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.
The brain is involved with everything we do, especially our relationships. In this fun presentation Dr. Amen will discuss different areas of the brain involved in relationships, what they do, what happens when things go wrong and how to improve them. You are a better marital therapist when you understand the brain.
This workshop explains and proves the meaning of the title, that romantic partners mostly do not know what they are doing or why. This is because partners are moving toward and away from one another in accordance of their internal working models, their anticipatory neurobiological systems, and their moment-to-moment experience of safety and or threat. These systems are extremely fast-acting and operate below ordinary cognition or knowing. In the absence of knowing, partners must confabulate in order to explain their behaviors and the consequences of behaviors. Attendees will learn how to work with this phenomena of “not knowing” from a psychobiological perspective and will learn so-called “bottom-up” interventions for bypassing ordinary cognitive mechanism that can distract and misdirect the therapy.
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.
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.
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.
This talk presents: 1) current information about porn, its users, and its impact on consumers and their relationships; 2) the common model of how porn use shapes sexual decision-making, and an alternative model that better matches people’s experiences; 3) an alternative to the “porn addiction” model for diagnosing and treating compulsive or impulsive behavior regarding porn.
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.
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.