Clinicians are enthusiastically discovering that mindfulness practices can enlighten and enliven their lives, both inside and outside the therapy hour. These techniques hold great promise for personal development and as a powerful method to enhance virtually all forms of psychotherapy. But what does mindfulness-informed therapy actually look like? This demonstration, using volunteers from the audience, will illustrate how mindfulness practices and insights derived from them can inform treatment.
This one-hour presentation will demonstrate cross-dialogic and other strategic techniques for shepherding couples to- ward “secure functioning,” an attitudinal and behavioral expectation that couples operate as a two-person psychological system. Because the concept of secure-functioning is principle based and not personality based, the success of secure-functioning relationships does not depend upon attachment orientation. The presentation will endeavor to help the clinician utilize psychobiological strategies to help clarify partner attachment strategies, true desires, and unspoken agendas in couple therapy.
Drs. John and Julie Gottman will present a state-of-the-art review of how to conceptualize and treat the highly intractable problem of domestic violence toward intimate partners. They will review the research literature and present a conceptualization of the issues in treating this population. They will describe a highly successful randomized clinical trial study and the results that demonstrate long-term follow up effectiveness.
Living is composed of a supreme flow of experiences. Telling is the selective option to revisit this landscape and to reveal the accessibly hidden markers of a lifetime. Dr. Polster will show how a sharply pointed attention within a group process will light up our lives, a key element in a growing life focus cultural movement. Techniques and precedents for conducting this process will be addressed.
Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have 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 participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work in this engaging all-day workshop.
Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have 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 participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work in this engaging all-day workshop.
Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have 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 participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work in this engaging all-day workshop.
In this workshop, we will explore the patterns of thought involved in how people make important life choices, especially those that carry the potential to really make a critical difference in their emotional wellbeing and quality of life. Instead of asking why and then theorizing why someone makes poor choices, our emphasis will be on how one decides to do this, not that, in especially vulnerable situations, i.e., those that hold great potential for causing psychological distress.
Anxiety and depression go hand in hand; untreated anxiety during childhood is a top predictor of depression in adolescents and young adults. This workshop teaches how to interrupt the patterns of anxiety and depression in children, first by recognizing what patterns need to change and then using creative and hypnotic language, homework, humor to actively make shifts happen. Concrete strategies are based on three frames that help simplify and target the patterns so common in anxiety, depression, somatic, and sleep problems.
This presentation poses a substance abuse treatment which acknowledges and accommodates the personal needs being addressed by substance use, bypasses perceived resistance and employs idiosyncratic psycho-biological learning to achieve a body-mind gestalt complementary to the client’s sobriety. Client self empowerment and relapse prevention are built into the intervention This method develops a safe framework for addressing any subsequent mental health themes directly or indirectly related to substance misuse. Ideomotor questioning is employed as a practical conduit to body-mind communication and function.