Here are the learning objectives and program agendas for Dr. Liane Leedom’s six-part webinar series.
Skills Module 0: Your first step towards real recovery from narcissistic abuse and trauma
Learning objectives
After completing the introductory program, you should be able to:
- Explain what makes someone a sociopath
- Describe why it’s empirically possible to fall in love with a sociopath
- Explain why it’s difficult to escape and get over the relationship
- Implement the two basic principles for surviving your encounter with a sociopath
- Use the STOP skill to stay in control of your emotions
Program agenda for Your first step in your recovery from narcissistic abuse
1 hour class
- Yes, healing and recovery from narcissistic abuse is possible
- What makes someone a sociopath
- Two clusters of psychopathic personality traits
- Is the inability to love really absolute?
- What causes preoccupation with power?
- How did I love a sociopath?
- Why can’t I just get over the relationship?
- How trauma can affect your window of tolerance
- Understanding hyperarousal and hypoarousal
- Understanding the wise mind
- Survival principle #1: Don’t make the situation worse
- Survival principle #2: Take small steps toward healing every day
- What behaving skillfully will enable you to do
- Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) includes four sets of skills
- Skills training assumptions
- Dialectics: Opposite truths that stand together
- Stay in control of your emotions with the STOP skill
Here’s a preview of the course:
Skills Module 1: Mindfulness to clear your head of sociopathic gaslighting
Learning objectives
After completing this webinar, you should be able to:
- Discuss how trauma interferes with seeing reality
- Identify states of mind — reasonable, emotional or wise
- Observe, describe and participate in the present moment
- Describe strategies for letting go of emotional suffering
- Respond appropriately to validation and invalidation
Program agenda for Mindfulness to clear your head of sociopathic gaslighting
Class 1
- What acting skillfully enables you to do
- The STOP skill
- The Wise Mind skill
- Components of the mind
- How psychological abuse affects perceptions
- Forms of psychological abuse
- Goals of mindfulness practice
- Mindfulness What skills: Observe, describe, participate
Class 2
- Model of the mind #1 — thoughts get stirred up, then drift away
- Model of the mind #2 — thoughts are like an empty room that becomes reality
- Pain vs. suffering
- How mindfulness and psychotherapy help
- How do you know you can separate from inner events?
- How skills: Nonjudgmentally, one-mindfully, effectively
Class 3
- Self-soothe to prepare yourself for acceptance
- Reality acceptance
- Radical acceptance
- Why do survivors struggle with acceptance?
- Sociopaths are designed to live off others’ energy
- What must be accepted?
- How to practice acceptance
- Reality acceptance skills: Turning the mind, willingness, half-smiling
- Mindfulness of current thoughts
Class 4
- What is validation?
- Why is emotional invalidation harmful?
- Identifying invalidation
- Consequences of invalidation
- Skills to fight the need for validation
- Validating yourself
- Mindful self-compassion
Preview of this course
Skills Module 2: Recovery from the bodily effects of toxic stress
Learning objectives
After completing this course, you should be able to:
- Recognize and alleviate the toxic stress in your life
- Use the STOP skill to stay in control in stressful situations
- Use the TIP skills to calm your body when it is roiled by emotion
- Analyze your own behavior — what you’re doing and not doing
- Increase the probability of behaviors you want
Program agenda for Recovery from the bodily effects of toxic stress
Class 1
- Goals of distress tolerance
- Overview of crisis survival skills
- When to use crisis survival skills
- Stay in control with the STOP skill
- Evaluating the pros and cons of acting on crisis urges
- Changing your body chemistry with TIP skills
- Using cold water, step by step
- Paired muscle relaxation, step by step
- Effective rethinking and paired relaxation, step by step
Class 2
- Strategies for distracting yourself from distress
- Self-soothing and grounding
- Body scan meditation step by step
- Strategies for improving the moment
- Sensory awareness, step by step
- Behavior change for repeated distressing events
- Analyzing behavior and planning for problem solving
- Chain analysis for understanding behavior
- Chain analysis step by step
- Missing links analysis — why did behavior not occur?
