Full Course Description

Breaking the Cycle of Unhealthy Family Relationships: Top Tools for Better Boundaries

For our adult clients with difficult parents, there’s a constant struggle between maintaining connection and protecting themselves from getting hurt.

Especially when there have been years of parental abuse, neglect, addiction, or mental illness, it's easy for therapy to get stuck on processing the past...

...and never get to the specific steps our clients can take NOW to feel better.

The key to healthier relationships is teaching our clients how to establish boundaries.

And now, you can learn top tools for better boundaries directly from relationship expert and acclaimed clinician and author, Nedra Glover Tawwab, LCSW.

She’ll give you practical, easy-to-implement interventions that you can use right away to help your clients set better boundaries and transform their interactions with difficulty family members.

PLUS, don’t miss in-depth conversations between Nedra and key experts in the field, including Joshua Coleman, PhD, Karl Pillemer, PhD, and more!

Watch this is a rare opportunity and hear from four leading experts discuss the most crucial clinical topics!

Program Information

Objectives

Distinguish the six types of boundaries in order to inform case formulation and treatment planning
Catalogue the benefits and consequences of healthy and unhealthy boundaries
Employ the eight steps of boundary setting when working with adults in individual therapy
Appraise relationship dynamics to determine the need to address boundary issues
Distinguish between effective and ineffective strategies for working with clients that struggle with boundaries
Debate at least three risks involved when working with boundaries

Outline

Part 1: Understanding Boundaries in Parent-Child Relationships

What are boundaries (hint: they aren't cutting someone off)
The six types of boundaries

Benefits of healthy boundaries and impact of poor boundaries
Common boundary issues in parent-child relationships and the family dynamics that lead to them

Part 2: Assessing boundary issues with your clients

How to tell if your client is struggling with boundaries

The signs of poor boundaries that therapists frequently miss
Determining your client’s readiness for change and how to increase motivation when it isn’t there

Part 3: A Step-by-step guide to teaching boundaries and becoming a boundary-centered practitioner

Eight steps to setting healthy boundaries

Communication strategies your clients need for setting (and enforcing!) a healthy boundary
How to help your clients best respond when new boundaries are tested

Part 4: Conversations with Experts

Interview 1 – Lindsay Gibson, PsyD
Interview 2 – Joshua Coleman, PhD

Interview 3 – Karl Pillemer, PhD

Part 5: Clinical Considerations

Therapists need boundaries too: How to set professional boundaries
Limitations of the research and potential risks

Target Audience

Psychologists
Psychiatrists
Social Workers

Case Managers
Marriage & Family Therapists
Addiction Counselors
Other Mental Health Professionals
Art Therapists

Copyright : 03/27/2023

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

No matter what you treat, we all work with clients trying to overcome the wounds inflicted by emotionally immature, insensitive, self-absorbed, and controlling parents.

As a therapist, working with these clients can leave you feeling frustrated and ineffective as they make the same self-destructive choices again and again, struggle to set healthy boundaries, find themselves unable to walk away from the role of “rescuer” in toxic relationships, and only say what they think others want to hear – including in therapy.

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD is the Amazon #1 Best Selling Author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents. A psychotherapist for over thirty years, her work has been translated into 14 languages and has helped thousands of people reverse their toxic psychological legacy and reclaim their lives.

Watch her as she shows you how you can find greater therapeutic success with clinical strategies to help your clients take control of their relationships and lives, break free from harmful patterns, connect more deeply with themselves and others, and become the person they were always meant to be.

The invaluable tools Dr. Gibson will share can help all therapists:

Skillfully guide clients in how they can restructure toxic relationships with parents and others
Free clients from the fear, shame and self-doubt that traps them in a life of emotional coercion
Teach clients to protect themselves from hurtful behaviors without completely severing all ties
Give clients the courage to set boundaries without feeling guilty

This is one training you can’t afford to miss! Purchase today!

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
Physicians
Other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 09/15/2021

Estranged Relationships: Clinical Tools to Navigate the Divide Between Family Members

Estrangement from family is on the rise. And therapists are being asked to weigh in on these separations.

Clients use therapy to work through so many challenging family-related experiences - toxic communication styles.. childhood trauma.. lack of attuned parenting.. unchecked sibling rivalry.. parental divorce.. mental illness or addiction in a family member..

What should you do when clients begin to lean toward cutting off family members? When is estrangement the best choice? How can you know whether the family system is truly toxic? What if your client cuts off contact and it creates more problems than it solves?

Maybe you are seeing cut-off family members in your practice. They are hurting and confused about their role in what happened. Therapists can easily misstep and unintentionally make existing separations worse.

