Neurodiverse Clients: Identifying Unseen Neurodynamic Influences in Psychotherapy
EVENT POSTPONED
Saturday 10 June 2023
A live webinar or in-person event with Stephen Seligman
CPD Credits: 4 hours
- Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
- Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 7 June
Psychotherapy clients can present unexpected clinical puzzles which can only be more fully understood when constitutional factors are considered. For example, when typically, effective interventions fall flat, or the severity of symptoms and depth of disorganization is not well-explained by the client’s developmental history.
READ MORE...In this seminar, you will learn about a wide variety of neurodynamic factors that can affect a person’s experience of the body, emotions, interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, phantasies, and overall sense of self. These factors include sensorimotor difficulties, variations in attention and processing speed, auditory and visual processing in addition to the commonly discussed attentional and autistic spectrum disorders.
Multidisciplinary and inclusive collaboration will be stressed, including such professions as neuropsychologists, educational specialists, occupational and physical therapists, speech and language specialists, as well as psychotherapists. Specific techniques for evaluation, treatment planning and intervention will be presented and illustrated with extensive clinical presentations.
FULL PROGRAMME
13.30 BST
Registration and Refreshments (attending in person only)
14.00
Introduction
14:05
What’s the problem? : Neurodynamics and socioemotional differences and difficulties
As an introduction our speaker Dr Seligman will outline the variety of specific constitutional neurodynamic factors that shape character and development. This overview will support the therapist in identifying underlying factors, for example, a client may seem unresponsive, withdrawn, flat, “odd,” or “weird”, and even psychotic-like, in ways that don’t correspond to our usual formulations and diagnoses. They may be successful in certain areas, but quite confounded in others. Apparently serious difficulties, such as disorganization, inattention, and impulsivity, are not matched by typical histories of trauma or deprivation. Stephen will also reflect on how diagnoses like ADHD, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, “Asperger’s” and even “learning disability” are often applied, but often don’t fit and can be misleading, stigmatizing and preclude more thorough inquiry and effective treatment.
Learning Objectives
- Consider the role of neurodynamic factors in puzzling cases more frequently.
- Summarise the uses and limitations of frequently applied diagnostic categories such as ADHD and ASD.
15:00
Q&A
15.15
Break
15.35
What are constitutional factors and how does this change our work with clients?
Therapists often underestimate these complex constitutional underlying factors at play in a client’s presentation. Instead, we can over rely on descriptive diagnoses or attribute client behaviour to environmental influences such as maternal and parental disturbance, trauma and attachment difficulties. In this presentation, we will consider motor, sensory-perceptual, visual and auditory-related, memory, language-related, affect, social awareness, and organizational/executive functions and attention as factors. Adult and child examples will be offered to illuminate how these functions are central to the development and moment-to-moment experience of the body, mind, and self, as well as how they continuously interplay with the environment, especially with relationships.
Learning Objectives
- Consider the effects of such factors in the subjective experience of patients.
- Interpret the complex interactions between environmental influences and constitutional factors.
16:15
Q&A
16.30
Break
16.50
Translating understanding into more effective therapy: working toward an integrative and multidisciplinary approach
The final presentation will provide specific suggestions for assessment and treatment. At each step, integrative, multi-modality thinking will be helpful. Ideally, multidisciplinary evaluation should be considered in addition to psychotherapeutic assessment. This may include neuropsychological, educational, speech and language, occupational, and physical therapy evaluations. An integrative and personalized understanding can often be communicated to the patient offering great relief. Where indicated, interventions from several professionals might proceed sequentially or concurrently. This allows for the client to take advantage of formidable potentials for therapeutic synergies. Without losing psychotherapeutic insight, therapists can offer interventions that capture how neurodynamic differences may be affecting both explicit and unconscious patterns of experiencing, relating and senses of self and objects in their clients.
Learning Objectives
- Apply team approaches including practitioners from several relevant disciplines.
- Describe and attend to the effects of neurogenic differences in their specific interventions with patients.
17.30
Q&A
18:00
End