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 manoeuvers.
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 manoeuvers
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
Practising experiencing emotionally intimate connection

Practice Tips for Working with the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Using countertransference effectively
Honouring personal style
Invitation, collaboration and celebration vs. direction and persuasion
How to phrase suggestions
Research and treatment limitations

Copyright : 10/11/2020

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 behaviour 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

Copyright : 15/01/2021

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!

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 behaviour 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