Difficult Clients

Treating Difficult Clients
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. • 6.0 C.E. Hours
COURSE DESCRIPTION Some psychotherapy clients are nearly impossible to relate to; yet, they come to therapy with a desperation, tenacity, passion, and/or vengeance that compels our concern and attention. Contemporary psychotherapy seeks to address the trying and sometimes exasperating impasses we encounter in our work. Dr. Hedges will contextualize these many difficult treatment situations within a framework of developmental arrest and deficits. He will demonstrate that different kinds of transference reactions characterize different kinds of relationship experiences in therapy and call out distinctly different emotional countertransference reactions in therapists. This intermediate course will provide some fresh ways of considering difficult clients and of working creatively and effectively with them.
TESTIMONIALS Here are some comments about the program taken from recent course evaluations:
TOPICS • Listening Perspectives • The Four Developmental Levels of Relatedness • The Ethics of Relating • The Value of Achieving Flexibility in Relatedness • The Case of Paul: A Countertransference Illustration • Terror & The Nature of Organizing Transference, Resistance, and Countertransference Reactions • Themes & Essential Features of the Organizing Experience • Using the Organizing Experience Worksheet to Study Early Developmental Traumas as they appear in Transference, Resistance, and Countertransference
GOALS At the conclusion of this program you should be better able to: • Identify and work with different kinds of developmental trauma, deficit, and arrest. • Distinguish emotional issues that characterize neurotic, narcissistic, borderline, schizoid, and organizing (psychotic) states. • Utilize your emotional responses to clients as effective working tools. • Encourage interpersonal therapeutic connections. SPEAKER PROFILE
	Lawrence E. Hedges, Ph.D., ABPP is a Psychologist (#PSY 3567) and Psychoanalyst in private practice specializing in the training of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He is a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology, the director of the Listening Perspectives Study Center and the founding director of the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of numerous publications on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including the following texts Listening Perspectives in Psychotherapy, Interpreting the Countertransference, Strategic Emotional Involvement, Working the Organizing Experience, and Remembering, Repeating & Working Through Childhood Trauma. His books on professional issues, ethics, and risk management in psychotherapy include Therapists at Risk and Facing the Challenge of Liability in Psychotherapy: Practicing Defensively.