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

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 34 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 : 08/25/2023

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.

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!

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.

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!

Treating Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents - Q&A with Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Copyright : 02/13/2024

Treating Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents - Q&A with Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Copyright : 03/12/2024

Treating Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents - Q&A with Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Copyright : 04/09/2024

Boundary Setting Strategies: How Your Clients Can Reclaim Emotional Autonomy

Attempts to set boundaries with toxic and emotionally manipulative people are often met with demeaning abuse designed to instill guilt, shame, fear, and self-doubt. Their victims are left feeling confused, selfish for having their own needs, and convinced they must make the abuser happy with them at any cost.

In this session, Dr. Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and international best-selling author, will show you experiential emotional techniques your clients can use to set boundaries and free themselves from emotional tyranny.

Program Information

Objectives

Investigate defenses and emotionally coercive tactics of the narcissistic personality.
Use psychoeducation and self-concept development to help empower clients to set healthy boundaries in relationships.
Apply emotional and experiential techniques that will help clients protect themselves against emotional coercion.

Outline

Why clients seek the narcissist’s approval
Build boundary setting skills through psychoeducation and self-concept development
Strategies to decrease the impact of emotional coercion tactics

Target Audience

Counselors
Social Workers
Psychologists
Psychiatrists
Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners
Therapists
Art Therapists
Marriage & Family Therapists
Addiction Counselors
Physicians
Nurses
Other Mental Health Professionals

Emotional Dysregulation in Emotionally Immature (EI) People: When Parents Are Terrified of Feelings

You want to help your clients ease the pain of rejection from their emotionally immature parent…

But how do you help them to understand that the problem isn’t them, but rather is rooted in the emotional dysregulation of the parent?

This cutting-edge session with Dr. Lindsay Gibson shows how an emotionally immature parent’s fear of unbearable emotional arousal is rooted in their tendencies toward emotional dysregulation, rendering them unable to respond to their child’s bids for connection and comfort. This has profound effects on the Adult Child of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIP) client who isn’t in a position to understand the defensive nature of their parent’s emotional withdrawal, tension, and retreat into chronic superficiality.

You’ll be able to:

Help clients deal with the loneliness and lowered self-esteem that comes from parental emotional dysregulation and distance-keeping
Show your client how relational trauma and the paralyzing fear of being overwhelmed by emotions destroys the EI parent’s capacity for clear, honest communication
Teach your clients how to communicate most effectively with an EI parent prone to emotional dysregulation
Uncover the real reasons behind unpredictable emotional disruptions in the parent-child bond
Guide your clients through the emotional minefield of trying to resolve disagreements with emotionally immature parents, while diminishing feelings of defeat

You don’t want to miss this opportunity to help your clients navigate the rough waters of dealing with an emotionally immature parent.

Register today!

Program Information

Objectives

List 5 developmental factors that affect a person’s capacity for emotional self-regulation.
Identify how the emotional dysregulation from emotionally immature parents leads to emotional loneliness.

Outline

The Development of Emotional Self-Regulation

Why all these emotions?
What healthy emotional self-regulation looks like
Dyadic beginnings of emotional regulation
When the parent also is emotionally dysregulated
Effects of avoiding right hemisphere resonance and engagement – Primal Wound
Techniques for learning self-regulation (free writing, self-compassion, selftalk, parts work)

How Emotional Dysregulation Leads to Limited Self-Development and Existential Insecurity

Limitations of research and risks to consider
How self-development depends on self-regulation
EIPs’ terror of abandonment, powerlessness, worthlessness, and non-being
Best approaches to avoid triggering EIP’s loss of control and existential fears

Blocked Communication Connection Prevents Resolution, Repair, and Reunion

Avoidance of emotional intimacy through superficial communication
Tangential, disrupted communication: maintains control through destroying meaning
Egocentric communication to block meaningful, reciprocal exchange
Plan for defeat and narrow goals to what is controllable and achievable

Deal with Fear and Envy of Emotional Openness and Intimacy

Hostile toward child’s inner individualistic world (thoughts, feelings, dreams)
Appeal for connection provokes emotional dysregulation and defensive attack on joy, mutuality, outreach
Why EIPs seem more available at times
Use imaginary encounters and role play to practice self-expression
Focus on what you want to say, not whether or not you’re reaching them

Target Audience

Counselors
Marriage & Family Therapists
Social Workers
Psychologists
Case Managers
Addiction Counselors
Therapists
Physicians
Other Mental Health Professionals