This one-hour presentation will demonstrate cross-dialogic and other strategic techniques for shepherding couples toward 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.
The psychobiologically oriented couple therapist understands that the intersubjective, phenomenological process operating in primary attachment relationships relies heavily on fast acting implicit memory systems. Because of this phenomenon partners in a relationship rarely know what they are doing or why, and so they confabulate meaning in the absence of real understanding. Additionally, partners in couple therapy maintain hidden agendas and use deception in order to protect themselves from loss.
During this seminar, Dr. Erickson describes essential skills for working with resistant patients, the use of permissive language, ordeal therapy, geometric progression, and therapeutic double binds. Erickson conducts a demonstration, answers questions from the audience, and elaborates on his thinking with case illustrations that include: sexual dysfunction, stuttering, bed wetting, childhood eating disorders, compulsive habits, phobias and self-defeating behavior.
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses three brain systems that evolved for mating and reproduction: the sex drive; feelings of intense romantic love; and feelings of deep attachment to a long term partner. She then focuses on her brain scanning research (using fMRI) on romantic rejection and the trajectory of love addiction following rejection. She concludes with discussion of the brain circuits associated with long-term partnership happiness and the future of relationships in the digital age—what she calls “slow love.”