Description
Led by Wendy Behary, MSW, LCSW
Live Broadcast Date*: Thursday, June 8 and Friday, June 9, 2023
Live Broadcast Time*: 1:00pm – 4:15pm ET each day
Convert to your local time here
*Can’t Attend Live? This webinar will be recorded and archived. All registrants will be given unlimited access to the recording for a full year after the Live Broadcast date.
Already Registered?
Already registered for this workshop?
Description
Peeking into the complexities of a client with narcissism can arouse our curiosity as therapists. Treating them individually or in the context of couples work can also arouse our sense of inadequacy and sheer frustration.
Maintaining a firm and flexible posture, understanding our own personal triggers, and understanding the narcissist makeup helps therapists bypass obstacles when dealing with narcissistic clients, thereby promoting a sturdy stance for (empathically) holding the narcissist accountable. In so doing, we can sustain the necessary leverage for healing and meaningful, sustainable change.
But how can we summon up the courage, maintain an empathically attuned state of mind, and effectively engage narcissistic clients when they’re more likely to defend, deny, demean, devalue, attack, distract, and charm us—rather than cooperate with us and comply with treatment?
Exploring the critical content related to early life experience and unmet needs is essential to the formulation of a robust conceptualization and the implementation of treatment. But this can be a triggering endeavour for many therapists when facing the belligerence, self-righteous entitlement, denial, neurotic victimization, and arrogance of a narcissistic client.
Treating the narcissistic client—whether overt or covert—involves meeting early unmet needs, such as unconditional love and acceptance, empathy, and tolerance for frustration and limits. This comes with the challenge of confronting bullying, critical, passive-aggressive, detached, martyrish, and approval-seeking modes.
These clients can also sometimes default into hypersexual activity, such as pornography, cyber-sexual relationships, prostitutes, affairs, or other erotic preoccupations. Intimacy is fractured and the refurbishing of trust is challenging due to the “betrayal trauma” of offended partners and the entitled stance of the narcissist. Healing is possible, however, when leverage is high enough and partners are willing to engage in the treatment process individually and together.
At the heart of schema therapy, we have an approach capable of weakening narcissistic coping modes and internal demanding critic modes. Adaptive responses replace unhelpful ones as schemas heal. Using effective strategies grounded in emotional engagement and the therapy relationship, therapists are poised to correct the biased early emotional experiences typically linked with high demands for extraordinary performance, confusing messages of over-indulgence alongside inferiority and insecure attachments, devalued emotional experiences, and poor limit setting.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this course, the attendee will have learned to:
- Integrate the Schema Therapy model into their work and conceptualize Narcissism and NPD in formulating treatment strategies.
- Apply a highly effective strategy known as empathic confrontation to gain and maintain leverage and avoid power struggles, address entitlement and lack of reciprocity, access reasonable responsibility, and set limits with the narcissist.
- Observe and utilize specific strategies, such as replacing self-defeating patterns and coping modes with healthy and adaptive modes via the moment-to-moment encounters in the therapy relationship.
- Develop a sturdy self in the chair by identifying and stabilizing the therapist’s personal challenges—our own schemas—a major obstacle to treatment effectiveness.
- Create customized dialogues that maintain leverage and enhance opportunities to access client vulnerability and emotion.
- Receive an overview of how to facilitate treatment with offended partners; the recovery and fortifying of a voice of advocacy; setting limits; cultivating leverage for accountability; identifying the impact of unacceptable behaviours; and enforcing reasonable consequences that act as motivational drivers for the narcissist to seek treatment.
Agenda
Part 1:
| Time | Topic Covered |
| First 90 minutes |
|
| 15 minutes |
|
| Last 90 Minutes |
|
Part 2:
| Time | Topic Covered |
| First 90 minutes |
|
| 15 minutes |
|
| Last 90 Minutes |
|
CE Information
This training offers 6 hours of direct contact (not counting breaks or lunch). It is the participant’s responsibility to check with their individual provincial/state boards and/or regulatory body to verify CE requirements for their license to practice.
For Live Broadcast Attendees
Webinar attendance by participants is automatically tracked, documented and archived for future reference. Upon confirming you have attended 100% of the webinar and upon completion of a course evaluation, you will be issued a certificate of participation (see below).
For Attendees of the On-Demand/Recorded Version
If you cannot verify 100% attendance of the Live Broadcast or if you are watching the on-demand/recorded version of this webinar, you will need to complete a Post-Webinar Quiz with a pass of at least 80% in order to verify your attendance.
For Canadian and International Participants
Upon fulfillment of the above requirements, Canadian and international participants will be issued a Certificate of Participation which features:
- Name of Participant
- Title of Training
- Name of Presenter plus their credentials
- Number of hours of training
- Date of training
- Confirmation that you have passed a quiz with at least 80% grade to verify your attendance
Please check carefully with your regulating body/organization that this certificate is sufficient proof for you to claim CEUs.
Click here for information about Continuing Education for Canadian and International participants
Who Should Attend?
This training is aimed at all mental health professionals including:
- Marriage and Family Therapists
- Clinical and Counselling Psychologists
- Psychiatric Social Workers
- Pastoral Counsellors
- Psychotherapists
- Psychiatrists
- Physicians
- Nurse Practitioners
- Occupational Therapists
- Counsellors
- Graduate Students in accredited programs in the above fields
- case managers
- licensed professional counsellors
- all other professionals who would like to develop, update or expand their skills and knowledge in mental health practices
What level of knowledge the attendee should have in this topic?
– Intermediate/Advanced
