Everybody lies. Some lies are loving and harmless. But, others are enormously destructive. Couples’ patterns of deception often begin innocently but end in couples destroying the love they once had. Self deception, conflict avoidance and felony lies all undermine commitment and connection. We’ll use clinical videos and transcripts to identify and disrupt deception. You’ll learn to successfully confront the evasiveness, hypocrisy and avoidance that keep couples developmentally arrested and differentiation failing.
Dr. Barbach will explore dialogue as it pertains to creating intimacy. Her presentation will analyze the language used by partners as a key to understanding the dynamics of the relationship and how deliberate linguistic changes can transform that relationship by deepening emotional bonds and creating healthy intimacy.
Using movie clips, this presentation will illustrate a simple five-step model for effectively intervening with couples. Bring the popcorn and have fun while you learn.
Volatile couples come to couples therapy with a fearsome mixture of trauma, devastated dreams, and defensive attitudes. If you ask about their goals or how you can help, you quickly get intense cross complaints, and pressure to fix their partner. Simply trying to understand their problems and asking about their goals can be a toxic beginning as their defensiveness and trauma get re-triggered. This innovative approach is the result of 30 years of seeing couples and searching for a better beginning. In this workshop you will understand how to have each person identify their role in the distress, accept accountability for self-change, identify personal growth changes that are a stretch, create the foundation to work as a team and do it all with a spirit of cooperation and positive strokes. Do all this and more in the first session.
The brain is involved with everything we do, especially our relationships. In this fun presentation Dr. Amen will discuss different areas of the brain involved in relationships, what they do, what happens when things go wrong and how to improve them. You are a better marital therapist when you understand the brain.
Jay Haley once said that couples work is the hardest kind of therapy. This presentation will identify the most common screw-ups therapists make in couples therapy, and demonstrate ways to avoid them. There will be some-thing for both beginning and experienced therapists, who tend to make different mistakes.
There are multiple reasons for affairs. We will examine the benefits of affairs and why affairs can actually stabilize a marriage. In particular, we will focus on how couples can turn the crisis into an opportunity. This is a multicultural therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations.
Gridlocked perpetual conflicts often destroy relationships. They repeatedly surface, causing partners endless pain, fear, even trauma. Yet every couple faces them. In this address, Dr. Julie Gottman describes a dyadic therapy method that uncloaks the dreams, history and fears beneath partners’ issues while fostering greater compassion and connection in the couple. An edited film will be shown to demonstrate this intervention.
We have all been taught that our romantic partner should end our misery and make us feel happy and alive. When he or she doesn’t we wonder if they’re the right one. Yet, for most of us, no partner is capable of keeping our heads above the pools of pain and shame we bring to intimate relationships. Only we can drain those pools and become the primary caretakers for the young, needy parts of us that are drowning in those pools. Once this inner trust is achieved, we can love our partners courageously and unconditionally because we don’t need them to always do the heavy lifting of our spirits.