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Unstuck!
Working with Your Most Challenging Clients
While Keeping Your Soul Alive As a Therapist
Bill O’Hanlon, MS, LMFC
Earn 12 CE/CME Credits
 Burned out? Tired? Frustrated with certain clients or patients? Being a therapist can be challenging these days, with insurance restrictions, lower
reimbursement rates, more paperwork and more stringent ethical requirements to contend with. And compassion fatigue can plague the best of us at times –
especially when our caseloads are filled with particularly difficult clients.
This workshop will offer two related approaches to recharging depleted
therapist batteries: we’ll learn how to keep energized and motivated in our lives and our work while working with clients in ways that not only increase
effectiveness but also decrease frustration and anxiety. First we’ll delve into what fuels and recharges us in life and work, how to make mid-course
corrections if we have gotten onto the wrong track, and how working with difficult clients can actually help us achieve these ends.
Next, we’ll take up dealing with our most frustrating and "resistant" clients.
Trauma survivors and clients with borderline issues or other chronic problems are often paralyzed by ambivalence and impulses toward self-hatred and self
-harm. We'll examine how therapists can widen their clinical lens to keep from becoming over-invested in having their clients change. We'll discuss how to be
with clients in their ambivalence and contradictions in a way that permits them to choose to step into the possibility that things can be different. And we'll
explore stories and other indirect methods of inviting change, as well as techniques of inclusion and permission that can move therapy forward with even the most difficult clients.
The workshop will be eminently practical: we’ll leave with specific ideas and techniques that will be immediately useful both
personally and professionally. Bill O’Hanlon is a master trainer who mixes clinical examples, movie clips, music, poetry, and
heaping teaspoons of humor into an experience that is as entertaining and uplifting as it is educational.
Workshop Agenda
Day 1
7:45 am – Registration and CE/CME sign-in
8:30 am - Keeping Your Soul Alive
--
The four energies that can give you direction in life and work
--Reclaiming pieces left behind or neglected
-- Thriving Through Crises: Turning trauma, transitions and turning points
into opportunities for growth and renewal
12:00 noon - Lunch (on your own)
1:00 pm – Opening Possibilities and Renewal
-- Possibility Therapy
-- Acknowledgment and possibility: the two legs of successful therapy
-- Five methods of acknowledging and validating while opening possibilities
-- Future Pull: How the future can cause the present
-- Possibilities in Action: Pushing against your own resistance to change
-- Faith: Lessons from Indiana Jones and Kierkegaard
4:00 pm - Adjourn
Day 2
8:30 am – Working with Challenging Clients
-- Storytelling and metaphorical strategies as invitations to change
-- Containing resistance, hostility and ambivalence --5 techniques:
--Location
--Scheduling
--Paradox
--Restraint
-- Splitting
-- Joining: Ways of utilizing resistance to facilitate change
-- Symptom transformation: Using the problem as a solution
12:00 noon – Lunch (on your own)
1:00 pm – Pulling it Together
-- The rule: Never be the most motivated person in the therapy room
-- Motivation 101: Never try to teach a pig to sin
--Discovering people’s motivations
--The two directions for motivation
--The three time dimensions of motivation
--From window shoppers to customers
--Evoking vs. invoking motivation
--Changing consequences and contexts to invoke motivation
-- Dealing with discouragement
--Invoking hope
-- Dealing with passivity
--Baby steps
--Paradoxical restraining of activity
--Compliments
--Evocation of strengths and competence
-- The resistant therapist:
-- Identifying where you are stuck, hooked, or ineffective
-- Getting unstuck
-- Keeping your soul alive revisited
Workshop Objectives
Attend this powerful workshop and enhance your ability to:
- Identify 4 energies that give direction and renewal
- Describe 5 methods of acknowledgment that also introduce possibilities
- Discuss 3 methods of inclusion
- List 2 therapeutic biases or habits that interfere with clinical results
- Describe the use of paradoxical restraint
- List 5 ways to contain hostility and ambivalence
- Help their most challenging clients turn resistance into motivation
Workshop Information
Check-in begins at 7:45 am and the workshop hours are 8:30 am - 4:00 PM with an hour lunch on your own
from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM and two fifteen minute breaks.
Earn 12 CE/CME Hours
Current Dates and Locations
Nov. 30 - Dec. 1, 2007
Portland, Oregon area
Jan. 25-26
Seattle, WA area
Registration Information
$269 Early registration (sent 14 days prior to workshop)
$289 Regular registration (on-site reg. is $309, space available)
Aide positions must be filled by phone. Please call for availability. Additional information will be
required.
To register by phone call 800-258-8411. Or register online on the Calendar Page
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