Couples therapy with challenging partners is a therapy of confrontation. You must be proficient at the nuances of gentle and forceful, but effective confrontation. You must oversee and control the confrontation between your clients, to ensure that it remains productive and positive. Learn to confront the partners, help partners confront each other, and manage yourself when they challenge you.
Cultural and religious differences provide the backdrop against which couples' issues of commitment, gender and child raising, as well as, family connectedness and cultural loyalty are played out. Mixed couples often face difficult decisions at key junctures in the life cycle. In this workshop, participants will learn to identify conflicts around culture and religion, tease out the cultural contexts of common couples' dilemmas, and help clients make informed choices about the role that group continuity, family tradition and cultural values will play in their lives.
Hypnosis is an experiential method of "gift wrapping" ideas. With or without formal trance, hypnotic methods can be used in the assessment and intervention process of couples therapy.
Infidelity is not necessarily about sex, but about secrets and the violation of trust. In this workshop, Dr. Spring will map out the trauma of an affair (or other intimate wounds) and help partners think through whether and how to reconcile.
This workshop examines the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex and the puzzling inverse correlation between greater emotional intimacy and the loss of sexual desire. It will demonstrate how to help couples draw pleasure from the hidden, the suggestive and the uncanny while also respecting their needs for safety and stability. Using case examples, we will explore how to grant the body its profound capacities for communicating in its own language.
Through stunning new brain imaging research, the ADD brain has been uncovered. Based on extensive research using brain SPECT imaging, Dr. Amen has been able to see where ADD resides in the brain and why it has such a negative impact on behavior, including relationships. This workshop will discuss the impact of ADD on relationships and give strategies to help cope with the major issues.
It is said that men are afraid of intimacy. Love-avoidant men don't know what intimacy is; what they fear is subjugation - being drained, used, entrapped. These men most often have histories of enmeshment with either one or both parents. That enmeshment can be positive (e.g. the caretaker} or negative (e.g. the scapegoat), but it always leaves the person with both shame and grandiosity.
The classic passive-aggressive person is a help-rejecting complainer who will not follow through with carefully crafted agreements and seems to be immune to targeted insights. They often end up with a despairing partner.
Anxiety and depression are fast becoming the leading causes of personal disability and the single greatest destructive force in relationships. Research indicates that when one person in a relationship is depressed, the divorce rate goes up nine times. Therefore, it is vital that therapists learn to recognize typical and atypical symptoms early in therapy. It also is imperative that symptoms of relational depression are recognized. Lecture, video, written exercises and demonstration will be used.
Some narcissists want to be adored without giving much in return. Others make outrageous demands. Couples therapists are continually challenged to remain centered and not get derailed by their defensive styles. In this workshop, we will discuss how to promote recovery and repair, how to confront and how to increase differentiation to sustain long-term change.