With her Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Marsha Linehan was one of the first practitioners to show how East and West could meet in the consulting room. She will address how critical it is that psychotherapists strive for both a well-being of our clients and the scientific validation of our methods.
Daniel Siegel (2009) Mindsight and Integration in the Cultivation of Well-Being demonstrates interpersonal neurobiology therapy with a volunteer studying to be a therapist. She has experienced fear in one clinical setting and has also been “the glue,” holding together her family since she was young. Siegel uses the triangle of relationship/ mind/brain to help the volunteer experience her fear of responsibility by allowing images and body sensations to flow to “soften the mind.”
Daniel Siegel (2009) Mindsight and Integration in the Cultivation of Well-Being demonstrates interpersonal neurobiology therapy with a volunteer studying to be a therapist. She has experienced fear in one clinical setting and has also been “the glue,” holding together her family since she was young. Siegel uses the triangle of relationship/ mind/brain to help the volunteer experience her fear of responsibility by allowing images and body sensations to flow to “soften the mind.”
There is a vast wisdom describing the capacity for self-transformation and healing central to Buddhist psychology, now a focus of current neuroscience research as well. We will delineate the principles and clinical/therapeutic applications of mindfulness, compassion and forgiveness trainings, attunement, mental health and well being, as well as the profound shift of identity that has parallels in eastern psychology and recent neuroscience research. We will explore the wedding of a spiritual psychology of the heart in tune with clinically sound modern science.
The challenge of personal transformation is faced differently in the East and West. Typically, Eastern meditation emphasizes how to cultivate higher states of consciousness that "go beyond" ego identifications, while Western therapy focuses on how to "work through" problematic states. This workshop explores an integrative model that suggests how to use both approaches in a complementary way: sometimes "transcending, sometimes "transforming", and often doing both at the same time. The connection between meditation, generative trance, and selfrelations will be a central focus.
The evidence that the relationship matters in psychotherapy is vast, but that knowledge is of limited usefulness until it is known how to create powerful therapeutic relationships. The relevance of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) model to this issue is described, and specific methods are described and shown that can increase the potency of the therapeutic relationship.
Change is a three-part rite of passage: separation from the known; wandering in the wilderness; and the return transformed. The second stage is hardest to navigate, often interrupted by the premature need for closure. A specific skill set including inquiry, mindfulness, curiosity and stillness provides essential competencies for moving through change.
Stop-Breathe-Focus (SBF) diffuses volatile situations, interrupts addictive/compulsive behaviors, resolves conflicts, facilitates healthy decisions and changes problematic behavior. SBF is useful to make changes quickly, to autopsy previous behaviors and to create a plan for behavior change; all in a simple, easy-to-use package.
Adolescent self-harming behavior is on the rise and is one of the most challenging presenting problems school professionals, healthcare providers, and therapists will face in their clinical practice settings. In this "hands-on" practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn several distress management tools and strategies to strengthen the adolescent's self-soothing and coping capacities and family connection building rituals and therapeutic experiments to foster closer and stronger parent-adolescent relationships. Parent management skills for constructively responding to their adolescents' inevitable self-harming slips will be presented.
Mindfulness and acceptance methods are powerful methods in clinical practice that greatly simplify the therapeutic tasks at hand. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) will be described as an example of these methods and specific techniques will be shown. ACT targets common core processes that research are the basis for much psychopathology or restrictions on psychological health.