Agenda

This session will be focused on all the areas that are encompassed by the term “family violence,” including intimate partner violence, domestic violence, coercive control (CC) and types of control, child abuse and neglect, and child sexual abuse. Anxiety, stress, and toxic stress will be addressed. The session will include consideration of social and cultural issues.

This session will include an exploration of the multi-factors that predispose, precipitate, and perpetuate parent-child contact problems; and consideration of parent alienating behaviors (PAB) in their various forms. Attendees will also learn about high conflict dynamics, poor parenting, compromised parenting, impaired parenting, and a pattern of unwarranted negative messages by one parent in an attempt to convince a child that the other parent is “bad,” dangerous, disinterested, or not to be trusted.

Participants will learn about possible interventions with PCCP families, including the steps to create and set up an intervention, the development of intervention goals, and some of the different challenges for success.

Faculty will discuss suggestions for navigating the pathways and pitfalls when working with PCCP - including a detailed examination of multiple dilemmas professionals face when working with complex families.

This session will offer participants a chance to test their knowledge with an evolving case study. A faculty panel will discuss the multiple challenges of how and if to intervene when a case shifts unexpectedly or when new allegations arise. Dilemmas around allegations of IPV, severity of child’s resistance, child’s voice, lack of parent communication, and increased litigation take center stage.

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.