CC12 Topical Panel 02 - Bringing Attachment and Neuroscience into Couples Therapy: Benefits, Challenges, and Pitfalls - Rick Hanson, PhD, Harville Hendrix, PhD, Stan Tatkin, PsyD, and Scott Woolley, PhD
A psychobiological approach to couple therapy utilizes a bottom-up versus a top-down approach to psychotherapy. This means that the couple’s therapist utilizes very fast, often surprising interventions in order to access implicit systems as revealed in micro expressions and micro-movements in the face and body, respectively. This workshop will introduce several exciting bottom-up techniques to use in couple therapy, including the use of surprise statements, movements, poses, and music.
This workshop focuses on the use of digital audio and video frame analysis and heart rate monitoring for gathering reliable information concerning attachment and arousal patterns within and between partners. The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) places particular emphasis on implicit body states that drive interaction between partners. Though clinicians are trained to use their senses to pick up micro-movements and micro-expressions through the body, face, and voice, precision equipment such as digital video and biofeedback devices can often provide compelling “proof” of what the clinician sees, hears, and senses when observing partner interactions.
This workshop explains and proves the meaning of the title, that romantic partners mostly do not know what they are doing or why. This is because partners are moving toward and away from one another in accordance of their internal working models, their anticipatory neurobiological systems, and their moment-to-moment experience of safety and or threat. These systems are extremely fast-acting and operate below ordinary cognition or knowing. In the absence of knowing, partners must confabulate in order to explain their behaviors and the consequences of behaviors. Attendees will learn how to work with this phenomena of “not knowing” from a psychobiological perspective and will learn so-called “bottom-up” interventions for bypassing ordinary cognitive mechanism that can distract and misdirect the therapy.