Someone with a flashback experiences an intense traumatic memory as if it were happening to them again. Learning how to view the same memory as if it were happening to someone else on a small, distant movie screen eliminates the intense unpleasant feeling, while preserving important learning. There will be a live demonstration.
What are the differential impacts of divorce on children? This workshop will consider the thoughts, feelings, behavior, issues, concerns and needs of children in different age groups, from birth to 50 years, within the framework of the stages of the divorce process and for years afterwards. Lecture, discussion, clinical examples and role plays will be interspersed as efficacious interventions are considered.
Changing mood and perspective is central in brief therapy. Experiential methods can be more immediately effective than traditional didactic approaches. All art is, by definition, "experiential." Altering mood and perspective is the point of it - whether drama, painting, literature, dance or music. Movies use multilayered methods for change. The viewer is often unaware of the intricate dramatic, experiential techniques that filmmakers use to exert influence. Social psychology studies the way in which people are influenced outside of awareness.
Inclusive Therapy is a new model of therapy designed to deal with the ambivalence to change clients often bring to the therapy process. Participants will learn a gentle way to approach conflicted clients to dissolve resistance, binds and dissociation. This method can be especially useful in dealing with borderline or hostile clients.
A key idea in Milton Erickson's work was that a person's problematic experiences and behaviors can be skillfully accepted and utilized as the basis for therapeutic change. Self-relations psychotherapy develops this idea further, emphasizing symptoms as indicating the death of an old identity and the impending birth of a new identity. Thus, we don't try to "get rid of" depression, anxiety, or other "acting out/acting in" expressions, but instead invite them into a human relationship of "sponsorship", where their healing and helpful nature may be realized. In this workshop, we will see how a therapist can generate a ritual space where symptoms and other disturbing experiences can be "midwifed" into new identities.
Many therapies involve brief lengths of treatment. A structure will be presented for organizing the tasks and skills involved in different phases (pre, early, middle, late and follow-through) of therapy. Numerous case examples, including video, will illustrate brief therapy techniques both in initial sessions and in the course of longer treatments.
The challenge of personal transformation is faced differently in the East and West. Typically, Eastern meditation emphasizes how to cultivate higher states of consciousness that "go beyond" ego identifications, while Western therapy focuses on how to "work through" problematic states. This workshop explores an integrative model that suggests how to use both approaches in a complementary way: sometimes "transcending, sometimes "transforming", and often doing both at the same time. The connection between meditation, generative trance, and selfrelations will be a central focus.
The field of hypnosis has moved to the forefront of objective research in striving to understand the role unconscious processes play in mindbody healing, automatic (reflexive) cognitive and behavioral responses, and the utilization of attentional mechanisms in problem-solving. In this workshop, participants will both learn and experience the merits of integrating hypnosis into goal-directed psychotherapies.
The evidence that the relationship matters in psychotherapy is vast, but that knowledge is of limited usefulness until it is known how to create powerful therapeutic relationships. The relevance of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) model to this issue is described, and specific methods are described and shown that can increase the potency of the therapeutic relationship.
In the literature, music and drama, artists often covertly foreshadow impending events. In social psychology there are myriad studies of priming, an effect by which the accessibility of a future target is increased by the presentation of an earlier cue. Priming effects illuminate important facets of interpersonal responsiveness. Milton Erickson was the first therapist to seed future ideas in the course of strategic therapy and hypnosis. Seeding is an important concept that can increase the effectiveness of interventions regardless of the technique that will be used. We will learn to harness seeding methods through lecture, demonstration and practice.