Intensive Training: Shame, Guilt and Self-Criticism Course

CPD

Handouts

Speaker

Dr. Pavel Somov, PhD Related seminars and products

Existential-Dynamic Associates, LLC

Objectives

1. Characterize how shame, guilt, and apathy can function as impediments to clinical progress.
2. Establish how clinicians can teach clients techniques to negate the sweeping generalizations that can lie behind shame.
3. Discriminate guilt from regret and communicate how this informs therapeutic approach.
4. Communicate how normalizing strategies can be used with clients to dissipate self-doubt.
5. Articulate how Choice Awareness Training can be used in therapy to combat motivational apathy.
6. Specify how techniques that reframe symptoms as strengths can be used to increase therapeutic effectiveness with self-critical clients.
7. Assess the impact of exposure and mindfulness interventions on affect avoidance.
8. Establish how exercises that help clients rediscover their self-worth can be used in trauma treatment.
9. Communicate how shame pushes clients into binge eating and clarify how self-acceptance interventions can be used to reduce emotional eating.
10. Determine how shame acts as a cover for anger and explain how compassion exercises can be employed to help clients let go of anger.
11. Analyze research that establishes shame as a risk factor for suicide in depressed individuals.
12. Address the importance of managing shame in clients with substance use issues in efforts to prevent relapse. 

Outline

Shame, Guilt and Motivational Apathy as Impediments to Clinical Progress​

• Therapy as a trigger and affect avoidance
• Clinical impasses (underutilization, stagnation, premature termination)
• Shame, guilt and a sense of not-deserving
• Secrets from self and from therapist

Tools for Catalyzing Progress in Therapy

• Normalizing, de-pathologizing, un-diagnosing
• Dialectic reframing & evolutionary psychology
• Mindfulness & metacognition
• Self-acceptance & self-compassion
• Neuroplasticity of internalization

Shame: Clinical Techniques to Move Therapy Forward

• Debunking the myth of self-sabotage
• Manage outside judgement with a self-referenced identity
• Techniques to negate sweeping generalizations
• Foster self-forgiveness with motivational innocence

Guilt: Help Clients Overcome the Debts of Guilt

• Differentiate guilt from regret
• Ordinary perfection & self-acceptance
• Master the fear of making mistakes

Self-Doubt, Dilemmas & Indecision: Interventions for Clients Paralyzed by Uncertainty

• Normalizing strategies to dissipate self-doubt
• Manage the anxiety of unpredictability with uncertainty training
• Make decisions easier with the art of arbitrary choice
• Reframe a dilemma as a choice between two rights

Motivational Apathy & Self-Inefficacy: Strategies to Improve Motivation and Autonomy

• Find a reason-to-change with the change equation
• Techniques that leverage intrinsic motivation
• Find freedom-to-change with Choice Awareness Training (CAT)
• Pattern interruption for habit change – get clients off autopilot

Self-Criticism and Self-Stigmatization: Quiet Your Client’s Inner Critic

• Varieties of self-deprecation (self-criticism, self-loathing, etc.)
• Techniques to reframe symptoms as strengths
• Compassion exercises for problematic habits of self-care
• Recover from the disease model

Working through Affect Avoidance

• Exposure, mindfulness & metacognition
• Top-down & bottom-up emotional self-regulation
• Cue-conditioning of self-Regulation

Connect Specific Strategies to the Treatment of:

Trauma

• Damaged goods, survivor’s guilt & avoidance of conflict
• Somatic interventions to restore the original goodness
• Strategies to survive without guilt
• Conflict avoidance: Paper tigers v. real tigers
• Exercises to rediscover self-worth

Stress and Anxiety

• Mediate the paralysis of perfection with self-acceptance
• Non-neurotic, stress-free perfectionism
• Social anxiety as shame & self-doubt: disapproval inoculation & self-referencing
• Mindfulness-based, non-anxious self-consciousness

Emotional Eating & Binge Eating

• How shame pushes clients into binge eating
• Choice Awareness Training for moderation & presence
• Self-acceptance strategies for emotional eating
• Transcend body shame by dis-identifying from the physical

Anger

• Shame of fear: Shame as a cover for anger
• The vicious guilt-anger loop
• Self-acceptance techniques for internal damage control
• Compassion exercises to let go of anger

Depression

• Depression as self-exile
• Shame as a risk factor for suicide
• Mindfulness for managing rumination
• Metacognitive silence: From negative self-talk to selfaccepting non-talk

Substance Abuse

• Addressing the shame of relapse
• Self-assertive trigger avoidance
• Choice awareness techniques for habit modification
• Build craving/impulse control skill power

Betrayal, Secrecy & Deception

• Separation & divorce as self-care & progress
• Secrets from therapist without rupture of rapport
• De-pathologizing the motives behind lying & deception

Research, Limitations and Potential Risks

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Addictions Counselors
• Case Managers
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Other Mental Health Professionals
• Chaplains/Clergy

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