Three specific techniques are universally valuable in brief therapy: utilization, experience resource retrieval, experiential-based imagery rehearsal. This workshop provides an exposure to these concepts and techniques with clear examples and demonstrations. Participants should find numerous ways to enhance their brief therapy practice in any setting and with all populations of clients.To list the essential aspects of the utilization approach for reducing resistance across multiple settings.
Difficult relationships are often confusing. This disorder, rather than the content differences, often keeps us from finding resolution. Learn a simple, yet detailed, content-free process to sort out this unconscious confusion, reach clarity, understand other's experience, and spontaneously change perceptions and responses to become more resourceful. A demonstration will be given.
The experience of being a therapist can often seem routine, dealing with similar issues, telling well-worn stories, and applying favored methods. Yet occasionally there are moments, even whole sessions, that appear miraculous in their innovation. This workshop explores the process and mechanisms of creative breakthroughs, based on interviews with the world's most innovative clinicians.
Personal identity is a crucial guide to the way people live their lives. Dr. Polster will examine how therapy may accentuate and empower familiar identities and how to resuscitate those which are dimmed. Conceptual elaboration will be joined with live therapy sessions, showing how concepts connect with therapeutic work.
As the rate of depression increases around the world, it is apparent that depression is about more than just "bad chemistry." The evidence is clear that social factors play a huge role in depression's onset and course, and these can be better addressed through psychotherapy than with medications. Key aspects of effective treatment will be described in this workshop.
Cognitive-Behavioral treatment is now pushing further into the confrontational. Participants will learn how to divide and conquer: to interrupt anticipatory anxiety and then to manage physical symptoms using cognitive strategies, paradox, pattern disruption, exposure and interceptive exposure, peeling away their ever-present safety crutches and, the second order change of perceiving panic disorder as a mental game.
Mindfulness and acceptance methods are powerful methods in clinical practice that greatly simplify the therapeutic tasks at hand. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) will be described as an example of these methods and specific techniques will be shown. ACT targets common core processes that research are the basis for much psychopathology or restrictions on psychological health.
Non-verbal techniques can constitute excellent companion methods to traditional testing and assessment tools, and clinical interviewing for evaluation and diagnosis of client/patient personalities, relationships and problems. In addition, they can provide additional avenues for intervening that can be utilized with many diverse populations of different ages and backgrounds, including those who may be hard to reach by verbal psychotherapeutic techniques. This workshop will demonstrate the use of these techniques and involve participants individually and interactively in their utilization so they will acquire skills to enrich their practices.
This workshop is an introductory presentation about how our daily mental activity turns on the activity-dependent gene expression and protein synthesis cycle to construct and reconstruct the neural networks of our brain. We will experience the four-stage creative process of art, science and psychotherapy during a group induction of therapeutic hypnosis.
The Personal and professional dimensions of a therapist's life often intersect, leading to reciprocal influence that takes place in sessions. This experiential workshop explores the ways that therapists are often transformed by their work helping others and enhances their productivity and life satisfaction.