Ambiguous Loss in Narcissistic Relationships: Clinical Skills to Process the Unresolved Grief of Estrangement

CPD

Planning Committee Disclosure - No relevant relationships

All members of the PESI, Inc. planning committee have provided disclosures of financial relationships with ineligible organizations and any relevant non-financial relationships prior to planning content for this activity. None of the committee members had relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies or other potentially biasing relationships to disclose to learners.  For speaker disclosures, please see the faculty biography.

Handouts

Speaker

Amy Marlow-MaCoy, LPC Related seminars and products

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Amy Marlow-MaCoy, LPC, focuses her practice on treating complex and developmental trauma in adults raised in narcissistic, emotionally immature, and toxic families of origin.

She is the author of the Amazon best-selling book The Gaslighting Recovery Workbook: Healing from Emotional Abuse (Callisto Media, 2020), a workbook designed to help individuals identify, understand, and begin to heal from emotional trauma and abuse caused by gaslighting in interpersonal relationships.

Amy has been trained in Level 1 Internal Family Systems therapy. She also provides supervision to LPC candidates and regularly consults with other clinicians regarding treatment of adult children of narcissists. She earned her Mast of Education in counseling psychology degree from Temple University.

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Amy Marlow-MaCoy maintains a private practice. She receives royalties as a published author and receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Amy Marlow-MaCoy is a member of the American Counseling Association.

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Objectives

1. Differentiate ambiguous loss from other losses and identify relevant clinical implications.
2. Apply the theory of ambiguous loss to clinical cases involving emotional abuse and estrangement.
3. Support clients in exploring all dimensions of grief work, coping with past, present and future losses.
4. Analyze how guilt and shame can complicate grief, particularly when a client’s estranged loved one dies and they are unable to achieve resolution.
5. Employ a past, present and future perspective to treatment to help clients manage the pain of the past, find closure, and envisions a future after the “death” of a relationship.
6. Apply evidence-informed techniques for promoting resilience in circumstances of ambiguous loss in the context of estrangement or the end of abusive relationships.

Outline

• Ambiguous losses in the context of abuse
• The grief of the past - the childhood that happened and the one that didn’t
• Grieving the present and future - helping clients come to terms with what is
• Clinical skills to process grief that occurs in relationships that end or change due to estrangement
• Risks, limitations and challenges

Target Audience

• Counsellors
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Nurses
• Nurse Practioners
• Psychologists
• Social Workers
• Other Mental Health Professions