Transforming Resistance: Working with the Challenges of Defense and Anxiety

Transforming Resistance:

Working with the Challenges of Defense and Anxiety

April 14, 2018 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

Jacksonville, FL

A full day psychotherapy workshop with Clinical Psychologist and Senior Faculty of the Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy Institute

Steven S. Shapiro, PhD

Sponsored by the North Florida Association for Dynamic and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

And Co-Sponsored by the Florida Psychological Association

(Licensed Psychologists, LMHCs, LCSWs, and LMFTs May Earn 6 CEUs)

Frustrated in your attempts to help challenging clients?

Interested in promoting deep & lasting change quickly?

·      Acquire techniques to transform resistance, restructure defenses and build an alliance even with the most resistant and over-regulated patients.

·      Learn reliable methods for regulating anxiety and building emotional capacity in clients who become so dysregulated that they have trouble utilizing the therapy process.

·      Understand how to move beyond symptom management into deep, transformational processes that release resources associated with health and resilience.

·      Learn an innovative, healing-oriented, attachment-based, body-focused, experiential approach that involves an active, focused and emotionally engaged therapeutic stance.

·      Learn to accelerate treatment using innovative techniques that help gain access to unconscious affective material, underlying intrapsychic conflicts and untapped resources.

·      Learn a system for rapidly conducting a psychodiagnostic assessment during the first session to determine your patient's level of anxiety and affect tolerance, defensive operations and capacity for change.

·      Gain clarity and a comprehensive understanding that will guide your interventions, strengthen rapport and avoids treatment ruptures with all types of patients.

·      Recognize the benefits of integrating the latest research on affective neuroscience, attachment theory, trauma studies and experiential affect regulation strategies with your existing approach.

·      Acquire clear internal maps that simplify the complexity of information in sessions to guide understanding and clinical decision making.  

·      Attain practical skills that are immediately applicable that you can integrate with your existing theoretical approach and personality to result in a style that is effective, efficient, authentic and rewarding to practice.

Ironically, most clients interfere with the very progress they seek through their own resistance or because their anxiety is so high that it interferes with effective use of the therapy process itself. Therapists offer the promise of help often based on the presumption that the client will arrive with sufficient openness or emotional capacity to face painful realities and progress smoothly toward achieving therapeutic goals. In order to help clients’ achieve their goals, therapists must fully understand how resistance and anxiety interfere with the therapeutic process. The result of failing to address these barriers immediately and directly ranges from limited progress to premature termination. This results in tragic consequences for the client, as well as frustration and a sense of failure for the therapist. Only by addressing resistance and anxiety directly can we move beyond simple symptom management to access emotional conflicts and unconscious material necessary to promote lasting character change. This is especially important when working with challenging patients who are highly resistant or excessively anxious.

Participants will gain a clear understanding of the nature and function of resistance, methods to clearly identify and restructure defenses, as well as effective ways to regulate anxiety; only then can clients uncover the healthy and previously inaccessible internal resources. Because these issues are universal in the practice of psychotherapy, the principles and skills demonstrated can be readily integrated with your existing orientation; consequently, this workshop is well-suited for therapists of all orientations and levels of experience. Using lecture and extensive video footage of actual therapy sessions to clearly demonstrate specific skill sets, participants will be introduced to methods for rapidly assessing and intervening with a wide range of patients and presenting problems.  

Learn to accelerate treatment using innovative techniques that implore clients to abandon chronic maladaptive coping patterns that were once necessary but have long outlived their usefulness and are now causing untoward suffering. By adopting an active, selectively focused, experiential and emotionally engaged stance, while relying on systematic clinical maps, therapists will learn the skills necessary to promote healthier functioning. While the primary goal of this workshop is to learn methods to accelerate the healing process for clients, the secondary goal is to help clinicians integrate new skills into their existing orientation to result in a style that is more effective, efficient, rewarding to practice, authentic and entirely compatible with your personal and professional history. 

About the Presenter

Steven S.  Shapiro, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with a full-time private practice in suburban Philadelphia who has over twenty-five years of clinical and teaching experience.  He has been practicing various forms of Experiential Dynamic Therapy (EDT), such as Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP) and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), since the mid-1990’s. Dr. Shapiro is a Senior Faculty and Founding Member of the AEDP Institute in New York City.  Areas of specialization include the treatment of high resistance, severe anxiety, trauma, severe and persistent disorders, psychiatric emergencies; adolescents and their families and high conflict relationships. In addition to clinical work, Dr. Shapiro provides lectures, training groups and individual consultation to therapists of all orientations and levels of experience. His trainings are often commended for being engaging, innovative and highly effective in translating complex clinical theory into clear, precise, and practical techniques which are easily understandable and immediately applicable in clinical settings.