Full Course Description
Treating Adult Clients of Emotionally Immature Parents: How Your Clients Can Reclaim Their Lives from the Toxic Legacy of Controlling, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents
Program Information
Objectives
- Distinguish between psychopathology and emotional immaturity, and establish how a disease concept model can impede therapeutic progress.
- Demonstrate practical communication skills that clients can use to protect themselves and redirect interactions with emotionally immature people.
- Utilize cognitive and emotional techniques to teach clients how they can set boundaries without feeling guilty.
- Employ interventions that help clients regain self-trust and the ability to identify emotionally immature control maneuvers.
- Formulate a treatment strategy that teaches clients how to evade attempts to undermine their mental freedom, inner-world connection, sense of goodness, and ability to reach out to others.
- Apply effective therapy approaches to release clients from emotional coercion and self-doubt in emotionally immature relationships.
Outline
Spotting Emotional Immaturity: Teach Clients to Understand Emotional Immaturity
- Importance of describing over diagnosing
- Projective identification and the Emotionally Immature Relationship System
- Characteristics of emotional immaturity and maturity
- What relationships feel like with emotionally immature people
How Emotionally Immature Parenting Impacts Your Clients: What You Can Expect When They Come for Therapy
- Emotional loneliness and the fear of non-being
- Good coping, emotional suffering; polyvagal effects
- Self-disconnection and distrust of the inner world
- The four horsemen of self-defeat
- Loss of emotional autonomy and mental freedom
- Healing fantasies, role-self, internalizer vs. externalizer styles
Cognitive and Emotional Techniques: What Works and What Doesn’t
- Why clients find it so hard to break free from exploitation and emotional neglect
- Why CBT and psychodynamic approaches aren’t enough
- Exercises to help clients express themselves without anxiety
- Teach clients to simultaneously disengage and become relationship leaders
- How to define and use values as guideposts for the future
- Phrasing suggestions, encouraging agency and showing how it’s done
End Emotional Takeovers and Coercion: Help Clients Achieve Emotional Autonomy from Emotionally Immature People
- The emotionally immature person’s “distortion field”
- Emotional coercion: how clients can spot and deflect control maneuvers
- Communication skills to establish boundaries without guilt
- When to sever ties with someone
Release Self-Doubt, Shame, and Fear: Clinical Tools and Interventions to Help Clients Find Their True Selves
- Techniques to release clients’ feelings of personal “badness”
- Interventions to address fears of being selfish and incapable of love
- Tuning into energy shifts to track safety, unreliability, and threat in others
- Repurpose self-doubt, shame, fear and guilt
- Practicing experiencing emotionally intimate connection
Practice Tips for Working with the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
- Using countertransference effectively
- Honoring personal style
- Invitation, collaboration and celebration vs. direction and persuasion
- How to phrase suggestions
- Research and treatment limitations
Target Audience
- Counselors
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Social Workers
- Psychologists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Copyright :
11/10/2020
Narcissistic and Psychopathic Abuse: The Clinicians' Guide to the New Field of Traumatic Pathological Love Relationships
Program Information
Objectives
- Justify why differentiating Pathological Love Relationships and narcissistic abuse from other domestic violence, addictive, co-dependent, or dysfunctional relationships is important to effective trauma treatment.
- Analyze the unique relational dynamics generated from the pathology and the traumatic impact to intimate partners
- Investigate the five stages of a Pathological Love Relationship (narcissistic abuse).
- Apply the DSM5 Alternative Model personality disorder ‘four impairments’ to predict relational deficits in narcissistic abuse.
- Investigate co-morbid and intensification factors related to behavior of the narcissistic abuser.
- Assess the role of chronic and pervasive Cognitive Dissonance in survivor symptomology.
Outline
Pathological Love Relationships
- Pathological Love Relationship (PLR) definition
- PLR theory and its influences from other fields and disciplines
- Differentiating these relationships and abusers from others
- Research and treatment limitations
Personality Disorders and Their Application to Pathological Love Relationships
- How to spot a Pathological Love Relationship
- Identifying Pathological Love Relationships through personality and personality disorders
- The DSM Alternative Model about personality disorders and interpersonal risk
- Significance of partner pathology as ‘pervasive’ and the relevance to survivor’s understanding
- Problems identifying Pathological Love Relationships
- How to identify relational pathology from the DSM-5 four impairments
Relational Dynamics and Stages of PLRs
- DSM descriptions used as one of the identifiers in spotting a Pathological Love Relationship
- Stages of Pathological Love Relationships
- Pre-Stage— trolling, luring and predatory targeting tactics
- Early Stage— manufactured intensity and reflective relational tactics
- Mid-Phase —when the mask slips
- End relationship dynamics
Survivor Personalities and Targeted Traits:
Critical Considerations for Prevention, Intervention, and Treatment
- Who these survivors are NOT
- Survivor personality super trait elevations and its importance in targeting and recovery
- Agreeableness and cooperation: the relationship investment trait
- Conscientiousness and self-directedness: the integrity-oriented life traits
- Misidentification/misdiagnosis of personality ‘Super Traits’
- Codependency, dependent PD, borderline PD, empaths
Trauma Symptoms and the Aftermath of Narcissistic Abuse:
Atypical Presentations of Trauma and Keys to Treating the Survivor
- How these survivor’s symptoms can be different
- ‘Atypical’ trauma and misdiagnosis
- Cognitive dissonance and its presentation in survivors
- Difference in chronic and persistent CD— not your college understanding
- Cognitive dissonance and its connection to PTSD intensification
- Trauma treatment and further treatment issues
Target Audience
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Physicians
- Addiction Counselors
- Psychiatric Nurses
Copyright :
01/15/2021
Demystifying Personality Disorders: Clinical Skills for Working with Drama and Manipulation
Program Information
Objectives
- Differentiate among the various clinical personality disorder DSM categories.
