CC17 Workshop 13 - Therapy with Polyamorous Clients: Gaining Cultural & Clinical Competence with a Marginalized Population - Martha Kauppi, LMFT, ACST
Polyamory is in the news, in the movies, and in the therapy room. As media attention for this open relationship style grows, more and more people are giving it a try. Working skillfully with this marginalized group requires gaining cultural competence specific to their struggles. Learn who chooses p
The gay male subculture emphasizes easy sexual hookups as a norm, without questioning whether this is actually healthy for a couple. This workshop will define how male couples choose exclusivity successfully, how healthy attachment is an important component for considering an open relationship and provide guidelines for managing open boundaries within a couple. Norms in the subculture will be compared to stereotypical heterosexual couples, including what actually constitutes deception or affairs, and how transform deception to a deeper intimacy.
The secret to helping couples have a powerful, transformative experience in therapy is to get them to deeply explore---while in each other’s presence---their own character structure and family-of-origin trauma. For the therapist, this process involves six steps: arriving at the couple’s relational diagnosis, helping them articulate their repeating loops, getting the backstory of their childhood adaptation, imaginatively reparenting each inner child, loving confrontation, and helping
Perhaps the single most discussed issue in couple therapy is sex. This two-hour workshop will lead clinicians through a series of interviewing techniques for examining sexual problems in couples. These techniques include questions to ask, assessment of explicit and implicit somatic answers, and other strategic, bottom- up methods for getting to the crux of the matter. We will also cover typical difficulties many therapists have with frank sexual questioning. We’ll examine attach- ment orga
Safety is a non-negotiable condition for thriving relationships. This workshop will inform and train participants in a three part process that helps create and sustain emotional safety.
Secure attachment offers us a potent sense of safety and a way to maintain equilibrium in the presence of danger or threat. These bonds allow us to tolerate and cope with our human frailty. The love one person feels from another has an enormous effect on them, both physically and emotionally. One of the goals of EFT is to help partners see how they are both caught in a recurring pattern of emotional disconnection, triggering each other into aggressively demanding a response or freezing up and sh
Curiosity is the path to wonder. Most workshops focus on processes therapists can learn to help couples remove the constraints to the relationship they want. In this workshop, participants will learn about wonder as the ultimate quality of a thriving relationship and discover techniques that help intimate partners transition from judgment to curiosity and wonder.
Are you ready to hear your favorite long-term couple client tell you they are fighting because one of them is interested in exploring polyamory and the other is not? Would you choose to work with a couple who told you on the phone they live and love with 2 other people and some tensions are arising? Many people are exploring consensually non-monogamous relationships, and as a result, related issues are showing up in therapy rooms everywhere. This workshop will debunk myths, distinguish between n
When One or Both Partners are Highly Cognitive or Emotionally Avoidant. Accessing and deepening vulnerable emotions that are at first hidden, unspoken, unknown or masked by reactive and protective emotions is one of the most powerful skills of an emotionally focused couples therapist. Emotionally focused therapists facilitate emotionally moving enactments by guiding avoidant partners to turn to their partner and to share with them about their pain, sadness and fears.