Masterclass in Advanced Psychotherapy Skills, Volume 3: Working with Stuck Clients
$119.00
Looking to purchase for a business or organization?
Explore our solutions for universities and for practices.
Overview
Clients come to us in pain, seeking not just understanding, but meaningful change. And we often help many of them. However, some of these clients, despite faithful attendance in therapy and outward compliance, simply do not make progress. Instead, they cleave to defensive behaviors, rigid thinking, and distancing maneuvers in their relationships—or what are cumulatively called protective patterns. And paradoxically, while these patterns shield and protect clients, they also restrict growth and prevent change, leaving even the most experienced clinicians feeling stuck and frustrated in their efforts to help.
In this third and final volume of their Masterclass in Advanced Psychotherapy Skills, Victor Yalom and Orah Krug turn their attention to working with clients who are entrenched in their protective patterns of behavior, thinking, and relating. Through clinical demonstrations with real clients, you’ll see how focusing on the underlying protective patterns and narratives creates opportunities for new understanding and meaningful growth.
By experiencing real sessions enhanced with commentaries and accompanying discussions, you’ll learn how to use the client’s own language to identify and address protective patterns in ways that cultivate collaboration, vulnerability and client agency. Yalom and Krug share powerful experiential techniques for confronting avoidance and resistance with empathy and curiosity, which fosters relational safety, invites inner exploration and reinforces change.
What’s Included
You’ll learn how to:
- Challenge rigid ways of being and thinking to facilitate growth
- “Tag” protective patterns to increase client awareness
- Engage stuck clients with empathy and curiosity
- Identify clients’ protective patterns and apply tailored interventions
- Help clients explore and articulate their barriers to intra- and interpersonal connection
Identify Protective Patterns That Keep Clients Stuck
When you shift the focus from surface-level issues to underlying defenses, it’s easier to see how how pervasive and limiting protective patterns can be. By using imagery or metaphor to explore these patterns, clients can recognize how they experience themselves and shine a light on how these patterns may suppress their sense of vitality, connection, and authentic expression.
Explore How These Defenses Serve Clients
These protective patterns—developed as adaptive and functional survival strategies—can become rigid and impede emotional growth. They’re employed to protect a person’s sense of safety, identity, or emotional balance. Identifying patterns with compassion and curiosity, using techniques like process comments, role play, and metaphor, can help clients explore more flexible, empowering ways to respond to life’s challenges.
Create Opportunity for Growth
As clients recognize the paradox—that their defenses both shield and isolate them—new possibilities emerge for deeper connection, emotional risk-taking, and a more authentic sense of self. Being flexible and fostering an opportunity for growth helps move clients forward in therapy and in their lives.
About the Experts
Victor Yalom, PhD is the founder and resident cartoonist of Psychotherapy.net. He has produced over 100 psychotherapy videos featuring many of the luminaries of our field, including Sue Johnson, Marsha Linehan, William Miller, Reid Wilson, and his father Irvin Yalom. He is a licensed psychologist with over 35 years of clinical experience and has conducted workshops in the US, China, Mexico and online. More info on Victor and his artwork and metal sculpture at sfpsychologist.com.
Orah T. Krug, PhD, is recognized in her field as a master clinician, supervisor and author. Her dedication to training the next generation of therapists led her to create Krug Counseling, Inc., where she trains and supervises the group’s clinicians, provides experiential therapy for individuals and couples, and leads consultation groups for licensed therapists. For further information about Orah Krug, Krug Counseling and the consultation groups visit krugcounseling.com.
Disclosures
General Disclosure
This Disclosure Statement has been designed to meet accreditation standards; Psychotherapy.net does its best to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and eliminate bias in all areas of content. Experts are compensated for their contributions to our training videos; while some of them have published works, the purchase of additional materials are not required for any Psychotherapy.net training. Each experts’ specific disclosures can be found in their biography.
Psychotherapy.net offers trainings for cost but has no financial or other relationships to disclose.
Therapist Disclosure
Victor Yalom and Orah Krug were compensated for their contribution to this course. None of their books or additional offerings are required for this course. Should such materials be referenced, it is only as additional resources.
Psychotherapy.net defines ineligible companies as those whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients. There is no minimum financial threshold; individuals must disclose all financial relationships, regardless of the amount, with ineligible companies. We ask that all contributors disclose any and all financial relationships they have with any ineligible companies whether the individual views them as relevant to the education or not.
Additionally, there is no commercial support for this activity. None of the planners or any employee at Psychotherapy.net who has worked on this educational activity has relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the core protective patterns that stuck clients present in therapy
- Discuss the personal and professional challenges of working with stuck clients
- Utilize effective therapeutic interventions to help stuck clients move forward
What you get in this course
Real Sessions
5 hours of videos featuring real clients in session
Therapist Commentary
Voiceover commentaries and discussions for behind-the-scenes insight
Continuing Education
4.75 CE credits available
Bonus Resources
Supplemental tools and activities to consolidate learning and promote lateral thinking
“The common therapeutic issue addressed in this video was a client’s issue of ‘worthiness.’ As demonstrated, everyone’s personal issues are relevant enough to discuss in therapy. Well done!”
“In this course, Yalom and Krug use a non-blaming and non-shaming framework to conceptualize and help clients who are stuck — a topic that is often overlooked in training materials.”
“Dr. Yalom and Dr. Krug’s discussions between footage from real therapy sessions provide valuable guidance for advancing skills and creating a transformational therapeutic experience.”
