Volatile couples come to couples therapy with a fearsome mixture of trauma, devastated dreams, and defensive attitudes. If you ask about their goals or how you can help, you quickly get intense cross complaints, and pressure to fix their partner. Simply trying to understand their problems and asking about their goals can be a toxic beginning as their defensiveness and trauma get re-triggered. This innovative approach is the result of 30 years of seeing couples and searching for a better beginning. In this workshop you will understand how to have each person identify their role in the distress, accept accountability for self-change, identify personal growth changes that are a stretch, create the foundation to work as a team and do it all with a spirit of cooperation and positive strokes. Do all this and more in the first session.
BT12 Workshop 26 – Practical Perceptual Skills Training – Steve Andreas, MA
Detecting changes in a client’s posture, tone of voice, direction of gaze, lateral gestures, etc. provides rich instantaneous feedback about how a session is going, and often indicates what kind of intervention will be useful. Simple exercises will be demonstrated and taught that are useful irrespective of your theoretical orientation.
Neuroscience documents how experiences of (1) Novelty, (2) Environmental Enrichment, and (3) Mental & Physical Exercise can optimize gene expression, brain plasticity (brain growth), and mind-body healing. We will practice psychotherapy as discussed in my recent book Creating Consciousness: How Therapists can Facilitate Wonder, Wisdom, Beauty, and Truth.
BT12 Workshop 29 – Short-Term Treatment of Anxiety and Medical Illness – Frank Dattilio, PhD, ABPP
Clinicians are very likely to encounter patients in their clinical practice that experience both anxiety and medical illness. Sometimes differentiating the symptoms of each can become extremely difficult and can serve to exacerbate either condition. This workshop will introduce some of the cognitive-behavioral techniques that are used in helping clinicians differentiate symptoms and also intervene, providing patients with skills for managing their anxiety, as well as their medical illness.
BT12 Workshop 31 – It Takes One to Tango: Doing Couples Therapy with Individuals – Michele Weiner-Davis, MSW, LCSW
That only one partner is willing to seek relationship therapy should not deter therapists since there is much that can be accomplished. In fact, there are occasions when working with only one partner is preferable. This workshop will explore these situations and offer therapists a conceptual framework for conducting relationship oriented sessions with one partner present.
BT12 Workshop 32 – Rethinking Couples Therapy: A Radical Approach to Love, Sex and Infidelity – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Couples therapists are typically discouraged from seeing partners separately lest power imbalances, allegiances, or secrets further divide the couple. What’s lost in this approach? Through case examples, Esther Perel will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible environment to work creatively with infidelity.
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.
Jay Haley once said that couples work is the hardest kind of therapy. This presentation will identify the most common screw-ups therapists make in couples therapy, and demonstrate ways to avoid them. There will be some-thing for both beginning and experienced therapists, who tend to make different mistakes.
There are multiple reasons for affairs. We will examine the benefits of affairs and why affairs can actually stabilize a marriage. In particular, we will focus on how couples can turn the crisis into an opportunity. This is a multicultural therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations.
Gridlocked perpetual conflicts often destroy relationships. They repeatedly surface, causing partners endless pain, fear, even trauma. Yet every couple faces them. In this address, Dr. Julie Gottman describes a dyadic therapy method that uncloaks the dreams, history and fears beneath partners’ issues while fostering greater compassion and connection in the couple. An edited film will be shown to demonstrate this intervention.