How does one master the practice of psychotherapy? Should training emphasize theory, technique, or research? What about the personal growth of the clinician? We will identify seven essential "postures" through a series of graduated, Psychoaerobics exercises. Attendees will participate in growth games and group hypnosis to explore the merging of discipline and spontaneity that occurs in the most artful and effective clinical work. The program focuses on refining the therapist's lenses (perception), muscles (therapeutic power), heart (compassion), and hat (social role).
Educational Objectives:
(1) List three therapist postures that were especially well-developed in Erickson.
(2) Given a case, describe how to use a Psychoaerobic exercise.
The Basic Accessing Question is a simple fail-safe approach to accessing inner resources and creative problem solving by the patient with a minimum of suggestion by the therapist.
Seminal laboratory experiments show how habits are unlearned. Behavioral analysis: Accurately identify fear eliciting stimulus patterns. Description of major techniques with case examples, e.g., systematic desensitization, flooding, assertiveness training. Practica involving attendees showing treatment of specific anxiety constellations will reveal how the therapist adjusts to the individual.
A consistent, testable theory can permit the importation of effective techniques, not theories, on patients. Knowing when to apply a specific technique and how to enhance compliance will be stressed.
Presentation of the principles of feminist therapy as utilized with women who have been battered, sexually abused as children or adults. Such techniques also can be used to treat sexual misconduct by therapists and sexual harassment, including dealing with issues such as dissociation, obsessions and cognitive distortions.
This workshop focuses on the control theory and how it relates to the practice of Reality Therapy. Demonstration with volunteers from the audience who will role-play actual clients they are now working with will be highlighted.
Memories may be treated as one-act dramas, dialogues or dreams, as volunteers use them, incorporate them in new ways and let them return to the past. Demonstration, with audience volunteers, of a single childhood memory to make changes in their current lives will illustrate Redecision Therapy.
The development of the capacities of the healthy real self is described along with the impairments in these capacities that ensue in the Disorders of the Self. A diagnostic system based on the Disorders of the Self is presented, its conceptual basis is explained, and it is compared with DSM IV. A central triadic psychodynamic theme of these disorders, i.e., self-activation leads to depression which leads to defense, is described.
Human problems can be seen as "games without end; " that is, as recurring behaviors based on the continuous application of rigid rules, but devoid of rules for the change of these rules. What are such "meta-rules" and how can they be introduced?