Early childhood trauma has lasting and dramatic effects on attachment formation and on the later capacity for intimacy and mutuality. Instead of experiencing relationships as a haven of safety, traumatized couples are driven by powerful wishes for and fears of closeness. By using somatic and mindfulness-based interventions, conflictual patterns are disrupted, allowing couples to address the intense responses and impulsive reactions that undermine all sense of safety and hope and recreate the experience of threat in the body and in the relationship.
Gay men face unique challenges regarding intimacy, communication and personal autonomy. Hiding due to being gay along with being raised male, creates a dynamic of distancing as the norm. The goal of psychotherapy is to accept and verbalize vulnerabilities in a context of safety, encourage revealing oneself for the sake of self-acceptance, and to learn how to receive nurturance from others. This workshop will define the art of how to gain connection while maintaining autonomy. There will also be an emphasis on sexuality and how specific attachment styles effects choices related to safety, security and risky sexual practices.
Research confirms our clinical experience. We can teach partners all manner of skills but in moments of triggering, emotional flooding, skills go out the window. Why? Because we are no longer in our adult selves. Our thinking brain has shut down and the limbic system has taken over. An inner child part has seized the wheel. This workshop introduces a model of working with the traumatized parts of the partners we treat by empowering individuals to come into conscious relationship with those parts—loving, understanding, and ultimately containing them.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
This bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our need for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and show how reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time. We will address paradoxes of desire and how social forces inhibit erotic expression; attachment history and the erotic blueprint.
Through case examples, Esther Perel will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible therapeutic environment to work effectively with infidelity.
While we love those deep, intimate conversations that bring us close together and join our spirits, what role does difference play in passion? Come explore this and other questions related to relational happiness. We will identify two empathic systems, and understand the role of dopamine in intimate relationships.
Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Why doesn’t good intimacy guarantee good sex? When you love , how does it feel and when you Desire how is it different? Loss of Desire brings many people into our offices. It is the prime sexual complaint that leads relational unhappiness, infidelity and even divorce. For the most part, sexuality has been relegated to sex therapy and couple therapy has been a desexualized practice. Yet, love in our digital age puts sex at the center of couples’ lives.
Our natural sexual setpoint explains a lot about arousal, desire and intimate satisfaction. We will explore this issue with research, facts and humor, with the objectives of understanding the effects of estrogen on desire and the effects of testosterone on desire.
Based on Perel’s Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our need for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and show how reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Human sexual response is a complex system even when attempting to understand one person let alone two people in a relationship. It is helpful, therefore to have a way to organize decades of research and clinical practice in a manner which can be shared with clients. A practical schema will be presented to educate and motivate clients interested in improving their intimate connection. Lecture, video, original handouts and experiential exercises will be utilized.