Most couples have at least one partner who withdraws. To bring about lasting change, withdrawers have to engage in the process of therapy and most importantly they must reengage in the relationship. Using video examples, this workshop focuses on how to engage withdrawers and help them reengage with their partners.
The first emotion our ancestors evolved was fear—and we remain highly threat reactive today, continually overestimating threats and underestimating opportunities and resources. We’ll explore multiple methods for helping clients “cool the fires” of fear and anger, and internalize inner strength and an appropriate sense of safety.
Building on the keynote on “taking in the good,” we’ll explore ways to use positive experiences to soothe and potentially replace negative material (e.g., relationship upsets, pain from childhood). Through discussion and experiential activities, we’ll match healing experiences to disturbances in the brain’s core motivational systems (Avoid harm, Approach reward, Attach to “us”).
Deficits such as affect blindness, alexithymia, and poor theory of mind will likely lead to mutual dysregulation in couples during periods of distress or threat and is the driving force behind relationship dissatisfaction and dissolution. This workshop will introduce attendees to the most common social-emotional deficits and will demonstrate how to identify these deficits and what to do about them in couple therapy.
This workshop is designed for couple’s therapists who have trained in the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy. Increase your skills in effective confrontation and incisive resolution of intrapsychic conflicts. Bring some of your toughest challenges and join Ellyn Bader and Sue Diamond-Potts to strengthen your ability to confront and transform those unrelenting couples’ impasses.
For decades, psychoanalytic models of individual therapy were retrofitted into marital treatment models. These approaches tended to be ineffective with character disordered partners. With the recent emergence of polytheoretical, psychobiological approaches to couple therapy, the clinician can now be more effective with character disordered partners. This two hour workshop will help clinicians differentiate between those partners who are psychoneurotic, insecurely attached, or undifferentiated, a
This six-hour program seeks to provide information and recommendations for mental health professionals whose work includes the assessment and treatment of couples and families. The program begins with an update on legal and ethical developments that affect providers, and then moves to a discussion of risk management strategies for clinicians, including the most critical issues faced by clinicians in their work.
This six-hour program seeks to provide information and recommendations for mental health professionals whose work includes the assessment and treatment of couples and families. The program begins with an update on legal and ethical developments that affect providers, and then moves to a discussion of risk management strategies for clinicians, including the most critical issues faced by clinicians in their work.
Relational Life Therapy (RLT) produces deep, lasting change in couples quickly by breaking many cherished couple’s therapy rules. We take sides, for example. Not all problems are fifty-fifty. We judiciously self-disclose. We’re in it with you. We work with trauma in each partner, doing deep individual work in the presence of one another. We pay close attention to gender – the unique characteristics of men and women in our culture and how those differences collide. We work with issues of both shame and also of grandiosity. We explicitly address power imbalances, and rebalance them.