Remarried couples are often poorly served by therapists who treat them without enough appreciation for the unique complexity and multiple loyalties of stepfamily life. This workshop will combine clinical assessment and treatment issues with a special focus on values issues such as commitment and fairness that often dominate conflict in stepfamilies.
How do we raise sexual issues? How should we respond when the couple does? Why doesn’t THIS couple enjoy sex, or have sex? Are aging or health issues complicating sexual problems? What’s the ONE cross-cultural issue that matters regarding sexuality? And what’s really a sexual issue—versus an issue of power, grief, resentment, or fear of rejection/abandonment? This PRACTICAL workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning.
Overtly angry and passive-aggressive partners often present the most difficulty for therapists. They frequently demand intimacy, while being unable to create the conditions for intimacy to occur or be sustained. They require a high level of activity from you to structure treatment, manage hostility in the office and confront hypocrisies that keep their development stalled. Learn to increase your personal strengths to harness the enormous developmental potential that exists in these couples.
This workshop probes the intricacies of love and desire—how they relate and how they conflict.. Participants will learn how emotional intimacy can inhibit sexual desire and why “good intimacy” doesn’t necessarily make for “good sex.” Through case material and video vignettes, we’ll explore how our emotional history: “how we were loved” shapes our erotic blueprints and expresses itself in the physicality of sex: “how we make love”. We will show how to break through erotic impasses and help couples balance the dual needs for security and freedom. This model applies to couples and individuals from all sexual orientations.
This workshop is designed to help you and your partner learn how to achieve courageous love, based on the presenter’s Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy. When couples have self-led conversations, their relationships harmonize naturally. They can discuss even highly charged issues productively and feel safe to reveal their most vulnerable parts to each other.
CC11 Topical Panel 03 – Couples and Divorce: How Do You Assess When Separation/Divorce Make Sense or Does it? – Lilian Borges, MA, LPC, William Doherty, PhD, and Julie Gottman, PhD
Jay Haley once said that couples work is the hardest kind of therapy. This presentation will identify the most common screw-ups therapists make in couples therapy, and demonstrate ways to avoid them. There will be some-thing for both beginning and experienced therapists, who tend to make different mistakes.
There are multiple reasons for affairs. We will examine the benefits of affairs and why affairs can actually stabilize a marriage. In particular, we will focus on how couples can turn the crisis into an opportunity. This is a multicultural therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations.
CC11 Topical Panel 01 - Infidelity: What is the Essence of the Crisis and How Do Couples Move Forward? - Ellyn Bader, PhD, Marty Klein, PhD, Esther Perel, MA, LMFT, Jette Simon