Description
We all work with clients who test our capacity to connect with them, feel compassionate, and act competently. Clients may present as relentlessly hopeless, passive, and incapable. They may direct their anger toward us or accuse us of being ineffective. Or they may be especially high-risk, causing us to worry that they will harm themselves or someone else, and that we will face professional or legal consequences. These behaviours can leave us feeling anxious, ashamed, and resentful, resulting in us emotionally detaching and giving up. How do we manage this? Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) provides a model. Yet doesn’t DBT require multiple modes of treatment and intensive consultation? What do clinicians do when they don’t have such a structure in place? This workshop will present principles and strategies from DBT that clinicians can integrate into their therapeutic work with so-called “demanding” clients. Participants will learn to apply DBT’s biosocial model to their own experience and use acceptance, change, and dialectical paradigms to treat their own burnout and strengthen their capacity to work with the clients that most challenge them.
Learning Objectives:
Describe where we, as therapists, often fail in treating clients with complex, interdependent problems.
Apply dialectical strategies to keep us motivated to treat clients who leave us feeling vulnerable and ineffective.
Identify our own therapy-interfering behaviours and how to treat them.
Speaker’s Bio
As the Provincial Leader of Training and Education for the Nova Scotia Health (NSH) Mental Health and Addictions Program, Dr. Jacquie Cohen (she/her), RPsych, leads the clinical training of mental health clinicians throughout Mi’kma’ki. Prior to this role, she co-founded and co-led the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Treatment Program at NSH then worked as an Advanced Practice Lead, developing a stepped care model for BPD treatment throughout the province and training clinicians in dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and good psychiatric management. Dr. Cohen is the past Certification Chair (2017-2021) and President (2022-2023) of CACBT. She co-authored CACBT’s National Guidelines for Training in CBT and is on the Training and Accreditation Committee of the World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies. Dr. Cohen is the former Director of Training of the Halifax Clinical Psychology Residency Program, a past Board Member of the Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Programs, and an Assistant Professor with the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University. In 2024, she was awarded the Association of Psychologists of Nova Scotia’s Excellence in Psychology Award. Dr. Cohen is certified in CBT by CACBT and in DBT by the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification TM and is a DBT-PE provider.
Earn 1.5 CPA CE Credits by attending this webinar in full, in real time, and by completing the post-session evaluation