This online course will explore several advanced topics for helping clients with complex dissociative disorders learn to stabilize. The focus is on skills to empower clients to act on their own behalf more than on the specific interventions by the therapist. Topics include helping clients learn to challenge their belief systems and shift to more adaptive ones; to approach emotions that are highly avoided, including anger, fear, shame and guilt; to compassionately decrease self-harm and suicidality; and to learn more adaptive decision-making strategies based on listening to and balancing the needs and wishes of the whole person. Rigid core beliefs that are not amenable to quick or easy change will be addressed with step wise approaches to help clients consider change.

Clients are often highly phobic of at least some emotions, which are often made worse by maladaptive beliefs, and they use dissociation to cope with dysregulation. This central issue will be addressed through examining more adaptive ways to handle intense and highly conflicted emotions. Self-harm and suicidality are strongly related to maladaptive beliefs and emotion dysregulation and may be persistent in some dissociative clients. We will explore how to use systemic interventions to decrease and stop these sources of suffering. Exercises and strategies clients can use to challenge their phobic avoidance will be discussed.