KIDS WITHOUT CONSCIENCE: CHANGING THE UNCHANGEABLE

KIDS WITHOUT CONSCIENCE: CHANGING THE UNCHANGEABLE

How do we explain why a youth would bring a gun to school and go on a shooting spree? What about a youth who tortures and/or harms animals? What about youth who regularly assault others and are constantly in trouble with the law? What makes them keep doing these acts? Many would label these kids “sociopaths,” “severely disturbed,” and argue that they should be “locked up and spend a life in jail” or “be placed in some long-term residential treatment center.”

A compassionate and strengths-based treatment approach is presented that both provides a better understanding about the aggravating factors that drives these kids’ provocative, self-destructive, dangerous, and extreme daredevil behaviors. Participants will learn effective therapeutic tools and strategies for successfully engaging these challenging youth and their families, how to harness the youth’s inner strengths, resources, and talents to empower them to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and how to utilize key resource people from the youths’ social network to co-generate solutions and provide relapse prevention as he or she pursues a new more preferred direction with their lives. As a result of attending this information-rich, practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn:

 

  • Key individual and family aggravating factors that fuel self-destructive, violent, and extreme daredevil youth behaviors
  • Loss and rage: Two sides of the same coin
  • Collaborative Strengths-Based Family Therapy: An Eco-Systemic Treatment Approach
  • CAN-IF Mapping: Identifying the key resources in the youth’s social ecology to mobilize and to co-construct a roadmap for change
  • Effective strategies for engaging resistant and challenging adolescents
  • Strategies for building into youth moral character and empathy capacities
  • Turning negative behaviors into positive virtuous behaviors to help youth find meaning and purpose in their lives
  • Working with angry, laissez-faire, demoralized, and mental health and substance abuse impaired parents
  • Tailor-fitting and matching interventions to adolescents’ key strengths, talents, and life passions
  • Use of former gang members, client alumni, and adult inspirational others to pave the way for youth transformation
  • Family-Social Network relapse prevention tools and strategies
Whats New?

Due to popular worldwide demand for a longer more intensive training experience in our model, our Partners team is now offering a 5-Day and 4-Day Advanced International Certificate Training Program in Collaborative Strengths-Based Brief Family Therapy. In addition to lots of videotape examples of major therapeutic tools and strategies of the Collaborative Strengths-Based Brief Family Therapy approach, there will be both daily live couple and family therapy consultations and skill-building exercises. Finally, we will cover effective strategies for working with some of the toughest clinical dilemmas, such as: long-term self-injurers, suicidal, violent, eating disorder, heavy substance abusing clients, high-conflict couples, families with multiple symptom-bearers, post-divorce conflict families, and more. Click on the LEVEL I and II training descriptions and topics covered below.

Matthew’s book Pathways to Change: Brief Therapy with Difficult Adolescents, Second Edition was just published in Korean. A copy was presented to me at my workshop in Seoul, which was hosted by the Korean Solution-Focused Brief Therapy Association.

Matthew’s new book: Working with High-Risk Adolescents: A Collaborative Strengths-Based Therapy Approach, has been published by Guilford Press, Inc.

To view a downloadable flyer of my book, click here