When Caregivers Just Don't Like Their Children:
How You Can Shift Them

About this Training

This training explores one of the most challenging and often unspoken of dynamics in family work - when caregivers experience resentment, aversion, or emotional distance toward their child. For evidence-based treatment to be most effective, we need the caregiver to be part of the solution to the child’s trauma, not reinforcing the child’s unhelpful or inaccurate beliefs. Children heal in the context of their relationships! This is even more critical when children have experienced interpersonal trauma and attachment ruptures. The reasons for this issue are varied, but there is room for hope and change when clinicians have the skills to guide the family in a new direction.
 
Dr. Esther Deblinger says, “The challenging part in TF-CBT is not teaching the skills, it’s inspiring parents to use them.” This course gives you the skills to inspire caregivers you might prematurely overlook as being able to fulfill the supportive caregiver role in TF-CBT. Expect live demonstrations, experiential activities, and a mixture of lecture and discussion using case examples to teach clinical skills and techniques to facilitate learning and achieve learning objectives. This course builds your ability to grow a more supportive caregiver for the child, which is one of the most gratifying skills you will add to your clinical practice. This course builds participants’ ability to develop a more supportive caregiver for children who have experienced trauma, which is one of the most gratifying skills you will add to your clinical practice.
 
Participants should have access to the internet and web cameras. Recorded self-paced training requires passing a quiz and includes verification of participation in training. 

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this training, participants will be able to:

• Examine the impact of our own cognitions on others’ behavior

• Create a plan for how to shift a caregiver’s thinking using CBT skills

• Articulate the parallel process between the clinician’s cognitions about disengaged caregivers and those between caregivers and their children

• Demonstrate 2 interventions clinicians can use in practice with caregivers who love (but may struggle to like) their children.

View Session Agenda, CE credit policy, and refund policy

Who should attend this training?
This training is appropriate for master’s level clinicians/social workers and above, but interns/students who are working on their master’s degrees will also benefit. Seasoned clinicians will find these clinical skills enhance their assessment skills and interventions in TF-CBT, AF-CBT, and other evidence-based treatment models. Training is interactive with engaging activities and opportunities to practice the skills.