How to work with partners who are leaning in difference directions about staying together and trying therapy. Learn core techniques and see a video demonstration of how to work confidently with these challenging couples. You will learn the key pathways offered couples in Discernment Counseling.
Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Why doesn’t good intimacy guarantee good sex? When you love , how does it feel and when you Desire how is it different? Loss of Desire brings many people into our offices. It is the prime sexual complaint that leads relational unhappiness, infidelity and even divorce. For the most part, sexuality has been relegated to sex therapy and couple therapy has been a desexualized practice. Yet, love in our digital age puts sex at the center of couples’ lives.
This bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our need for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and show how reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time. We will address paradoxes of desire and how social forces inhibit erotic expression; attachment history and the erotic blueprint.
Rituals have been used for thousands of years to help people move through difficult developmental times, to move on from problems and stuck places and to grieve and leave trauma behind. In this session, you will discover the two types of rituals that can help couples resolve their issues effectively.
In the old way of thinking, couples were depicted as a communication system that could be improved with relational skills or as interacting psychopathologies needing treatment by a mental health professional. In the new way of thinking, couples are a system of mutually reinforcing interactions that create anxiety or safety, wounding or healing. They also are the source of culture and the fulcrum of social transformation. What happens in the couple happens in the culture; what happens in the culture happens in the couple.
Our natural sexual setpoint explains a lot about arousal, desire and intimate satisfaction. We will explore this issue with research, facts and humor, with the objectives of understanding the effects of estrogen on desire and the effects of testosterone on desire.
Couples therapy tends to operate without a clear map of successful outcome, except the reported satisfaction/dissatisfaction of the couple. In this workshop, we will propose an optimal outcome of couple’s therapy, the process of reaching it and demonstrate the procedures that achieve it.
This workshop focuses on couple therapy with highly disorganized partners and couples. Special attention will be paid to the importance of strong therapeutic frame (rules) and therapeutic stance (goals). Highly disorganized partners and couples will be viewed through the lens of attachment theory, regulation theory, and neurobiological development.