( HS Shapiro 096453 2025) Effective Tools for Working with Serious Mental Illness

Course overview

Its unfortunate, but severely mentally ill clients are the ones we frequently feel least able to help. Instead, they often find themselves marginalized within our field, medicated for chronic mental health symptoms without therapy. In this workshop, youll be introduced to powerful ways you can help fragile clients with serious trauma histories or those who experience psychoses to develop a more mature emotional infrastructure. Whether youre an experienced practitioner or new to experiential dynamic therapies like ISTDP or AEDP, youll come away with new tools and interventions and a better understanding of how to help clients suffering from PTSD, personality disturbance, and severe and persistent mental illness. Well also touch on related issues such as splitting and projection, paranoia, hallucinations, disassociation, mind and body phenomena, suicide, therapeutic confrontation, and management of psychiatric emergencies. Youll learn to: Use defense restructuring and anxiety regulating methods to meet clients where they are Do deeper work with clients through the development of increased emotional capacity and relatedness Help clients tolerate difficult and previously forbidden emotional conflicts Help clients recognize the implicit emotional schemas keeping them stuck