Joshua Coleman, PhD is the author of The Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict and a leading expert on family relationships. He’s appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR, PBS and other major media outlets. More than an expert, Dr. Coleman brings his lived experience to this important work as a father whose daughter cut off contact for several years and later reconciled.

Watch Dr. Coleman for this one-day seminar and fill the knowledge and practice gap around estrangement so that you will be able to:

Respond with confidence to clients who ask your opinion about cutoffs
Gain tools for addressing tension, conflict, and boundary-setting
Support your clients experiencing estrangement-related guilt, shame, trauma, and grief
Implement key interventions for facilitating a potential reconciliation

Don’t miss this chance to provide your clients with the emotional tools they need to reconcile when it’s possible and move forward when it’s not.

Purchase today!

Program Information

Objectives

Describe three common reasons that estrangements occur.
Analyze generational differences in understanding abuse, harm, neglect, and trauma.
Evaluate two differences between alienation and estrangement.
Choose treatment strategies to reduce estrangement-related trauma and grief.
Plan interventions for estranged family members based on knowledge of their current mental health status.
Manage countertransference issues rooted in the therapist’s own family relationships.

Outline

Pathways to Estrangement

Common reasons for estrangement and what they mean for your practice
Collectivism versus individualism - changing meaning of family
Generational differences in understanding abuse, harm, neglect, and trauma
How to prepare for and deal with threats to the status quo of family dynamics
Key assessment questions to evaluate estrangement history and potential

From Setting Boundaries to Cutting Off Contact

Guidelines for discerning the level of toxicity of the family system
Differences between emotional cut-off, alienation, and estrangement
Address tension, reduce conflict, and set boundaries
When you know the diagnosis of non-client family members
Common mistakes of therapists in the arena of blame and shame

Clinical Tools for When the Client is the Initiator of the Estrangement

Overcome obstacles that maintain painful feelings of rejection, fear, guilt, and anger
Confidently answer the “is this relationship healthy?” question
Manage estrangement-related guilt and shame
Re-configuring family: support identity changes that occur along with estrangement
Treat estrangement-related trauma and grief
Tailored interventions for when the initiator has mental illness or addiction

Therapy Strategies for When the Client is the Estranged Individual

Clinical approaches to doing no harm
Strategies for facilitating a potential reconciliation
How to help clients cope when there are cycles of contact
Re-establish identity stability in the face of ambiguous grief and shame
Interventions for estranged parents
Considerations for when the estranged individual has mental illness or addiction

Clinical Considerations

Manage countertransference issues rooted in the therapists’ family relationships
Ethics in family estrangement
Determining when to work with additional family members or the whole family system
How to collaborate with co-providers when there is a family estrangement
Support resources for estranged family members
Limitations of the research and potential risks

Target Audience

Counselors
Social Workers
Marriage & Family Therapists
Psychologists
Physicians
Addiction Counselors
Psychiatric Nurses

Helping Clients Manage Unhealthy Family Relationships: A Drama-Free Approach

When is a client’s family member too toxic to keep? When is it worth it to heal a longstanding family rift? For many of our clients, their families are a source of ongoing pain, hurt, and conflict. It’s not always easy to maintain healthy, positive connections with family members who have different ideas about loyalty, love, connection, what’s appropriate to share, and how much influence they believe they should have over a family member’s personal choices. For therapists, it can be hard to know what to do when clients struggle with intense ambivalence about family members. In this session, you’ll learn:

How to help clients resolve ambivalence about difficult and unhealthy family relationships and know when to stay and when to go
How to know when an apparently abusive relationship can be salvaged through healthy communication and boundary setting
Clear ways for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to break painful cycles and move forward

Program Information

Objectives

Identify the most common presenting problem of clients with dysfunctional family issues.
Help clients understand that they can't change other people and refocus instead on developing the skills most likely to improve their relationships.
Teach them how to manage difficult relationships by practicing different techniques—such as respectful assertiveness—that can alter negative relationship dynamics.
Reduce the discouragement and fatigue clients often experience as they work through dysfunctional family dynamics by helping them set boundaries and prioritize self-care.

Outline

The mental and physical implications of troubled relationships
How to sit with clients who have difficult, unhealthy, or abusive family relationships
Providing a historical context for relationship issues
How to allow clients to make their own choices based on what they feel comfortable doing
Helping clients learn research-based relationship skills and offer them space to discuss what the tools look like in practice (in between sessions)

Target Audience

Counselors
Social Workers
Psychologists
Marriage & Family Therapists
Addiction Counselors
Physicians
Physician Assistants
Nurses
Nurse Practitioners
Other Mental Health Professionals