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Don’t Make Me ‘Go There’: Innovative Therapeutic Approaches for Intellectualization and Avoidance: Video Course
Don’t Make Me ‘Go There’: Innovative Therapeutic Approaches for Intellectualization and Avoidance: Video Course
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Online video access remains available for 1 year from the date you receive the video course.
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This course does not qualify for CE credits.
£ 145.00
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These adaptive strategies provide safety and survival in a threatening unsafe environment, but they become impediments for us as therapists, when working with our clients. Years later, traumatized clients come for ‘help’ but their phobia of exploring those difficult emotions and memories or showing vulnerability creates an enormous obstacle to healing and finding closure.
For such traumatized clients, intellectualization is a powerful defence mechanism that helps them regulate core emotional wounds that are too difficult or painful to process. In doing so, they are not conscious of distancing from affect but simply become emotionally detached, keeping their feelings at bay. Our focus on emotion exacerbates their phobias and habits of avoidance.
Therapists want clients who actively engage in confronting, leaning into their emotions, and seeking closure. However, we often get blocked by our clients’ inability to ‘go there.’
Such clients may present with multiple manifestations:
- Denial: Getting defensive when past issues are brought up or refusing to acknowledge linkages between past events and present negative patterns
- Perfectionism: Perfectionism can be a form of intellectualization, as individuals focus on achieving high standards or performance to avoid punishment or rejection
- Avoidance of Vulnerability: Traumatized clients usually avoid expressing vulnerability or seeking support from others, associating vulnerability with exploitation and abuse. Our need for them to be vulnerable can prevent them from forming a therapeutic alliance
- Minimizing the impact of past or childhood traumas on their mental and emotional health and present relationship patterns
- Excessive Focus on Cognitive Understanding: Clients may prioritize understanding their experiences cognitively rather than processing them emotionally. They may seek out information or research related to their trauma as a way to gain a sense of control or mastery over their experiences
- Difficulty Connecting with Others: Intellectualization and avoidance can lead to difficulties in forming meaningful connections with others, both within and outside of therapy. Individuals may struggle to establish trust and intimacy in relationships, maintaining a sense of emotional distance as a protective mechanism
Effectively engaging with intellectualized and avoidant clients requires therapists to acknowledge the inherent fear that arises when touching on painful past emotions. It is essential to recognize that avoidance serves a survival function, necessitating an understanding of clients’ reluctance to confront overwhelming feelings. Perpetrators often exploit this vulnerability of survivors, therefore the importance for us as therapists to explore clients’ survival mechanism of intellectualization cannot be overemphasized. Validation of their understandable fears and respect for their need to go slowly is key to helping these clients re-connect to themselves.
Fortunately, with recent research into trauma treatment, as therapists we now have access to a number of robust therapeutic approaches to support survivors, even those fearful of diving into their emotions. At this interactive workshop, Dr Janina Fisher will discuss specific strategies for building robust therapeutic alliances with such clients and managing our own need for client vulnerability. These will include:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): This is an empirically-supported therapy that helps us to learn to accept life experiences as they come. Instead of avoiding, denying, or struggling with our difficult emotions, we accept these deeper feelings as appropriate responses to traumatic life situations. By understanding that these negative past experiences need not prevent us from continuing with our lives, we begin the journey to create positive experiences and relationships. ACT is transdiagnostic (applies to more than one condition), process-focused, and flexibly delivered.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy: This therapy has proven efficacious in treating post-traumatic symptoms by changing the interoceptive and proprioceptive sensations associated with traumatic experiences. The SE approach guides the body to gently release stored traumatic memories, which is key to resetting the nervous system and resolving symptoms.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT): which is adapted from CBT, is particularly effective for people who feel emotions very intensely. ‘Dialectical’ means trying to understand how two seemingly opposite things could both be true. For example, clients may struggle with the dilemma of accepting themselves while also changing their behaviour. DBT provides tools to help such clients accept their negative emotions and experiences, learn skills to manage these emotions and creates resilience for them to be able to make positive changes in their lives.
Internal Family Systems (IFS): IFS views the mind as a system of different parts, each with its own perspectives, emotions, and roles. It helps clients to access and work with these internal parts, fostering self-awareness, self-compassion, and integration.
Learning Objectives:
- Articulate the Role of Avoidance in Surviving Childhood Abuse: Understand how avoidance served as a survival mechanism in childhood abuse scenarios
- Discriminate Intentional Avoidance versus Unintentional Disconnection from Affect: Differentiate between deliberate avoidance and subconscious disconnection from emotions
- Describe the Adaptive Value of Intellectualization under Threat: Explore how intellectualization functioned adaptively in threatening environments
- Identify 2 Techniques for Decreasing Clients’ Intellectualization: We will focus on mindfulness-based approaches to cultivate present-moment awareness and non-judgement
- Implement 3 Interventions for Increasing Client Ability to Tolerate Vulnerability: Acquire strategies to help clients tolerate vulnerability and navigate emotional expression effectively. These approaches will align with the overarching goal of supporting clients in accessing and processing their emotions in a more direct and embodied manner, ultimately promoting greater emotional resilience and well-being.
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What's included in this course
- Presented by world-class speaker(s)
- Handouts and video recording
- 5 hrs of professionally produced lessons
- 1 year access to video recorded version
- CPD Certificate
- Join from anywhere in the world
Effectively engaging with intellectualized and avoidant clients requires therapists to acknowledge the inherent fear that arises when touching on painful past emotions. It is essential to recognize that avoidance serves a survival function, necessitating an understanding of clients’ reluctance to confront overwhelming feelings. Perpetrators often exploit this vulnerability of survivors, therefore the importance for us as therapists to explore clients’ survival mechanism of intellectualization cannot be overemphasized. Validation of their understandable fears and respect for their need to go slowly is key to helping these clients re-connect to themselves.
Fortunately, with recent research into trauma treatment, as therapists we now have access to a number of robust therapeutic approaches to support survivors, even those fearful of diving into their emotions. At this interactive workshop, Dr Janina Fisher will discuss specific strategies for building robust therapeutic alliances with such clients and managing our own need for client vulnerability.
Learning objectives
- Articulate the Role of Avoidance in Surviving Childhood Abuse: Understand how avoidance served as a survival mechanism in childhood abuse scenarios
- Discriminate Intentional Avoidance versus Unintentional Disconnection from Affect: Differentiate between deliberate avoidance and subconscious disconnection from emotions
- Describe the Adaptive Value of Intellectualization under Threat: Explore how intellectualization functioned adaptively in threatening environments
- Identify 2 Techniques for Decreasing Clients’ Intellectualization: We will focus on mindfulness-based approaches to cultivate present-moment awareness and non-judgement
- Implement 3 Interventions for Increasing Client Ability to Tolerate Vulnerability: Acquire strategies to help clients tolerate vulnerability and navigate emotional expression effectively. These approaches will align with the overarching goal of supporting clients in accessing and processing their emotions in a more direct and embodied manner, ultimately promoting greater emotional resilience and well-being.
Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice; Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute; an EMDRIA Approved Consultant and Credit Provider; former president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation; and a former instructor, Harvard Medical School. An international writer and lecturer on the treatment of trauma, she is the co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation and Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma. Dr Fisher lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to the integration of the neurobiological research and newer trauma treatment paradigms into traditional therapeutic modalities. For more information, go to www.janinafisher.com.
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