Recognising and Managing Resistance: a Therapist and Client Wellbeing Strategy - Dr Catherine Hynes

Do you recognise these challenges in your work?

• A client presents with such emotional vulnerability that you can’t bring yourself to start your intervention
• A client is working hard on their therapy, but things aren’t improving, and they report a confusing “technical” problem that prevents the strategies that work for others working for them
• No matter what you propose, your client reports it won’t work for them
• You feel like you are doing more work on the therapy than your client

It’s possible that resistance is the source of the challenge. Do you know how to manage it?

Learning to recognise and manage resistance as a process in therapy helps your clients to make more progress, and also enhances your wellbeing as a therapist. Resistance refers to all the ways that people try not to feel their pain, (and all the ways we let clients do that), when facing the pain is what is needed for change.

This training is suitable for any therapist at any state of their career.  It does not presume knowledge of any therapeutic modality, and has no prerequisites.

This is an online event offered via Zoom, and practicum takes place in breakout rooms.   Participants number are limited to 21 people to ensure that Catherine can observe and engage with each triad.  

Detailed Content Summary

 In this workshop, Catherine walks you through:

• Theories of resistance in the context of complex trauma

• Self-reflection on your caseload and your own profile of resistance

• Practicum in triads (therapist-client-observer) to develop skills in addressing and managing resistance in your therapies.

Part 1:

• Manifestation and Theories of Resistance in Therapy

Part 2:

• Self Reflection on Caseload
• Self Reflection on Therapist Resistance
• Practicum: starting a conversation about resistance

Part 3:

• Practicum Managing Resistance
• Group Debrief

• Conclusions

About the Trainer

Catherine has a passion for helping people to achieve wellbeing by harnessing the brain’s healing potential. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Brisbane, who works with adults who have experienced adversity and trauma, often in childhood and throughout development. She is the director of Wellbeing Wisdom, a business devoted to training psychologists to provide high level interventions in trauma and dissociation while practicing thoughtful self care, and to sharing wisdom from the therapy room with the general public.

Catherine offers training and consultation across Australia and internationally on the treatment of trauma and dissociation. She graduated from the University of Toronto, Canada, where she studied philosophy and neuroscience. She completed a Masters Degree at Dartmouth College, USA in Biological and Brain Sciences, where she completed her thesis on the functional neuro-imaging of social cognition. She obtained a PhD from the University of Queensland, in clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology, where her thesis developed neuropsychological assessments for social and emotional difficulties following traumatic brain injury. She is a an EMDR consultant with the EMDR Association of Australia, and a member of the Australian Association of Psychologists, and the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

Catherine’s current therapeutic work is founded on her lifelong interests in the philosophy of consciousness and the neurobiology of social cognition. She works integratively, and draws on therapies whose mechanisms are consistent with brain science. She uses EMDR therapy, embodied mindfulness therapies, Parts Work Therapies, Coherence Therapy, Compassion Focussed Therapy, Schema Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in her treatments.

She develops her clinical case conceptualisations from a social neurobiology perspective, and avidly follows developments in neuroscience to guide her therapeutic and educational projects.