In our first session, our demonstration subject has recently made a major life change. They have decided to change their career from being a priest, into becoming a therapist. Big life changes like these often induce anxiety in patients, and in this clinical demonstration we see Dr. Jeffrey Zeig exhibit a number of Ericksonian techniques to help the client be in harmony with themselves. Dr. Zeig utilizes some of Ginny’s religious history to help guide her towards transformation.

Demonstration subject Mette is struggling with issues trying to feel an emotional connection to her children. She describes her difficulty with being present for her children, and is looking for guidance. Dr. Zeig exhibits a few simple techniques that help create a powerful therapeutic relationship quickly, through the use of gestures and strategic interview questions. Dr. Zeig is able to utilize this information to create useful suggestions to help Mette with her situation.

Demonstration subject Mette is struggling with issues trying to feel an emotional connection to her children. She describes her difficulty with being present for her children, and is looking for guidance. Dr. Zeig exhibits a few simple techniques that help create a powerful therapeutic relationship quickly, through the use of gestures and strategic interview questions. Dr. Zeig is able to utilize this information to create useful suggestions to help Mette with her situation.

For the final class in the Utilization series, Patricia joins us to discuss her preference for being in control, and how that relates to her struggles with intimacy. She also requests help alleviating a psychosomatic response from an earlier trauma. Dr. Zeig uses an interpersonal approach to this session, utilizing verbal and body language techniques to help communicate complex concepts. Zeig establishes the theme of appreciate as the through-line for this session.

In part one of Seeding a Theme - A Teaching Seminar with Milton Erickson, you will witness Erickson seamlessly planting a seed, connecting the dots, developing a theme, and closing the loop in one class period. You will learn how Erickson conducted dissociation through the tempo, content and tone of his words.

This training tool contains segments of hypnotherapy conducted by Erickson, with the same subject, on two consecutive days in 1978. Erickson demonstrates how symbols may be used as metaphoric forms of communication to foster new ideas and understandings. Zeig discusses Erickson’s technique.

This video involves a therapy session with two clients. Monde has had three therapy sessions with Dr. Erickson and has been exposed to hypnosis in prior sessions. Monde is seeing Dr. Erickson because she is feeling insecure about herself as a person, mother, and wife. The other client, Nick, is a 20-year-old sophomore in college who has had no previous experience with hypnosis or psychotherapy. The therapy session is conducted in two parts: part one involves Monde as the primary patient while Nick is the secondary patient and part two involves Nick as the primary patient and Monde as the secondary patient.

The Process of Hypnotic Induction features Erickson in 1964, working with several different subjects. He demonstrates how to individualize the method of induction to fit the unique characteristics of the individual. Jeffrey Zeig discusses the microdynamics of teachnique that Erickson used in his 1964 inductions. Comments are aimed at clinicians experienced in hypnosis looking to refine their skills.

For this one-hour video, we reached backed into the Erickson archives, circa 1973 to 1978, to Milton Erickson’s teaching seminars. Erickson conducted these teaching seminars in the comfort and intimacy of his own home. In this video, we encounter three cases – each dealing primarily with trauma. And in each of these cases, there is hidden meaning. Erickson demonstrates how to take “extraneous” information provided by the client, understand the context relevant to the client’s problem, and insightfully extrapolate the true meaning for therapeutic effect.

This demonstration will introduce hypnosis into the process of ongoing therapy for the sake of illustrating a simple induction. The heightened internal concentration that results can be deepened and result in more effect concentration, resource retrieval, and experience re-associations aimed at reaching the contracted goal of the session.

This session will present group and individual demonstrations of basic ideodynamic approaches to therapeutic hypnosis utilizing Rossi's innovative activity-dependent creative work with hand signaling.

Hypnotic interventions can offer a cognitive shift toward tolerating uncertainty, positive expectancy, and a framework for taking action essential to helping the anxious person recover. Hypnosis is an opportunity to introduce and solidify these elements of active treatment.

