy life. Shannon has been the best therapist I've had. I knew I could always be honest with her when talking about my internal struggles.

    Former Client

  • Working with Shannon  was powerful and made BPD less scary.  My anxiety has decreased tremendously by giving me tools to address the thoughts that had been running wild convincing me I was terrible.

    Former Client

  • Shannon helped me realize I can shape who I am and what I value and also to stop running from emotional distress by doing things that are outside of the life I am shaping.

    Former Client

A woman with blonde wavy hair, smiling, wearing a navy blazer over a colorful floral dress with shades of purple, white, and red, accessorized with layered necklaces and jewelry, posing against a plain white background. 
Hello!

Science-Backed Personality Change

Hi! I'm Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala. BPD Compass grew out of 15+ years of research on personality change, conducted with my team. We ran the clinical trials, refined the treatment, and know it works.

It also comes from recognizing that the most effective treatments for this condition still aren't reaching everyone who needs them.

So BPD Compass is designed to bridge that gap, turning cutting-edge research into something accessible you can actually use to create meaningful change for yourself or your clients.

Learn about the Science →

Why now?

Awareness of borderline personality disorder has grown. But access to effective treatment hasn’t kept up. BPD Compass offers a more focused, accessible way forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • The BPD Compass Workbook is a personalized, science-backed workbook that helps people with borderline personality disorder, a condition marked by intense emotions, unstable relationships, and impulsive behavior, identify their specific patterns and build the skills to change them.

  • The BPD Compass Workbook was created to solve the most common reason BPD treatment fails: one-size-fits-all programs. It starts with a brief assessment that identifies which patterns are driving your specific struggles, so you only work on what actually applies to you.

  • No. The BPD Compass Workbook is designed for anyone who recognizes patterns of intense emotions, difficult relationships, or impulsivity in their life. No diagnosis required to start.

  • DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is the most established BPD treatment, but it's intensive and often requires a full year of weekly individual and group sessions. The BPD Compass Workbook draws on core evidence-based skills, but is built around a personalized assessment, so you focus only on the patterns driving your specific symptoms, rather than working through every skill in a fixed sequence.

  • No. The BPD Compass Workbook is designed to be used completely on your own, or alongside a therapist if you have one.

FAQs for Therapists

  • The BPD Compass Workbook is based on the COMPASS program, a short-term cognitive behavioral intervention developed by Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala and tested in NIMH-funded clinical trials. It targets the specific patterns driving each client's difficulties rather than applying the same protocol to everyone.

  • The BPD Compass Workbook was developed by Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky who has trained clinicians across six continents in this evidence-based approach.

  • Yes. The BPD Compass Workbook is modular and customizable, built specifically for clinical use and designed to integrate into existing treatment workflows without disrupting your current approach.

  • Yes. The COMPASS program behind the BPD Compass Workbook has been tested in rigorous NIMH-funded clinical trials, making it one of the most evidence-backed personalized approaches to BPD treatment available.

  • Yes. BPD Compass isn't designed to replace DBT, it targets the underlying personality patterns (negative affectivity, antagonism, disinhibition) that drive BPD symptoms, and can complement DBT skills training or serve as a shorter-term, transdiagnostic option when a full DBT program isn't accessible or appropriate.

  • BPD Compass is available through all major book retailers. Here is the link to our Amazon page, and here is a link to find your local bookseller so that your purchase can support them!

Cover of the book titled 'The BPD Compass Workbook' with pastel-colored waves and list of authors.

What if treatment for BPD wasn’t one-size-fits-all?

Who it's for: People diagnosed with BPD, or who suspect they have it. Also therapists using it with clients.

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