Infidelity generally points out flaws in a relationship, and the revelation of an affair often triggers a crisis of trust and connection. We’ll examine the benefits and the costs of truth-telling and transparency, how couples can rebuild trust and intimacy, and how affairs can actually stabilize a marriage and prevent its dissolution. In particular, we will focus on how couples can turn the crisis into an opportunity. Combining didactic material, case studies and video vignettes, we will lay out a nuanced and multicultural therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations, fantasized or real, disclosed or shrouded in secrecy.
Like walking a tightrope, working with couples in trouble requires focus and balance. Both partners want you to take their side, and, at times, it’s easy to get swallowed up by the intense emotionality of the sessions. So, how can you maintain a sense of balance and create an atmosphere in which healing can take place? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the principles of Imago Relationship Therapy to connect with the issues the couple brings to you and transform the emotional temperature of the session.
Couples’ conflicts that hurt and go unprocessed often lead to chasms of emotional distance. This workshop explains and demonstrates with film how a couple can learn to process their own battles and move from resentment to understanding, accountability, and repair. The Gottman “Recovery Kit” will be explained and given to each participant.
Knowing how to elicit positive emotion even in couples steeped in intensely negative interactions is the key to providing the motivation for change. In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of ways for creating “magical moments” in the therapy hour that offer a new template for couples, otherwise trapped in dysfunction, to allay repetitive cycles. You’ll learn how to use tools like focusing, sentence stems, doubling and directives to invite couples into new kinds of experience of connection. We’ll also examine the neurobiological principles that enable partners to expect and attract more positive experiences from each other.
Couples therapy is often complicated and delicate when one partner has suffered childhood sexual abuse. The needs of both partners must be honored though one partner’s dream may be the other partner’s nightmare. This workshop describes the details of applying Gottman Method Couples Therapy to a case involving one partner’s history of severe sexual abuse.
People change due to the experiences they live, more than the information they receive. A brief overview of the experiential approach will be followed by a demonstration and discussion of the experiential methods used for assessment and treatment, which include couples and therapist sculpting, attunement, and the use of signals.
This workshop reviews the areas of professional functions that have been most associated with regulatory problems for mental health professionals, including sexual and nonsexual boundary violations, “law-psych” interfaces, competence, “moral” offenses, licensing board and malpractice actions. The workshop covers causes for these problems and ways of avoiding them and/or managing them.
Internal Family Systems therapy synthesizes two paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind—and brings concepts and methods from many schools of family therapy to the world of sub-personalities. In addition to learning how to help clients access their Self, participants will learn the dif-ferent kinds of parts they will encounter in clients (managers, firefighters, and exiles) and how to help those parts transform. The workshop will provide tools to help therapists stay centered and open-hearted, as well as provide a user-friendly language for therapy that encourages disclosure and empathy.
This workshop will help you examine how your values and life experience affect your treatment of couples on the brink of divorce, and will teach you a protocol for helping clients make a decision that has integrity for all involved and that improves the odds that couples will try to heal their broken bond.
This workshop focuses on the use of digital audio and video frame analysis and heart rate monitoring for gathering reliable information concerning attachment and arousal patterns within and between partners. The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) places particular emphasis on implicit body states that drive interaction between partners. Though clinicians are trained to use their senses to pick up micro-movements and micro-expressions through the body, face, and voice, precision equipment such as digital video and biofeedback devices can often provide compelling “proof” of what the clinician sees, hears, and senses when observing partner interactions.