Hypnosis as a tool of treatment has become increasingly important as more and more schools of psychotherapy come to the obvious realization that your focus defines you. What a difference to focus on what’s right with someone than to focus on what’s wrong! In this demonstration, hypnosis will be used as a means of identifying and consolidating personal resources that can assist in promoting a higher level of well being.

Part 1 of 3. Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have a first-hand experience of an alive therapeutic process. Such dynamic empowering experiences pave the way for dynamic understandings. Drs. Polster and Zeig will engage with each other and the participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work.

Erickson demonstrates his utilization method of entering into the client’s world. He demonstrates his unique approach to working with dreams using a parallel process to stimulate strategic understandings of restrictive family patterns.

All of Milton Erickson’s cases are based in utilization. It is an “alchemical formula” of turning lead into gold. Utilization is not a technique; it is an orientation that the therapist assumes. Utilization is an orientation of sufficiency that is the opposite of psychological problems, which can be viewed as believed in insufficiencies.

You will see a model derived from Dr. Erickson's work that does not involve suggestion as the hypnotic method for creating change, but instead evocation. This gentle, empowering method avoids imposing the therapist's theories and values on the client.

In this provocative session, Bill O'Hanlon will make the case that Ericksonian Hypnosis does not involve suggestion but instead involves evocation of already existing resources, and that Ericksonian Therapy involves a radical departure from the usual diagnostic, pathological-oriented approach that strives to fix or correct the client’s or patient’s deficits and brokenness.

Zeig demonstrates the Ericksonian approach to psychotherapy while working with Carol, a woman whose nail-biting habit is rooted in anxiety. After gathering information on her personal history, Zeig helps Carol utilize her values and history to affect change. The process is both humorous and dramatic. After working to change associations linked to the problem behavior, Zeig offers Carol an ordeal that will produce a "guaranteed cure." Hypnosis is offered as the "dessert", rather than the main course.

Based on Perel’s Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of aliveness and vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and consider how the need for secure attachment and closeness can co-exist with the quest for individuality and freedom.

The psychobiologically oriented couple therapist understands that the intersubjective, phenomenological process operating in primary attachment relationships relies heavily on fast acting implicit memory systems. Because of this phenomenon partners in a relationship rarely know what they are doing or why, and so they confabulate meaning in the absence of real understanding. In this workshop we will learn to accept deception in couple therapy is a part of normal human behavior while utilizing specialized techniques to help partners clarify themselves and their agendas in an effort to move them toward secure functioning.

Couples problems may be rooted in deception—infidelity is based in deception. Clinicians need to know how to assess and treat it. In this presentation, viewers will be able to describe three patterns of couples deceptions, list three methods to address deception, and list three treatment options for infidelity.

After 40-plus years of clinical experience and research, the contours of a healthy love relationship and core interventions are visible but not delineated. This lecture will posit the core features of a healthy relationship and the essential interventions necessary to help couples achieve one.

To compensate for the brain’s innate negativity bias – making it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones, which sensitizes couples to hurts and conflicts and undermines psychotherapy – we’ll explore a vital method in self-directed neuroplasticity: identifying key positive experiences and then registering them deeply in implicit memory.

Dr. Minuchin will be interviewed by Dr. Zeig about key concepts in his approach to family therapy. We will compare and contrast approaches. We will discuss developments in family therapy. Viewers will be able to describe an enactment, list three developments in contemporary family therapy, and, given a family, describe how you would initiate an interview.

Carl Whitaker (1990) demonstrates consultation and therapy with a therapist who has brought a bilingual family with a mother who experiences anxiety attacks. The maternal grandmother, mother, father, and two children are engaged by Whitaker as he sits on the floor and experiments with different types of play and fantasy.

After watching this presentation, viewers will understand how to deepen, broaden and heighten therapist sensitivity and cognitive perception through use of humor and metaphor as treatment interventions. Viewers will also get insights on how to avoid therapist burnout.

