PARENTING CLASS
Working with Counterwill
January 10-11, 2026
11:45 am-1pm PST ZOOM
Counterwill is the natural mammalian instinct
to resist when feeling coerced.
Join Lisa for this weekend workshop to learn all about Counterwill so that you can recognize it, avoid unnecessarily evoking it and work with it when it (inevitably!) shows up in your relationship with your child. You might even leave this workshop with a sense of humor about Counterwill (it’s actually quite funny) and an appreciation for the intentions behind it!
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Counterwill is likely the most influential dynamic you’ve never heard of. Recent trends, including a rise in the diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and kids being increasingly described as having Pathological Demand Avoidance illustrate both the ubiquity of this instinct and the ways in which we are blind to it. At their root, both of these diagnoses are describing Counterwill.
Counterwill is the natural mammalian instinct to resist when feeling coerced. It features heavily in all human relationships, most notably the parent-child (or parent-teen) relationship. When we understand this instinct – what its purpose is, when it shows up and how to work with it – we avoid the all-too-common occurrence of letting it erode relationship. Counterwill, especially when we don’t understand it, can activate us as parents. We ascribe intentionality to things we don’t understand and thus can view our kids as consciously and intentionally being “willful”, “naughty” or “stubborn” (or, worse, “oppositional”, “defiant or “pathological”).
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Class meets live on Zoom on 1/10 and 1/11 from 10am-12:30pmPST. Classes will be recorded and available for one month. Registration includes access to the Neufeld Online Campus where your video lectures are to be viewed before class.
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