- Strategies for increasing the probability of behaviors you want
- Strategies for decreasing or stopping unwanted behaviors
- Tips for using behavior change strategies effectively
- Identifying effective behavior change strategies
Preview of this course
Skills Module 3: Strategies for reducing emotional distress and vulnerability
Learning objectives
After completing this course you should be able to:
- Define what makes your life worth living
- Describe strategies to manage emotions and distress
- Explain three ways to change your emotional responses
- Regulate emotions through opposite action and problem solving
- Accumulate positive emotions both short term and long term
Program agenda for Strategies for reducing emotional distress and vulnerability
Class 1
- How to endure over the difficult long term
- What psychopaths believe is important
- Psychopathic control of families and groups
- What makes a life worth living?
- ABCs of positive emotions
- Accumulate positive emotions: long term
- Accumulate pleasant events every day
- Build mastery
- Cope in advance for difficult events
Class 2
- Four foundations of mindfulness
- Purpose of mindfulness practice
- The middle path — moderation and balance
- Rate your own emotion regulation
- What is an emotion?
- Emotions communicate to ourselves and others
- Emotions motivate us for action
- Model for describing emotions — from vulnerabilities to aftereffects
- Emotions and psychopathy
- Why is emotion regulation difficult?
Class 3
- Emotions and mindfulness
- Emotion regulation strategies
- Mindfulness and regulation of love
- What is love?
- Prompting events for feeling love
- Biological changes and experiences of love
- Love: Check the facts
- Love: Opposite action
- Model of emotion with change strategies
Class 4
- What is an emotion?
- PTSD symptoms and persistent negative emotions
- How symptoms of abuse mimic borderline personality disorder
- Secret to dealing with painful emotions
- Regulation of anger
- The reconciliation trap
- What about when anger is totally justified?
- Regulation of fear
- What about when fear is totally justified?
- Regulation of envy
- Why is emotional regulation hard?
Here’s a preview:
Skills Module 4: Evidence-based tools for dealing with sociopathic behavior
Learning objectives
After completing this webinar you should be able to:
- Identify destructive and interfering relationships
- Use DEAR MAN guidelines for getting what you want — describe, express, assert
- Use GIVE guidelines for keeping your relationships — gentle, interested, validate
- Choose strategies for when what you are doing isn’t working
- Explain effective strategies for ending unhealthy relationships
Program agenda for Evidence-based tools for dealing with sociopathic behavior
Class 1
- Mindfulness exercise
- Healthy relationship behaviors
- Unhealthy relationships
- Destructive relationships
- Interfering relationships
- Radical acceptance
- Barriers to interpersonal effectiveness
- Chronic abuse can impact how you act with everyone
- Resolve to be skillful
- Assert yourself skillfully — DEAR MAN
Class 2
- Mindfulness exercise
- Linked lives
- Review — DEAR MAN
- What doesn’t work
- Strategy 1: Know what you want
- Strategy 2: Use reflection and say as little as possible
- Strategy 3: GIVE skill for building relationships and keeping the high ground
- Strategy 4: FAST skill for self-respect
- Strategy 5: Ending destructive relationships
Here’s a preview:
Skills Module 5: Post-traumatic growth and spirituality
Learning objectives
After completing this program, you should be able to:
- Explain how psychopathy can affect an entire family
- Describe what it means to be wise
- Recognize unhealthy mind states
- Cultivate healthy mind states
- Name self-transcendent emotions
Program agenda for Post-traumatic growth and spirituality
- Mindfulness exercise
- Linked lives
- Alone and connected: A dialectic
- Psychopathy in parents
- Psychopathy in siblings
- Psychopathy in sons and daughters
- Thriving despite being linked to psychopathy
- Review: All the wellness skills
- Recovery pyramid
- Cultivate wisdom
- What does it mean to be wise?
- Abandon unhealthy mind states
- Cultivate healthy mind states
- The self and suffering
- Self-transcendence
- Cultivate self-transcendent emotions
- Gratitude, compassion, awe
- Spirituality in recovery