Anxiety and depression go hand in hand; untreated anxiety during childhood is a top predictor of depression in adolescents and young adults. This workshop teaches how to interrupt the patterns of anxiety and depression in children, first by recognizing what patterns need to change and then using creative and hypnotic language, homework, humor to actively make shifts happen. Concrete strategies are based on three frames that help simplify and target the patterns so common in anxiety, depression, somatic, and sleep problems.

When people think of trauma they often think of acute dramatic situations, such as a natural disaster or acts of terrorism. Yet, the majority of people who experience trauma experience a more subtle and chronic form that exists within their own family. Beginning with a genogram, Claudia Black, Ph.D., will give a portrait of addiction in the family, offering an overlay of how adverse child experiences, emotional abandonment and blatant violence are all aspects of the trauma. She will discuss shame screens, the ways people attempt to gain power over or succumb to their emotional pain, incorporating how trauma is connected to multi-addictive and co-occurring disorders.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.

The therapist will offer a simple, active paradoxical strategy that the client can integrate into their belief system about therapeutic change and then implement in a moment-by-moment to respond to anticipatory worries and the urge to avoid. The therapeutic stance of “seeking out” in this model hits squarely at any person’s tendency to resist.

How do you “make” a violent individual, and what are the implications for both prevention and treatment, using a life-span perspective? This workshop will demonstrate how to use evidence-based interventions with angry and aggressive children, adolescents and adults. A major focus will be on ways to bolster generalization and maintenance of treatment effects.

Recent research and insights have given a new understanding of depression, not as a deficit in chemicals, but as a problem with neurogenesis (new brain growth and connection). Antidepressants may work by promoting brain cell and neuronal growth and connection, but there are other ways, within the grasp of therapists, counselors and addiction specialists that can make an immediate and lasting difference in helping relieve depression. This session will give three simple methods for relieving depression using insights from recent brain science.

Dr. Giammattei will present the underlying framework that therapists who work with transgender or gender expansive (TGE) couples need to understand in order to provide gender affirming treatment. He will share ways to explore your own hetero/cis-normative beliefs around coupling and how these influence the models you choose, the questions you ask, and the interventions you use. While TGE couples experience many of the same issues as other couples, we will explore the minority stress and unique stressors that impact these issues in profound ways.

The therapist will illustrate steps 2-4 of EFT, that is delineating the negative cycle, and unpacking underlying emotions to create a coherent picture of the couples problems as seen through an attachment lens.

Robert and Mary Goulding (1985), working as cotherapists, demonstrate using five volunteer clients. The concerns of each individual are addressed during the therapy session. The Gouldings help define each person’s goals and establish a contract for change. The session includes role-play, fantasy, confrontation and the use of humor.

Of all the challenges to the couple therapist the most common is the matter of the affairs, addictions, and deception. In this one- hour presentation, attendees will learn various methods of detecting cheating, lying, and substance and non-substance abuse very early in the process of couple therapy. We will be looking at these behaviors from both psychobiological and neurobiological perspectives. PACT has a specific orientation for dealing with affairs, addictions, and deception.

The presentation will trace the evolution of cognitive behavior therapy, showing the “untold story” and critically evaluate its present status. It will also consider the future intervention of computer technology.

Since life is lived in the Space-Between and remembered in the Space-Within, the quality of “interaction” between intimate partners determines the content of subjective life. Using the power of Imago Dialogue facilitated by the therapist, couples are empowered to achieve their own transformation. Participants at this presentation will hear and see a demonstration of the essences of the process.

At the heart of psychotherapy is the idea that listening to someone is an inherently healing act. Can an understanding of the grammar of music help us better understand the grammar of how patients communicate? Join NPR and PBS composer Rob Kapilow for a unique exploration inside the language of music to see if it can help us learn to listen.

The presenting problem for Class 1 is fear. Our demonstration subject is concerned that she will not be able to handle new circumstances and experiences. Some of the techniques used by Dr. Zeig in this brief session include attunement, utilization, signifying gestures and relaxation techniques. We follow up with this client at the beginning of Class 2, where she reveals that deep changes were made that helped her be a noticeably better therapist.