- Evaluate how transference and countertransference occurs in therapy sessions with personality disorder clients.
- Clinically assess for the nature of “drama” that personality disorder diagnosed clients create.
- Determine how this challenging client population can exploit the vulnerabilities of others.
- Demonstrate two key strategies of “drama non-participation” that clinicians can teach their clients who are impacted by the personality disorder diagnosed partner/family member.
- Demonstrate how re-defining the therapeutic approach can improve treatment outcomes.
Outline
Part I – Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D.
The Challenge of Personality Disorder
- The core of the personality disorder: the unchanging agenda
- The DSM-5® personality disorders and their agendas:
- Schizotypal
- Narcissistic
- Antisocial (and Psychopaths!)
- Borderline
- Avoidant
- Obsessive-Compulsive
- Trait Specified (PDTS) What is that?
- General criteria for personality disorders
- Levels of personality functioning
- Personality trait domains
Overcome Common Clinician Struggles
- Transference & countertransference
- What does transference and countertransference look like in our work?
- Boundary crossings and boundary violations
- How to tell when you are headed for disaster and how to intervene
Part II – Alan Godwin, Psy.D.
Techniques to Counter Manipulation & Empower Victims to Become Survivors
- Recognize the manipulation process
- Re-structure cognitive distortions
- Create healthy boundaries and set limits
- Respond instead of react
- Make direct requests, expect direct responses
- Judge actions, not intentions
- Explore their own vulnerabilities and identify risk factors
- Acknowledge relational limitations
- Resources for ongoing support
Maximize Therapeutic Gains with a Manipulative Client
- Accurately assess your client’s personality characteristics
- Re-define your therapeutic approach
- 5 signs your client is manipulating you
- Techniques to manage thinking errors and manipulative tactics
Strategies for Common Therapyinterfering Behaviors
- Manage countertransference
- Handle boundary violations
- Stay calm when your buttons are pushed – and carry on!
Target Audience
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychologists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Nurses
- Physicians
- Occupational Therapists
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Copyright :
02/24/2021
Emotional Abusive Behaviors and A Closer Look at Gaslighting: Clinical Tools to Break the Cycle of Manipulation and Regain Personal Power
Program Information
Objectives
- Analyze how gaslighting in the context of romantic relationships, friendships, and family relationships can lead to long term effects like trauma, anxiety and depression.
- Employ in-session approaches to help clients become aware of gaslighting behavior in their lives and recognize the consequences.
- Differentiate gaslighting from other forms of emotional abuse to improve your ability to recognize the subtle signs that clients may be victims.
- Employ body-based approaches to help clients who have experienced gaslighting validate their experience and rebuild trust in themselves.
- Utilize techniques from a variety of therapeutic approaches to unravel problematic beliefs that can prevent victims of gaslighting from making therapeutic progress.
Outline
Gaslighting in Relationships and Society
- Define what gaslighting is in measurable terms
- Review of term Gaslighting
- Romantic/intimate relationships
- Friendships
- Family relationships
- Work
- How gaslighting shows up on a larger scale: social media and advertising
- Gaslighting and communal trauma in minority groups
Signs and Side Effects of Gaslighting
- How this shows up for our clients
- Loss of self-confidence
- Emotional disturbance
- Increased vulnerability to emotional abuse
- Decreased autonomy
- Increased risk of codependency
- Retraumatizing survivors of abuse and trauma
Clinical Approaches
- Review of Evidence-based treatments
- Insight and self-awareness – how to help clients recognize gaslighting in their lives
- Self-forgiveness and compassion techniques to heal from shame and interrupt self-criticism
- Body-based approaches to help clients validate their experience and rebuild trust in themselves
- Assertiveness training — teach clients to express needs clearly, directly, and openly
- 5 steps to help clients set healthier boundaries
- Teach clients to identify traits of healthy relationships
- Unravel problematic beliefs with
- IFS, DBT, narrative therapy and somatic experiencing techniques
- Research limitations
Target Audience
- Social Workers
- Licensed Professional Counselors
- Physicians
- Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners
- Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- Other Mental Health and Social Work Professionals
Copyright :
02/01/2021