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Course Information

Transforming Resistance: Working with the Challenges of Defense & Anxiety

Ironically, many clients interfere with the very progress they seek either through their own resistance to the psychotherapy process or because their anxiety is too high and there is too much dysregulation to use the process effectively. Not infrequently, they terminate prematurely before reaching their goals. This results in tragic consequences for the client, as well as frustration and a sense of failure for the therapist. While clients enter treatment with conscious motivation, resistance is unconscious and, therefore, difficult to address without a coherent system. Therapists typically interpret resistance in a personal way becoming confused, frustrated, and hopeless, with a tendency to hold the client responsible and label him/her as “unmotivated or resistant”. Participants will learn to move beyond resistance and simple symptom management into deep, transformational processes that releases resources of health and resilience. Learn to accelerate treatment using innovative techniques that implore clients to abandon chronic coping patterns that were once necessary, but have long outlived their usefulness and are now causing untoward suffering.

Therapists offer the promise of help often based on the presumption that the client will arrive with sufficient initial motivation, openness and willingness to face painful realities. Frequently this is not the case. Clinicians are rarely adequately prepared to address resistance directly and therapeutically, making it difficult to help more challenging clients. Defenses can be seen as “a problem,” rather than an inevitable part of the process; defense restructuring can mistakenly be understood as an adversarial task, that we then avoid, rather than a compassionate and collaborative venture.

Therapists of all orientations and levels of experience will gain a clear understanding of the nature and function of defences, and ways to transform them therapeutically so clients can align with the healthy, buried and previously inaccessible internal resources, as well as effective ways to regulate anxiety when it is too high. The principles taught can be readily integrated with your existing orientation and skill set. By adopting an active, focused, precise, experiential, attachment-based and emotionally engaged stance, therapists can create the safety and attunement necessary for patients to risk abandoning their resistance and shift to healthier functioning. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the healing process for clients, but also to help clinicians practice in a way that substantially reduces counter transference, is deeply rewarding, effective, and authentic, fully compatible with your personal and professional history.

This program is for 12CE

There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.

 

Presenter


Steve Shapiro, PhD

Steve Shapiro, PhD, a licensed psychologist, has been practicing various forms of Experiential Dynamic Therapy (EDT) since the mid-1990’s, including Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). He has been studying AEDP with Dr. Fosha since 2003 and is a founding member of the AEDP Institute, where he is a senior faculty member. Dr. Shapiro provides training in the form of seminars, group supervision and private individual supervision. He has lectured and given workshops to the mental health community through various agencies and organizations. He is the former Director of Psychology and Education at Montgomery County Emergency Service (MCES), an emergency psychiatric hospital, where he worked primarily with severe personality disorders and those involuntarily committed to treatment. Dr. Shapiro conducts seminars and workshops on various topics in his other areas of specialization, which include: adolescents and their families, parenting, communication principles, personality disorders, involuntary treatment (adolescents and others), psychiatric emergencies and crisis intervention. He has held adjunct professor positions at Drexel/Hahnemann University and the University of the Sciences. Dr. Shapiro maintains a full-time private practice in suburban Philadelphia

 

Target Audience:

Psychologists, Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, Counselors/Marriage and Family Therapists, Creative Arts Therapists - All Levels

 

Course Objectives:

  • Construct reliable, internal clinical maps that will flexibly and accurately guide assessment of the patient and, consequently, therapist interventions/ clinical stance, particularly understanding the difference between high anxiety and high defense.
  • Demonstrate the ability to respond in the moment effectively to the patient’s need based on a moment to moment psychodiagnostic assessment of various aspects of the patient’s experience, especially considering whether the patient is responding with high anxiety or high defense
  • Relate practical clinical skills as rapidly as possible to  function in an effective, deep and efficient manner (technique).
  • Create a therapy style that is not only effective, accelerated and reduces suffering as rapidly as possible (patient benefit), but that is authentic and unique for each individual clinician, based on his both his/her professional experience/orientation, as well as his/her personality.  (professional development).
  • Integrate therapist awareness of his/her emotional reactions in various scenarios, to develop greater affect/anxiety tolerance, to welcome and use countertransference in a positive/effective manner (personal/emotional)
  • Develop a clear understanding of the nature and function of defenses
  • Develop an active, focused, precise, experiential, attachment-based and emotionally engaged stance
  • Transform resistance and simple symptom management into a deep, transformational processes
  • Integrate defenses as an inevitable part of the process; a compassionate and collaborative venture.
 

Agenda

January 31st, 2020

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview

9:30 – 10:45
Moment to moment tracking

10:45 – 11:00
Break

11:00 – 12:30
Understanding high anxiety/dysregulation and high defense/resistance. Two different skill sets

12:30 – 1:30
Lunch

1:30 – 2:30
Treatment of high defense

2:30 – 3:45
Treatment of high defense: video demonstration and discussion

3:30 – 3:45
Break

3:45 – 4:00
Group exercises

4:00 – 4:30
Q&A/Wrap-up

 

February 1st, 2020

9:00 – 9:30
Follow up from Day 1.Q & A

9:30 – 10:45
Understanding resistance to connection with therapist: Didactic and video demonstration

10:45 – 11:00
Break

11:00 – 12:30
Treatment of high anxiety

12:30 – 1:30
Lunch

1:30 – 3:30
Treatment of high anxiety: video demonstration and discussion

3:30 – 3:45
Break

3:45 – 4:00
Understanding portrayals

4:00 – 4:30
Q&A/Wrap-up