Cultural factors are present in all therapeutic relationships. Engaging the totality of individual clients by addressing their intersecting identities can promote self-affirmation and clarity about internalized oppression. The cultural competency paradigm and the Dimensions of Personal Identity model will serve as the primary reference points.

This demonstration will combine Buddhist psychology, and Eastern approaches of Mindfulness and compassion with Western clinical tools.

This presentation will focus on how Polyvagal Theory provides a plausible model to explain how and why intonation of voice and vocal music can support mental and physical health and enhance function during compromised states associated with illness, chronic stress, and trauma.

What if our therapeutic goals of improving self-esteem, developing a stable and coherent sense of self, and expressing our authentic feelings all turn out to be misguided? What if they inadvertently feed the cultural enthusiasm for celebrity and success that makes so many of us miserable? This presentation will examine how mindfulness practices can be harnessed in psychotherapy to reexamine our conventional sense of self, leading both us and our clients toward greater well-being, wisdom, and compassion.

Dr. Burns will illustrate the ultra-rapid treatment of four cases of incapacitating and intractable anxiety disorders, including a woman with ten years of failed therapy for extreme depression and panic attacks, a woman with twenty years of failed psychoanalysis for the fear of elevators and hallways, a man with more than a decade of incapacitating social anxiety / fear of sweating in public, and a woman with more than twenty years of OCD / germ phobia (the same disorder that haunted the late billionaire, Howard Hughes.)

Ways to implement the core tasks of psychotherapy with patients who evidence PTSD and co-morbid disorders of prolong and complicated grief, Substance Abuse Disorders and Borderline Personality Disorders. A case conceptualization model of risk and protective factors and incorporates a constructive narrator perspective will be presented.

Brief Treatment with the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) patient makes no pretense at wholesale personality reconstruction, but rather considers the impact of the disorder on the therapy process in order to enhance the probability of success in successive brief episodes of care. This workshop reviews the etiology of BPD from both the Object Relations and the Psycho-social viewpoints. Specific protocols for dealing with issues such as Self-injurious behavior and Suicidal Ideation are reviewed.

Indications and contraindications for supportive and psychodynamic approaches to pathological narcissism will be outlined. Essential techniques of these modalities for narcissistic patients will be described, and alternative approaches examined.

Carl Rogers (1985) demonstrates with Ann, who describes herself as suffering guilt and sadness after having put off becoming a mother to pursue her career. After deciding to have children, she miscarried twins and has since been unable to become pregnant. Rogers helps her access her own potential to experience herself more positively.

Cloé Madanes (2009) Strategic Therapy with a Couple demonstrates with a young couple who is conflicted about holiday celebrations and vacations. The husband has wounds from his past that resonate with family holidays. He also wants to be more a part of his wife “inner circle” with her son from a previous marriage and vacations challenge him in this area. Madanes uses humor, insight and emotional connection to guide the couple to an accepting compromise.

Rossi (1992) demonstrates his approach to mind-body healing while working with a volunteer, Jennifer, who has rheumatoid arthristis in her hands, which have become distorted and painful. Rossi explains that mind-body healing follows a predictable pattern. During the final phase of this approach, Jennifer begins to experience automatic movement in her hands. She exclaims that her hands are moving more freely than they have in the last five years. Rossi attributes the success to "a genuine moment of self-empowerment."

Erving Polster (1995) demonstrates with Delisa, who is troubled by her work with geriatric patients. Polster leads Delisa quickly and deeply into her own fears of death and loss. Polster jokes, confronts, and directs Delisa into a greater self-awareness. Following the demonstration Polster explains his work and addresses questions.

William Glasser (1995) demonstrates with a simulated client who is in an emotionally abusive relationship. This client is depressed and unhappy with her life. The goal of the first session is to focus on a behavioral change that can be accomplished as a first step. Glasser concludes with an explanation of the demonstration and of control theory.