At this engaging seminar, Dr Kathrin Stauffer – author of ‘Emotional Neglect and the Adult in Therapy: Lifelong Consequences to a Lack of Early Attunement’ draws on her rich clinical experience to highlight how therapy for addressing developmental deficits needs to be highly resource oriented. It requires a therapeutic stance which is relational and well-attuned to often unresponsive clients, in order to avoid catapulting clients into unmanageable shame and deepening the inner isolation that they are already suffering from.

The seminar explains practical facilitating and therapeutic skills, and specifically looks at the following topics:

• Therapists often experience emotionally neglected clients as strongly resisting change even though they are attending therapy diligently. In order to avoid conflict between therapist and client, it is always helpful to explore the clients’ experience and for the therapist to contain their countertransference response – Kathrin explains how we can achieve this in our clinical settings
• Clients who were ignored as children often want therapists to guide them through therapy. How does this fit into the narrative of early neglect, and how can we respond without abandoning our therapeutic and facilitative position? How can we handle the relational dilemmas arising from this?
• Therapeutic work to fill in the deficits of emotional neglect may put too much strain on clients – or it may get stuck at early stages by a feeling of hopelessness shared by therapist and client. The webinar explains how between these two extremes, it is important to find the middle ground where the therapist can work fruitfully.

© nscience 2020 / 21