Clinical focus on the distress, confusion, anxiety, and long-term impacts on clients of relationships with people who have antagonistic personalities, and the behaviors consistently expressed in these relationships continues to expand. This workshop will focus on working with clients experiencing narcissistic relationships using case examples, as well as employing a simulation technique that allows us to explore what works (and what always doesn’t) with clients experiencing these relationships. We will re-orient to what antagonism and narcissism are, how they show up in relationships, what happens to people in these relationships and then primarily focus on what to do, as well as the contextual, legal and ethical issues raised by these clients.

Objectives
  1. Understand narcissism and antagonism as personality presentations as well as the diagnostic implications of these patterns.
  2. Achieve an overview and understanding of the key issues in managing clients experiencing narcissistic abuse/antagonistic relational stress (NA/ARS), and how both clients and therapists are affected by doing this work and this experience.
  3. Be able to describe the concepts of DARVO, blindness, trauma bonding, and cognitive dissonance and how they appear in narcissistic/antagonistic relationships, and more specifically how they drive self-blame.
  4. Become clear on the role of attachment in establishing and maintaining narcissistic/antagonistic relational dynamics.
  5. Understand the differential process of how a client may be vulnerable to entering  a narcissistic/antagonistic relationship versus keeping them stuck in the cycles of these relationships.
  6. Be clear on the behavioral, emotional, cognitive, physical/somatic, sequelae and responses to antagonistic behavior and patterns observed in narcissistic/antagonistic relationships.
  7. Describe the overlaps between the fallout of NA/ARS and other major psychiatric disorders as well as the how these patterns may co-occur with NA/ARS.
  8. Describe the key tenets of what it means to be “antagonism informed.”
  9. Describe key elements of assessment when working with clients experiencing NA/ARS.
  10. Understand key treatment issues raised by clients with co-occurring mental health issues including antagonistic personality issues and are also experiencing NA/ARS and the risks of treating the fallout of NA/ARS as merely “co-dependency.”
  11. Understand and apply the concepts of radical acceptance, grief, guilt, shame, and pity to the therapeutic process with a client experiencing NA/ARS.
  12. Describe and construct a treatment plan for a client experiencing NA/ARS.
  13. Describe key legal and ethical issues that may have greater salience in working with clients experiencing narcissistic relationships.
  14.  Understand the importance of cultural competency, structural awareness, contextualization, and intersectionality when working with clients experiencing antagonistic/narcissistic relationships.

Outline

DAY ONE

Morning:

Afternoon:

 

DAY TWO

Morning:

Afternoon:

 

DAY THREE


Target Audience