The purpose is to transpose office therapy into communal application. Personal change is fundamental to psychotherapy but life focus is its instrumentality, often overshadowed. These groups will prioritize it, seeking to portray life. The groups may be large and life-long. Dr Polster will provide conceptual innovations, representative exercises and live communal illustration.
Knowing how to elicit positive emotion even in couples steeped in intensely negative interactions is the key to providing the motivation for change. In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of ways for creating “magical moments” in the therapy hour that offer a new template for couples, otherwise trapped in dysfunction, to allay repetitive cycles. You’ll learn how to use tools like focusing, sentence stems, doubling and directives to invite couples into new kinds of experience of connection. We’ll also examine the neurobiological principles that enable partners to expect and attract more positive experiences from each other.
BT12 Workshop 41 – Mating in Captivity: Reconciling Attachment, Security and Erotic Desire in Couples – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Based on Perel’s bestseller, Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of aliveness and vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality, and consider how the need for secure attachment and closeness can co-exist with the quest for individuality and freedom.
BT12 Workshop 42 – Treating Anxious Children and Families: Brief, Successful and Fun – Lynn Lyons, MSW
Families dealing with anxiety are often locked into cognitive and behavioral patterns that are rigid, overwhelming, and controlling. This workshop provides tools and interventions to interrupt the predictable elements of anxiety, help parents shift out of their anxious behavior, and teach families a plan to handle the process of worry.
BT12 Workshop 43 – Stages of Change: Tailoring the Treatment Method and the Therapy Relationship to the Individual Client – John Norcross, PhD, ABPP
Backed by 30 years of research, this workshop provides demonstrably effective methods for adapting the treatment method and the therapy relationship to the patient’s stage of change. You will learn to rapidly assess the stages of change (precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance) and then to match processes of change specific to that stage. “Doing the right thing at the right time” is the key to efficient change. This workshop features focused lectures, clinical examples, practice exercises, interactive discussions, and participants’ own case material.
BT12 Workshop 44 – Betrayed: Helping Couples to Heal from Infidelity – Michele Weiner-Davis, MSW, LCSW
If you work with couples, you’re no stranger to infidelity. And because healing from infidelity is challenging, it behooves us to have a clear roadmap of the territory. In this workshop, we’ll go over an array of post-affair issues, including ways to deal with intense emotions, whether to discuss the details of the betrayal, how to begin rebuilding trust in the aftermath of the discovery, whether to have clinical ultimatums about ending affairs, how to handle setbacks, and how to deal with residual feelings for the affair partner.
Couples’ conflicts that hurt and go unprocessed often lead to chasms of emotional distance. This workshop explains and demonstrates with film how a couple can learn to process their own battles and move from resentment to understanding, accountability, and repair. The Gottman “Recovery Kit” will be explained and given to each participant.
Remarried couples are often poorly served by therapists who treat them without enough appreciation for the unique complexity and multiple loyalties of stepfamily life. This workshop will combine clinical assessment and treatment issues with a special focus on values issues such as commitment and fairness that often dominate conflict in stepfamilies.
How do we raise sexual issues? How should we respond when the couple does? Why doesn’t THIS couple enjoy sex, or have sex? Are aging or health issues complicating sexual problems? What’s the ONE cross-cultural issue that matters regarding sexuality? And what’s really a sexual issue—versus an issue of power, grief, resentment, or fear of rejection/abandonment? This PRACTICAL workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning.
Overtly angry and passive-aggressive partners often present the most difficulty for therapists. They frequently demand intimacy, while being unable to create the conditions for intimacy to occur or be sustained. They require a high level of activity from you to structure treatment, manage hostility in the office and confront hypocrisies that keep their development stalled. Learn to increase your personal strengths to harness the enormous developmental potential that exists in these couples.