Mindfulness isn't a therapy in its own right, but its capacity for improving the quality of people's lives has received substantial empirical support as a class of meaningful interventions, particularly when embedded in a substantive therapeutic framework. Guided mindfulness meditation as a focusing strategy shares some key characteristics with clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, positive psychology, and other such focus-related approaches, but usually has a different aim in its application. This speech explores these overlaps when mindfulness is applied to a goal-oriented treatment process. This is NOT a speech about spiritual exploration with mindfulness. Rather, the focus is entirely on clinical applications of key aspects of mindfulness by deconstructing the hypnotic elements of such processes. We will identify the therapeutically relevant components of guided meditations, and how we can construct more meaningful interventions by incorporating them in novel ways.
Couples often come to therapy in the aftermath of infidelity. Their marriage is in crisis, their emotions are intense, and you are required to quickly organize a lot of complex information into a coherent treatment plan. How do you do this with confidence?
Discover what to look for, how to delineate core treatment issues in the initial, middle and termination stages of therapy. Next, use 10 parameters to assess the meaning of the infidelity and then uncover the major types of lies and deception to give you a solid way to determine what to address and when.
In this workshop I will show how to use a process-based therapy approach to guide intervention, based on a new form of process-based functional analysis. Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and an extended form of its psychological flexibility model I will show how idiographic analysis can be used to fit treatment kernels to client needs, rather than using protocols that target syndromes.
In psychotherapy, negative emotions are essential parts of a client's stuck places. This workshop focus on how to identify, welcome, and transform such difficult emotions, such that they become integral elements of a solution.
When grief becomes painfully preoccupying and protracted, the problem often arises at the intersection of the death and the relationship it interrupted. Drawing on attachment-informed and Two-Track models of bereavement, we will begin by considering grieving as a process of reconstructing rather than relinquishing our bonds with those who have died, and the complicating circumstances that can interfere with this natural process. We then turn to a close analysis of a single session of therapy that releases an adult daughter from an anguishing grief that has persisted unchanged for many years, and that has insinuated itself into her life with intimate others. We begin this work by attending closely to "quality terms" in the client's narrative that poignantly convey the character of her connection with her mother, that symbolically signal the devastation caused by her death, and that function as harbingers of a more hopeful reconstructed relationship
After a detailed description of emotional abandonment, Claudia will discuss a variety of behavioral responses to the internalized shame. The need for control, perfectionism, procrastination, the dynamics of victimization and compartmentalized depression are many such examples that she will describe.
What can mental health professionals do to enhance their performance? Available evidence makes clear that attending a typical continuing education workshop, specializing in the treatment of a particular problem, or learning a new treatment model does little to improve effectiveness. In fact, studies to date indicate clinical effectiveness actually declines with time and experience in the field. The key to improved performance is engaging in deliberate practice. At this workshop, the latest research on deliberate practice will be translated into concrete steps all clinicians can immediately apply in their efforts to achieve better results.
Gestalt therapy envisions a radical conception of the self as temporal and emergent. This means it is a fluid self, continually changing through creative adjustment to its changing contacts with the world. One could think of the self in Gestalt therapy as an unending aesthetic project: Like all experience, it has to be made and remade as it navigates the passing of time. And it is reflexive, being both creator and created.
In this talk, Dr. Steven Hayes will claim that most key psychological concepts that have entered into our cultural mainstream contain within them a core conceptual and methodological flaw that makes application of these concepts inappropriate and invalid. Dr. Hayes will explain the error and show how it limits the good that psychology can do for the world. He will then examine a small number of areas of research where significant progress has been made by correcting the problem.