Participants will learn how to incorporate sensory, psychological, mythic, spiritual and unitive states to bring personal potential to social change at a community, professional and cultural level.
Dr. Burns will describe disturbing new research on the accuracy - or lack of accuracy - or clinician's perceptions of how our patients feel - and how they feel about us. He will illustrate new, brief, highly accurate assessment instruments that can dramatically boost your clinical understanding and effectiveness.
The Law and Ethics Workshop covers emerging legal and ethical issues for mental health practitioners of all disciplines. The four-hour program addresses issues including confidentiality and privilege, note-taking, record-keeping, coping with subpoenas, the impact of professional society ethical codes on regulation of mental health practice, liability exposure with suicidal patients, and recent developments in “Tarasoff situations.”
This program focuses more closely on the needs of clinicians who fall into particularly high risk groups. Topics include confidentiality and privilege for children, coping with high-conflict divorce/custody families, the regressive impact of the regulatory environment on family therapy in particular, supervision/consultation issues that arise for professionals whose agency positions may include functions that conflict with ethical codes.
Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have a first hand experience of an alive therapeutic process. Such dynamic, empowering experiences pave the way for dynamic understandings. Drs. Polster and Zeig will offer brief introductions to their approaches. They will demonstrate their methods through live therapeutic sessions and they will engage with each other and the participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work.
Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have a first hand experience of an alive therapeutic process. Such dynamic, empowering experiences pave the way for dynamic understandings. Drs. Polster and Zeig will offer brief introductions to their approaches. They will demonstrate their methods through live therapeutic sessions and they will engage with each other and the participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work.
Fuzzy Focus is a method that therapists can use to bring about quick and effective results. Fuzzy Focus is a process whereby unconscious resources are accessed by disrupting existing mind-sets, which are keeping alternative frames of reference unavailable. To use Fuzzy Focus effectively, therapists must be grounded with a coherent understanding of human nature and human consciousness. This workshop teaches the participant Fuzzy Focus as well as the theoretical framework needed to use Fuzzy Focus.
The "Pointing Out Patterns" approach is a three-phase, nine-step process, which addresses the negative patterns of thinking and behavior that cause clients intrapsychic and interpersonal stress. The clinician rapidly observes and reveals these negative patterns, e.g., entitlement, intimidation, people-pleasing, etc., to the client, in a caring, supportive and straightforward manner, and assists the client in quickly diminishing, or eradicating negative patterns of thought and behavior.
A person may say, "Don't ever . . . lie to me again!" or "You can . . . always tell me the truth." In either case, hypnotic language has been used to evoke undesirable or desirable behavior. This workshop will take Ericksonian linguistic patterns and export them into everyday environments. Exercises, role-plays, and brain storming will show how to make lasting changes in speech habits when addressing resistant family members and co-workers.
The language a therapist uses to conceptualize and treat a problem determines whether or not that problem can be resolved effectively. Plato's story of the cave, where the inhabitants see only shadows, is a useful metaphor for how the language of therapy can generate either confusion or clarity. This workshop will teach a method of effectively treating severe problems of children and adolescents, using an invariant opening question, strategic dialogue and metaphorical techniques.