Anxiety Regulation: Creating A Safe and Secure Alliance to Increase Client Emotional Capacity

An Excerpt from the Transforming Resistance Series Presented by Steve Shapiro, PhD

Recorded for On Demand Learning


This online seminar is for professionals and students in mental health and the healing arts and sciences including: Psychologists, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, Counselors, MFTs, MD’s, Nurses, Creative Arts Therapists, and Masters & Doctoral students as well as soon-to-be licensed Interns & Trainees.


Ironically, many clients interfere with the very progress they seek either through their own resistance to the psychotherapy process or because their anxiety is too high and there is too much dysregulation to use the process effectively. Not infrequently, they terminate prematurely before reaching their goals.  This results in tragic consequences for the client, as well as frustration and a sense of failure for the therapist. While clients enter treatment with conscious motivation, resistance is unconscious and, therefore, difficult to address without a coherent system. Therapists typically interpret resistance in a personal way becoming confused, frustrated, and hopeless, with a tendency to hold the client responsible and label him/her as “unmotivated or resistant”. Participants will learn to move beyond resistance and simple symptom management into deep, transformational processes that releases resources of health and resilience. Learn to accelerate treatment using innovative techniques that implore clients to abandon chronic coping patterns that were once necessary, but have long outlived their usefulness and are now causing untoward suffering.

Therapists offer the promise of help often based on the presumption that the client will arrive with sufficient initial motivation, openness and willingness to face painful realities. Frequently this is not the case. Clinicians are rarely adequately prepared to address resistance directly and therapeutically, making it difficult to help more challenging clients.  Defenses can be seen as “a problem,” rather than an inevitable part of the process; defense restructuring can mistakenly be understood as an adversarial task, that we then avoid, rather than a compassionate and collaborative venture.

Training Description

Therapists of all orientations and levels of experience will gain a clear understanding of the nature and function of defences, and ways to transform them therapeutically so clients can align with the healthy, buried and previously inaccessible internal resources, as well as effective ways to regulate anxiety when it is too high. The principles taught can be readily integrated with your existing orientation and skill set. By adopting an active, focused, precise, experiential, attachment-based and emotionally engaged stance, therapists can create the safety and attunement necessary for patients to risk abandoning their resistance and shift to healthier functioning. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the healing process for clients, but also to help clinicians practice in a way that substantially reduces counter transference, is deeply rewarding, effective, and authentic, fully compatible with your personal and professional history.

Learning Objectives:

  • Construct reliable, internal clinical maps that will flexibly and accurately guide assessment of the patient and, consequently, therapist interventions/ clinical stance, particularly understanding the difference between high anxiety and high defense.
  • Demonstrate the ability to respond in the moment effectively to the patient’s need based on a moment to moment psychodiagnostic assessment of various aspects of the patient’s experience, especially considering whether the patient is responding with high anxiety or high defense.
  • Relate practical clinical skills as rapidly as possible to  function in an effective, deep and efficient manner (technique).
  • Create a therapy style that is not only effective, accelerated and reduces suffering as rapidly as possible (patient benefit), but that is authentic and unique for each individual clinician, based on his both his/her professional experience/orientation, as well as his/her personality (professional development).
  • Integrate therapist awareness of his/her emotional reactions in various scenarios, to develop greater affect/anxiety tolerance, to welcome and use countertransference in a positive/effective manner (personal/emotional).
  • Develop a clear understanding of the nature and function of defenses.
  • Develop an active, focused, precise, experiential, attachment-based and emotionally engaged stance.
  • Transform resistance and simple symptom management into a deep, transformational processes.

Meet the Presenter

Steve Shapiro, PhD

Steve Shapiro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who maintains a full-time private practice in suburban Philadelphia and has over twenty years clinical and teaching experience.  He has been practicing various forms of Experiential Dynamic Therapy (EDT), such as Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), since the mid-1990’s. He is a founding member of the AEDP Institute and has been studying with Dr. Diana Fosha, the developer of AEDP, since 2003 Dr. Shapiro conducts lectures, workshops and ongoing training internationally.  His presentations are often commended for translating complex clinical theory into clear, precise, and practical techniques (Read More…)

Requirements

AEDP Institute On Demand Trainings are to be viewed on your private computer or smart device. They are intentionally not downloadable; we “stream” them. So, having a high speed Internet connection is important to having a good learning experience.

This training is intended to be viewed only by mental health professionals and students in mental health or related fields. You will be asked to provide evidence of and swear to uphold your professional credentials before completing registration and payment and receiving access to the materials.


Fees & Registration – not including Continuing Education Credit (CE)

$149 USD Non-Members
$129 USD AEDP Institute Members – please login to receive the discounted price.

Continuing Education Credits

Please note: CE is not available at this time for this training.

Refund Policy, Suggestions & Grievances 

Questions:

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Marilia Rodriguez
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