A hybrid instructive/interactive session designed to assist learners in gaining a robust and fully developed understanding of highly destructive personality styles and disorders. Starting with the clinical definitions and skills for identification of such pathology, the course then extends beyond the fundamentals, moving deeper into the interface and dynamics between all afflicted parties.

What was once a highly concentrated niche specialty in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and forensics, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders are concepts that have dramatically evolved in more recent years by bursting into mainstream consciousness and social discourse abruptly, and with a bang. We are now living in a culture that by design promotes and desensitizes society to pathological personalities, while simultaneously often communicates solutions and responses to these challenging relationships in an uninformed, oversimplified, and overgeneralized manner.

The consequence of this cultural phenomenon is an increasingly “relationally destabilized” society, combined with a reality of inadequate accessibility to fully informed clinical resources that would equip individuals to accurately identify and safely manage relational threats, and also in some cases to find necessary treatment and healing from the subtle and not so subtle impact of these abuse structures.

It is only with this aforementioned knowledge and healing, that an individual will have capacity and capability for safe and fulfilling relationships with other healthy individuals. This is solely accomplished through the acquisition of insight, awareness, and mutual commitment to that end game. This session provides individuals, and their treatment providers a fully developed framework based on classic psychological theory, overlayed upon modern day constructs/popular culture, as to how people are relating and connecting these days.

As clinical providers and as individuals in relationships, who are living amidst a culture where dynamics and change happen so fast that our heads are spinning, we must insure that we take the time to educate ourselves on what history (and our theoretical roots in psychology have already taught us) at the foundation of our pursuits and endeavors in relationships.

Possessing a thorough understanding of psychological theory/clinical pathology within interpersonal relationships affords both practitioners and their clientele:

1. A more informed, and thus successful relational decision making process.
2. Access to salient, constructive, and person-centered treatment options for individuals affected by antisocial/destructive personality disorders.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” -Winston Churchill