A301 Dealing with Our Most Difficult Clients

Clients with borderline issues, trauma survivors, and other chronic problems are often paralyzed by ambivalence and impulses toward self-hatred and self-harm. Suggestions, interventions, and proposed solutions are often met with "Yes, but " or "You don't understand." In this course, you'll learn to widen your clinical lens so that you will neither be rigidly attached to any pet theory or overinvested in having your clients change. Instead, discover how to be with clients in their ambivalences and contradictions in a way that permits them to choose to step into the possibility that things can be different. You'll explore stories, task assignments, and techniques of inclusion and permission that can move therapy forward with your most difficult clients.

Meet The Instructor

Bill O'Hanlon, MS, LMFT, has authored or co-authored 23 books and taught over 1200 seminars around the world. His latest book is Seven Pathways to Connection: A Practical Manual of Therapy and Spirituality.

Course Contents

Session 1: Acknowledgment and possibility • The two legs of successful therapy • Five methods of acknowledging and validating while opening possibilities: spinning problems into the past, going un-global, shifting from reality claims into perceptions, shifting problems into preferences, creating positive expectancy and hope

Session 2: Inclusive therapy • Three levels of inclusion: permission, inclusion of seeming opposites, exceptions • Methods of inclusion: tag questions, saying the 'no' for the client, oxymoron, finding the value in the problem or the resistance, revaluing the devalued, disowned and dissociated, self-compassion and self-forgiveness

Session 3: The resistant therapist • The evil empire: what you as a therapist have devalued and resisted • Delusions of certainty and how to recover from them • The definition of insanity • Embracing and learning from clinical failures • Transcending biases and habits and developing flexibility • When to stop being flexible and take a stand or give up

Session 4: Unpacking problems • Co-creating achievable goals • Case consultations

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify 5 methods of acknowledgment that also introduce possibilities
2. Discuss 3 methods of inclusion
3. List 5 therapeutic biases or habits that interfere with clinical results

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