Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, depression was already ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the number one cause of human suffering and disability. The pandemic caused a huge spike in rates of depression giving rise to serious questions about the way we think about depression. Is it primarily a neurochemical phenomenon? Is it a product of environmental and situational influences? Or both? This conversation will explore these questions and others as well.
The process of contracting for change in the initial session will be described and discussed. Methods of targeting goals will be compared and contrasted.
This workshop will focus on themes of love and dependence, love and anxiety, love and power in exploring how the interplay of these factors govern whether an intimate relationship thrives or fails. The importance of these themes for both individual and couples therapy.
What does it mean to be intraconnected? In weaving the internal and external, the subjective and objective, this workshop will reveal how modern culture, as well as how our brain is wired, may give us a message of separation as a solo, isolated self; yet a wider perspective unveils that who we are, what a deeper reality actually is, may be something more—broader than the brain, bigger even than the body—fundamental to the social systems and the natural world in which we live. We will explore the nature of how our experience of what we often call, self, emerges across the lifespan and how this journey into identity and belonging can help weave our personal reflections with scientific discussions into how the mind, brain, and relationships shape who we are.
Resilience is the ability of individuals to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions and to regain and maintain a sense of equilibrium. Achieving resilience during challenging times requires the development and strengthening of a variety of resources on different levels. These include emotional intelligence, behavioral flexibility, the ability to balance "dreamer" with "realist," and the capacity to connect with something bigger than ourselves. This session will address a number of important skills and processes that support the deepening of people's capacity for resilience – behaviorally, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
In offering effective psychotherapy there are times for being informative and other times for being evocative. Use information when needed; use evocative means when the target is the realization of a concept, such as responsibility, motivation, or connection.
Evocative methods are used in all performing arts because the goal is to prompt a change in mood and perspective. Evocative methods will be extracted from art and applied in clinical practice.
Demonstration, lecture, practice groups.
"As advances are made in better understanding the power of focus in shaping one's subjective perceptions and even one's physiology, the field of clinical hypnosis has played an especially important role in this ongoing process of discovery. Despite too many clinicians' terribly misinformed dismissal of hypnosis as little more than a gimmick, in fact hypnosis has evolved a strong scientific basis arising from its insights into neuroscience, cognition, suggestive language and information processing, placebo and nocebo responses, the therapeutic alliance, and more.
Just as there are many different models of psychotherapy, each with different foundational philosophies and methods, there are many different models of hypnosis, each with a different emphasis and utilizing different approaches. The highly innovative work of Milton Erickson in particular is widely acknowledged by therapists who may or may not use hypnosis but are definitely influenced by his strategic methods.