Navigating Narcissism with Courage & Empathy – Clinical Tools & Techniques

by Wendy Behary, MSW, LCSW | Apr 12, 2023 | Uncategorized

Date course created: April 2023

Peeking into the complexities of the narcissistic client can arouse our curiosity. Treating them individually or in the context of couple’s work can arouse our sense of inadequacy and sheer frustration. Maintaining a firm and flexible posture, understanding our own personal triggers along with the narcissist’s makeup – helps us to bypass obstacles when dealing with them, promoting a sturdy stance for (empathically) holding the narcissist accountable. In so doing, we can sustain the necessary leverage for healing, and for meaningful, sustainable, change. But how can we summon up the courage, maintain an empathically attuned state of mind, and effectively engage these clients when they’re more likely to defend, deny, demean, devalue attack, distract, and charm us rather than cooperate with us and comply with treatment? Exploring the critical content related to early life experience and unmet needs is essential to the formulation of a robust conceptualization and the implementation of treatment but can be a triggering endeavor for many therapists when facing the belligerence, self-righteous entitlement, denial, neurotic victimization, and arrogance, of a narcissistic client. Treating the narcissistic client – overt and covert – involves meeting early unmet needs such as, unconditional love and acceptance, empathy, and tolerance for frustration and limits. This comes with the challenge of confronting bullying, critical, passive-aggressive, detached, martyrish, and approval-seeking modes. These clients sometimes default into hypersexual activity such as pornography, cyber-sexual relationships, prostitutes, affairs, or other erotic preoccupation. Intimacy is fractured and the refurbishing of trust is challenging due to the “betrayal trauma” of offended partners and the entitled stance of the narcissist. Healing is possible when leverage is high enough and partners are willing to engage in the treatment process individually and together. At the heart of schema therapy, we have an approach capable of weakening narcissistic coping modes, and internal demanding critic modes. Adaptive responses replace unhelpful ones as schemas heal. Using effective strategies grounded in emotional engagement and the therapy relationship, therapists are poised to correct the biased early emotional experiences typically linked with high demands for extraordinary performance, confusing messages of over-indulgence alongside inferiority and insecure attachments, devalued emotional experiences, and poor limit setting.

**This is a 5.75-CE noninteractive, self-paced online video course delivered in home study format via an industry-standard online learning platform**

Agenda:

00:00 – 01:00: Understanding NPD: Early Maladaptive Schemas

01:00 – 02:00: Exploring Grandiosity and Vulnerable Narcissism

02:00 – 03:00: Diffusion Tensor Imaging

03:00 – 04:00: Cognitive Neuroscience of Narcissism

04:00 – 05:00: 4 Types of Schema Modes in Narcissism

05:00 – 06:00: Goals of Therapy for Narcissism

Objectives:

This training will provide participants clinical knowledge and tools to:

a). After completing this training, participants will be able to describe the Schema Therapy model and how to comprehensively conceptualize Narcissism and NPD in formulating treatment strategies.

b). After completing this training, participants will be able to acquire the use of a highly effective strategy known as empathic confrontation to gain and maintain leverage and avoid power struggles, address entitlement and lack of reciprocity, access reasonable responsibility, and set limits with the narcissist.

c). After completing this training, participants will be able to learn and observe how to apply specific strategies such as replacing self-defeating patterns and coping modes with healthy and adaptive modes via the moment-to-moment encounters in the therapy relationship.

d). After completing this training, participants will be able to develop a sturdy self in the chair by identifying and stabilizing the therapist’s personal challenges—our own schemas—a major obstacle to treatment effectiveness.

e). After completing this training, participants will be able to create customized dialogues that maintain leverage and enhance opportunities to access client vulnerability and emotion.

f). After completing this training, participants will be able to learn how to facilitate treatment with offended partners; the recovery and fortifying of a voice of advocacy; setting limits, cultivating leverage for accountability; identifying the impact of unacceptable behaviors, and enforcing reasonable consequences that act as motivational drivers for the narcissist to seek treatment.

Target Audience:

The target audience for this event includes psychologists, social workers, counselors, MFT’s, psychiatrists and other clinical mental health professionals.

Instructional Level: Intermediate

Instructor(s): Wendy Behary, MSW, LCSW

Material Author(s): Wendy Behary, MSW, LCSW

With 25+ years of professional experience and advanced level certifications, Wendy Behary is the founder and director of The Cognitive Therapy Center of New Jersey and The Schema Therapy Institutes of NJ-NYC-DC. She has been treating clients, training professionals and supervising psychotherapists for more than 20 years. Wendy was on the faculty of the Cognitive Therapy Center and Schema Therapy Institute of New York (until the Institutes merged in 2012), where she trained and worked with Dr. Jeffrey Young since 1989. She is a founding fellow and consulting supervisor for The Academy of Cognitive Therapy (Aaron T. Beck’s Institute). Wendy served as the President of the Executive Board of the International Society of Schema Therapy (ISST) from 2010-2014 and served as the Training and Certification Coordinator for the ISST Executive Board from 2008-2010. She is currently the chair of the Schema Therapy Development Programs Sub-Committee for the ISST. Wendy Behary has co-authored several chapters and articles on Schema Therapy and Cognitive Therapy. She is the author of an international bestselling book, “Disarming the Narcissist…” translated in 15 languages. The Third Edition was recently released. Wendy has a specialty in treating narcissists and the people who live with and deal with them. As an author and an expert on the subject of narcissism, she is a contributing chapter author of several chapters on schema therapy for narcissism for professional readers. She lectures both nationally and internationally to professional and general audiences on schema therapy, narcissism, interpersonal relationships, anger, and dealing with difficult people. She receives consistent high praise for her clear and articulate teaching style and her ability to bring the therapy to life through dramatic demonstrations of client interactions in the treatment room. Her work industry business speaking engagements focus on interpersonal conflict resolution. Her private practice is primarily devoted to treating narcissists, partners/people dealing with them, and couples experiencing relationship problems.

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