BT12 Workshop 21 – John Weakland’s Brief Therapy with a Husband Suspected of Infidelity – Wendel Ray, PhD
John Weakland’s MRI Brief Therapy is among the most effective & influential models in use today. Video recordings of Weakland working successfully with a husband suspected of infidelity will be reviewed and discussed to demonstrate the MRI Brief Therapy conceptual framework and clinical techniques for competency based brief therapy.
BT12 Short Course 01 – Two Voices, One Dream: A Brief Therapy Technique for Couples – Eric Greenleaf, PhD, and Christine Guilloux, DESS
When we are in love, “Life is like a dream,” and each values the other. This brief exercise reintroduces a loving dream of the couple, utilizing values of childhood and the pleasure of trance to help them accomplish this once again. The female and male therapists induce the trance together.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher uses her brain scanning studies (fMRI) of people happily in love, rejected in love and in love long-term to discuss the traits of romantic love, love-at-first-sight, and addiction to love. She focuses on her current research on 40,000 men and women to propose that four broad cognitive/behavioral personality trait constellations have evolved associated with the neural systems for dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen. Then she discusses her data on mate choice among 28,000 individuals to pro-pose why we are chemically drawn to one person rather than another.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
To compensate for the brain’s innate negativity bias – making it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones, which sensitizes couples to hurts and conflicts and undermines psychotherapy – we’ll explore a vital method in self-directed neuroplasticity: identifying key positive experiences and then registering them deeply in implicit memory.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
In her lecture, Fisher discusses four biologically based styles of thinking and behaving and, using her data on mate choice among 28,000 individuals, shows why we are chemically drawn to one person rather than another. In this workshop Fisher goes deeper into these natural temperament constellations, and discusses how partners with very different (and similar) biological styles of thinking and behaving interact to create great joy, confusion and sorrow in their partnerships.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Most couples have at least one partner who withdraws. To bring about lasting change, withdrawers have to engage in the process of therapy and most importantly they must reengage in the relationship. Using video examples, this workshop focuses on how to engage withdrawers and help them reengage with their partners.
The first emotion our ancestors evolved was fear—and we remain highly threat reactive today, continually overestimating threats and underestimating opportunities and resources. We’ll explore multiple methods for helping clients “cool the fires” of fear and anger, and internalize inner strength and an appropriate sense of safety.
Building on the keynote on “taking in the good,” we’ll explore ways to use positive experiences to soothe and potentially replace negative material (e.g., relationship upsets, pain from childhood). Through discussion and experiential activities, we’ll match healing experiences to disturbances in the brain’s core motivational systems (Avoid harm, Approach reward, Attach to “us”).
Deficits such as affect blindness, alexithymia, and poor theory of mind will likely lead to mutual dysregulation in couples during periods of distress or threat and is the driving force behind relationship dissatisfaction and dissolution. This workshop will introduce attendees to the most common social-emotional deficits and will demonstrate how to identify these deficits and what to do about them in couple therapy.