Psychotherapy is an exploration of how individuals can forge positive, therapeutic responses to life challenges. This workshop focuses on the three core connections that allow clients to do this: (1) Positive intention and goals (“towards a positive future”); (2) Somatic Centering (“embodied presence”); and (3) Field Resources (“positive connections beyond the problem”). We will see how in a repetitive problem, all three of these connections are typically absent. More importantly, we will see how clients may be helped to developed and sustain these positive connections while engaging with challenging material—e.g., a past trauma, a present difficulty, or a future possibility. Participants will be offered multiple techniques and examples, as well as several demonstrations to illustrate this positive orientation to psychotherapy.
Cognitive Therapy has been extended in recent years to the treatment of severe mental disorders, such as bipolar disorders, schizophrenia and anorexia nervosa. This workshop will focus on strategies for relieving problems associated with severe disorders. Participants will be expected to present clinical problems and role-play patients illustrative of the specific problems that they encounter.
Building on the pragmatic foundation you have already developed as a clinician, you can readily appreciate that suggestion is an inevitable part of any treatment modality. The study of clinical hypnosis encourages a deeper understanding of how you already use suggestive language in your therapy approaches as well as ways to broaden your range of skills in suggesting therapeutic possibilities. Immersion in the practice of clinical hypnosis fosters sensitivity to the unique and subjective aspects of human experience and offers ways to enlist these potentials as positive allies in treatment. In this respect, hypnosis may well be regarded as the original applied “Positive Psychology,” for anyone who practices hypnosis recognizes that people have many more resources than they realize.
Many women are in a couple ship riddled with deception, lies, and false perceptions as a result of her partner’s compulsive sexual acting out. Dr. Black will describe the dynamics of co-sex addiction and the role of family of origin issues in thispartnership. She will address early stabilization issues as sell as treatment and recovery issues.
Drawing on the findings of her own mythic life and work in over 100 countries, 40 cultures, and with leaders the world over, Dr. Houston will offer a workshop rare for its ability to evoke new ways of being through the consideration of the dynamics of both old and emergent myths and stories of transformation. Participants will experience state of the art methods in experiencing sensory, psychological, symbolic and spiritual growth, and discovery in ways both practical and profound. Liberating thoughtways, shifts in perception and understanding, and growth in capacity will enable the participant to take these discoveries back to his or her own clients, communities and organizations. Full of music and high theatre, and often hilarious (Houston’s father wrote the joke, “Who’s on First?”), this workshop will explore the mystery of living in a time of whole system transition when what we can do as individuals can make a significant difference in the lives of many.
Strategies developed in cognitive therapy of depression are readily applied to couples' problems: Assessment includes ascertaining conflicting perspectives, thinking disorder, escalation of distortions, and cognitive interference with communication. Interventions include reducing hostility, reinforcing pleasure, increasing collaboration) and improving sexual satisfaction through cognitive interventions. Prerequisite reading: Love is Never Enough (Harper & Row).
Despite the common framing of depression as a medical illness, there is much more hard evidence pointing to social factors leading to the large and still growing population of depression sufferers. In this presentation, the focus will be on the social factors that lead to and exacerbate depression. How therapy, itself a social process, can make use of hypnotic and strategic approaches to experientially teach skills known to reduce and even prevent depression will be explored.
This workshop presents the Ericksonian and Self-Relations Psychotherapy approach to human states of suffering: depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, etc. This practical and positive approach assumes that each core human experience has equivalent potential to be positive or negative, depending on the human relationship to it; and thus focuses on how problems can be transformed into resources by skillful human connection. This process operates at two levels: (1) developing a generative state (in the therapist, client, and relationship field) and then (2) using specific methods of transforming negative experiences and behaviors.
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.