Clinical Series

Working with High-Conflict People

Seminar code: EDD-01

Led by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq
Thursday, May 8, 2008
9:00 am to 4:30 pm

Hear Bill Eddy before the workshop. Click on "Brief Conversations" in menu at left.

This workshop will help you work more effectively with clients in clinical practice, community agencies, and legal settings. People with borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personalities are increasingly present in clinical settings, community agencies, and high-conflict disputes. These people often have intense negative emotions, make repeated personal attacks, and have little apparent interest in making needed changes and resolving the issues that brought them to your office or agency.

This seminar will help you understand four high-conflict personality styles and give you tools to increase your effectiveness in working with them. A unique analysis of their conflict dynamics will be presented, including why they are Persuasive Blamers, why they often focus on intimate others or people in authority as their Targets of Blame, and why they seek and find Negative Advocates (family, co-workers, and even professionals), who help escalate their disputes rather than resolving them. Many case examples will be presented.

Ten tips will be provided for handling people with high-conflict personalities; these tips are respectful, calming of their negative emotions, and focused on tasks and setting limits. This interactive workshop will provide opportunities to practise specific techniques and to discuss difficult case scenarios.

You will learn —

To identify the four most common high-conflict personality styles

To recognize and intervene in their high-conflict cycle of negative behaviour

How recent brain research helps explain their emotional self-sabotage

Ten tips for handling people with these personalities in any setting

To predict and manage the Negative Advocates common in these disputes

How to avoid organizational “splitting” in managing high-conflict disputes

Fee: $169 until April 10; $179 after April 10

Location: Metro-Central YMCA
20 Grosvenor Street, Toronto

About the Presenter

William A. (Bill) Eddy, LCSW, Esq., is Senior Family Mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center in San Diego, California. He has 14 years' experience representing clients in family court. Prior to becoming an attorney in 1992, he was a licensed clinical social worker with 12 years' experience providing therapy for children, adults, couples, and families. He has experience working with child sexual abuse and domestic violence as a therapist and as an attorney. He is the author of the books High Conflict People in Legal Disputes and Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing a Borderline or a Narcissist. For more information, visit billeddy.com.

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