Responding to Patient Avoidance & Defenses

Description

Meet patient defenses with calm, skilled communication. 

This presentation will help serious illness care professionals understand avoidance and defense mechanisms, respond constructively, and use practical scripts to reduce anxiety while preserving trust.

KEY WEBINAR TAKEAWAYS 

• Adaptive denial (which serves to preserve coping capacity) versus maladaptive defense mechanisms (that impede essential end-of-life care planning or symptom management)
• Specific, non-confrontational communication techniques (e.g., gentle reframing, normalizing, validating the underlying fear) to safely explore critical topics without escalating patient or family defenses
• How to recognize personal emotional responses such as professional frustration, urgency, or the impulse to "fix" when encountering rigid patient avoidance, and strategies for maintaining professional neutrality and empathy

BONUS MATERIALS 

• Separate reference materials related to script options
• Checklist for clinicians identifying defense mechanisms 

WEBINAR DETAILS

When facing serious illness, patients and families often activate powerful, unconscious psychological defense mechanisms such as denial, projection, and intellectualization to cope with overwhelming anxiety and a loss of control. For those working in serious illness care, these behaviors can easily be misread as "resistance" or non-compliance, triggering a professional urge to force reality or push for immediate closure.

This presentation will reframe these defenses not as barriers to be broken down, but as vital psychological scaffolding protecting the patient’s inner stability. Rooted in psychodynamic theory and family systems models, this talk will explore the unconscious fears driving patient retreat and examine the clinician’s own internal landscape (countertransference). Walk away with a deeper clinical understanding of serious illness coping styles and concrete, real-time communication scripts designed to de-escalate anxiety, honor emotional pacing, and build a safe therapeutic alliance without stripping away a patient's necessary emotional armor.

THIS WEBINAR WILL BENEFIT THE FOLLOWING AGENCIES:

• Hospice 
• Home Care
• Home Health
• Palliative Care

WHO SHOULD ATTEND? 

• Nurses
• Physicians
• Social workers
• CNAs
• Chaplains

TAKE-AWAY TOOLKIT

• Employee training log
• Interactive quiz
• PDF of slides and speaker’s contact info for follow-up questions
• Attendance certificate provided to self-report CE credits

NOTE: All materials are subject to copyright. Transmission, retransmission, or republishing of any webinar to other institutions or those not employed by your institution is prohibited. Print materials may be copied for eligible participants only. 

Presented By

Vickie Leff