What do you do with couples who are split on trying to working on their relationship or calling it quits? They are often poor candidate for traditional couples therapy but they are idea candidates for "Discernment Counseling," a creative way of working with couples our therapy models are not designed for. We will discuss the difference between couples therapy and discernment counseling.
People turn to friends and family long before they go to a couples therapist. Marital First Responders is a new training program for people who are natural confidants on relationship problems: people turn to them for support and perspective. Learn what the training involves, tune your skills in being a confidant in your own social world, and see if you’d like to teach this course in your community.
This workshop will explore the fine line between love and addiction. Therapeutic strategies and questions will be explored, and you will learn three predictors of compulsion/ addiction.
Conventional approaches begin with: What brings you here? How can I help? What are your objectives? These are great questions for individuals but they are toxic for dysfunctional couples. Their responses will get you a truckload of cross complaints. After ten minutes nobody is feeling great.
Milton Erickson was one of the earliest people to work in Brief Therapy model with couples. This workshop will describe advanced advantages of using experiential methods with couples, including enactment technique and sculpting, lecture, demonstration, and small group practice.
Couples, because they come from different background and have different understandings, often use the same words to mean different things, leading to unnecessary conflict. This workshop will provide a simple, but powerful method to quickly resolve couples conflicts using action talk.
Through case examples, Esther Perel will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible therapeutic environment to work effectively with infidelity.
Sex addiction destroys trust in relationships, traumatizing the partner, the sex addict, and the family system. Relational trauma left untreated will have both parties and the entire system crumbling. Attunement, communication, and empathy (ACE) are the three pronged stool that supports the long, and sometimes arduous, journey to restoring trust. The goal is to recognize the signs of relational trauma in both parties, and compare the difference between relational trauma and co-dependence
Everybody lies. Some lies are loving and harmless. But, others are enormously destructive. Couples’ patterns of deception often begin innocently but end in couples destroying the love they once had. Self- deception, conflict avoidance and felony lies all undermine commitment and connection. Learn to identify and disrupt deception, confront evasiveness and hypocrisy and facilitate differentiation.
While we love those deep, intimate conversations that bring us close together and join our spirits, what role does difference play in passion? Come explore this and other questions related to relational happiness. We will identify two empathic systems, and understand the role of dopamine in intimate relationships.