Disarming Defenses DEFTly

Overview for Disarming Defenses DEFTly

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A client’s resistance to self-exposure and change can trigger the therapist’s defenses and make it harder to feel compassion and respond with “shame sensitivity.” Yet these qualities are central to meaningful defense work. For example, a colleague had referred a depressed man who had been unable to “feel his feelings” after several years of therapy. He believed himself incapable of experiencing emotions, and his detachment had led to a divorce and distant family relationships. Since early childhood, unconscious self-protective strategies dominated his personality and drove him to hopelessness. This presentation will demonstrate how to create sufficient safety, self-compassion, and clarity about crippling shame and defensive strategies, which awakened the will to take emotional risks never attempted before. He had been suffering under the illusion that his therapist and others had expectations of him that he couldn’t fulfill, projecting his judgments and desires onto others. Reclaiming his will to live authentically and emotionally free gave birth to a new hopefulness.

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