The Cycle of Abuse: Emotional Need, Sense Making and Your Map of Reality

This continuing education training is designed to help mental health clinicians, as well as lay people  deepen their understanding of the emotional dynamics within individuals who engage in abusive behaviors, and well as those who experience abuse.

Rather than considering the abused/abuser dynamic solely as a set of reactions, and behaviors, this training will explore the experience of abuse from the perspective of emotional need, sense making, and the internal representation of reality. Our focus will be on seeing the emotional needs of the individual as the foundation of what we call the cycle of abuse. Participants will explore the archetypal response to abuse, and the process of adaptation based in the individuals core emotional needs.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify the role of emotional need, and sense making in the adaptation to abuse.
2. Participants will be able to understand how adaptation to abuse shapes the individual’s perception of reality, and how this perception of reality becomes a primary strategy of function in the world.
3. Participants will be able to understand how this strategy, and its consistent drive to prove it is correct/right, shapes the individuals life, and becomes the foundation for what is often called the cycle of abuse.

CE Credit for Social Workers:

Inspired Memory Care, provider #1756, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organizations, not individual courses, are approved as ACE providers. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. Inspired Memory Care maintains responsibility for this course. ACE provider approval period:11/19/24-11/19/27. Social workers participating in this course receive 1.5 continuing education credits.