Agenda

Faculty will focus on the spectrum of issues encompassed by the term “family violence,” including intimate partner violence, domestic violence, coercive control (CC), and the impact when children are witness to these behaviors. Topics include types of control, child abuse and neglect, and child sexual abuse. Faculty will discuss the continuum from poor to impaired parenting, control to coercive control, and will emphasize that different families require different approaches.

Participants will explore high-conflict dynamics, poor or compromised parenting, impaired parenting, and patterns of unwarranted negative messaging by one parent in an attempt to convince a child that the other parent is “bad,” dangerous, disinterested, or not to be trusted. Faculty will examine best practices for understanding predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating factors in PCCP cases.

This session will address possible interventions for families with PCCP dynamics. It will include steps to create and set up an intervention, the development of intervention goals, ethics, and some of the different challenges for success, including strategies for client management, inadmissible evidence, and how to work with other professionals who are not court proficient.

Faculty will examine dilemmas faced across disciplines. Attorneys may experience disagreements with clients on case hypotheses or approaches. Judges may struggle to determine appropriate interventions, address stalled interventions or interference, and get buy-in. Therapists may face parents with misaligned agendas, ethical conflicts when court orders do not align with professional standards, or misalignment from other professionals on a case.

This session will focus on working through a case, including what to do and when to do it. Faculty will explore the art of apology in parent-child relationships, and interventions for cases involving accusations of parental gatekeeping and a child’s refusal to have contact with one parent.

In this wrap-up session, participants will explore what to do when the puzzle pieces don’t fit. A faculty panel will discuss factors that help determine when, and if so how, to persist in the most entrenched cases, and what factors determine a successful intervention. Topics raised by the audience throughout the course will be addressed here including complex and controversial areas such as what to do when the case is not responding to treatment; how, if, and when to change direction when safety, stress, or anxiety manifest; and what to do when the parties can no longer pay you; when you have crossed an ethical boundary; or when one party threatens to file a complaint.