The experience of being a therapist can often seem routine, dealing with similar issues, telling well-worn stories, and applying favored methods. Yet occasionally there are moments, even whole sessions, that appear miraculous in their innovation. This workshop explores the process and mechanisms of creative breakthroughs, based on interviews with the world's most innovative clinicians.
The Bioinformatics of Enchanting Effectiveness is the scientific foundation of Milton H. Erickson's naturalistic and utilization approach to therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy via the psychosocial facilitation of gene expression and brain plasticity.
Over the past 20 years, Dr. Rossi has innovatively expanded Ericksonian work by demonstrating its connection to molecular biology, chronobiology, chaos theory and mathematics. This course will explore the relationship and relevance of Dr. Rossi's mind-body work to other forms of psychotherapy. We will learn how mind-body work utilizes and integrates many of the core processes used in the work of Winnecott, Klein, Masterson, Kohut, Jung and cognitive behavioral therapy.
While confrontation is often the best way to help clients examine their contribution to a problem, many therapists feels anxious about the tension aroused during confrontation. Leam to employ confrontation in couples work with special emphasis on matching the intensity of the confrontation- gentle to tough- with the level of impasse. The focus will be on how to select what to confront, when to confront, and how to build a confrontation over time. You will leave this session with a firmer grasp of the attitude and posture necessary to use confrontation more effectively in your work.
The experience of feeling "stuck" is a common hazard of our profession and leaves therapists searching for creative solutions. Clinical creativity is never a solo process but always interactive, inseparable from the imagination and creativity of the clients. It is easy for therapists to get bogged down in literal definitions of problems that go counter to clients' idiosyncratic logic. This workshop will explore different ways of breaking through impasses by looking "outside the box" and changing the frame of reference from the literal to the world of personal meaning. Video tapes will demonstrate the use of metaphors, rituals, fantasies, writing and paradox in making a creative leap.
An introductory presentation reviewing how our daily mental activity may turn on the activity-dependent gene expression and protein synthesis cycle to construct and reconstruct the neural networks of our mind-brain and facilitate healing of the body. We will explore innovative approaches to facilitating the four-stage creative process in therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy in a group process and individual demonstrations.
Dealing with narcissistic and borderline defenses that block healthy relating can be quite challenging when dealing with couples. This short course will address ways to creatively apply core aspects of Rossi's mind-body approach to develop treatment plans and interventions that can facilitate the containment of these defenses and help reorganize the dynamics of the couple system. The integration of the psychodynamic system and cognitive behavioral perspectives will be addresses throughout the course.
Participants will learn the insights that are presented in my most recent manuscript, Feeling Good about Writing (forward by Albert Ellis, PhD), which is the first book to apply the main principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy to writing blocks and the process of creative and nonfiction. We will also discuss the application to other creative endeavors and learn how to develop beliefs which empower, as opposed to defeating, creative processes.
Lecture, group and individual demonstrations with volunteers from the audience will illustrate Rossi's activity-dependent approaches to therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy that are consistent with the theory and research on the molecular-genomic level plasticity for the creative reconstruction of mind, memory and consciousness.