NICABM – Working with Family Estrangement

NICABM – Working with Family Estrangement

Navigating No Contact: Helping Clients Process Family Estrangement

EstrangementWhen a client is estranged from a family member who used to mean the world to them . . .

. . . it can evoke a very specific trauma that many of us weren’t trained to work with.

And so because of that, we often miss the key sources of tension that sustain a client’s feelings of anger, fear, guilt, or shame.

Beyond that, there are some common well-intentioned mistakes (like being too reassuring) that can make the situation worse.

So to help you more skillfully navigate the murky waters of estranged family relationships, we put together this brand-new workshop.

Working with Family Estrangement

In this workshop, Joshua Coleman, PhD will share the latest research on what causes family estrangement and what treatments are most effective.

Here’s what he’ll get into:

• Strategies to help parents and adult children reconcile
• What to do (and not do) when one parent pits the child against the other parent
• Key differences between estrangement and alienation that can impact your approach
• Ten “rules” for healthy parent-adult child relationships
• How to work with estrangement when mental illness is a factor
• When sexuality or gender identity impact estrangement: three principles for treatment

Course Instructor

Joshua Coleman, PhD is a licensed psychologist and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families – an organization dedicated to providing the latest research and best-practice findings about American families.
He is a contributor to TIME, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, The Washington Post, and many more national publications.

Joshua is the author of several books, including Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict; When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along; and The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony.

More courses from the same author: NICABM