Where Angels Fear to Tread: Strategies for Working with Emotionally
Vulnerable Clients
Program Description
Working with emotionally vulnerable clients is often a challenging experience for mental health
providers. When clients become easily dysregulated, this can trigger others to avoid presenting
the client with important feedback and impede forward progress. For the provider, this can also
lead to feelings of ineffectiveness, increased burnout, and premature termination. Drawing
primarily from dialectical behavioral therapy, this training will provide strategies to help mental
health providers and clients handle this painful territory. These include the judicious use of
radical genuineness, irreverence, transparency, validation, honesty, and removing secret
judgments. These techniques are utilized to increase trust and safety in the session and produce a
more satisfying working alliance.
Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of this workshop, participants should be able to:
1. Identify avoidance patterns in sessions that can interfere with progress and reinforce
client’s inability to handle difficult observations.
2. Discuss how increasing transparency and genuineness during work with emotionally
vulnerable clients can lead to greater sense of safety.
3. Identify strategies for greater trust and progress in therapeutic work with emotionally
vulnerable clients
4. Decrease provider burnout with difficult and dysregulated clients
Target Audience
Mental health professionals or any other human service professional interested in this topic.
Contact Hours
2.0 to 6.0 contact hours
Program Agenda
9:00 AM
10:15 AM
10:30 AM
12:00 Noon
1:15 PM
2:30 PM
Overview of population (including common diagnoses and presenting
concerns)
Common problems in treatment with this population and the impact on
providers
Break
Functions of emotion regulation and skill deficits of this population
Keeping treatment on track: building rapport and collaborating on agreed
upon goals
Lunch
Maintaining balance in treatment
Problem-solving strategies
Validation strategies
Break
2:45 PM
3:30 PM
3:45 PM
Increasing client (and therapist) capacity for emotional regulation
Q&A
Adjourn
Faculty
Becca E. Edwards-Powell, MSW, LCSW is currently the Training Director and DBT Program
at Carolina Outreach, LLC., where she trains and supervises clinical staff in CBT and DBT,
provides case consultation, and clinical quality management. She is intensively trained in DBT
through the Behavioral Tech and participates in an ongoing Intensive team. She oversees all
DBT services, consultation teams, and development for 40 therapists and over 100 clients
participating in DBT. She is also nationally certified in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy. Previously, she worked as an intensive in-home specialist, client services director at
the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, and support group coordinator at the Family Violence
Prevention Center.