This workshop will introduce a new cognitive model for brief, solution-focused psychotherapy for couples. This cognitive paradigm is unique in several ways. It points to the fact that no one knows the client better than his/her intimate partner. The client’s partner pushes, pulls, and teases every imperfection of out their partner’s personality. Specifically, intimacy reveals what is incomplete about the client’s emotional development. It also reveals how effectively the client manages the needs he or she brings to the relationship. This is precisely what clients need to study themselves and points to what we as therapists can do to help our clients. With Robert Johansen, Ian Johansen and Todd Gaffnet.
Couples in distress minimize and numb their pain by avoiding contact. By writing a vision of what they both want, the therapist can focus the couple on the future. By combining Gestalt concepts with those popularized by Hendrix and others, therapists can have a powerful effect on quickening the healing process. New sessions will involve writing, note taking, and an agreed upon assignment to be practiced during the week. With Roberta Karant and Stefan Deutsch.
In this workshop, using lectures, demonstrations and practice, participants will distinguish between the individual and relational paradigm, and learn how to use the Imago Dialogue Process to help couples create a conscious partnership in which difference is accepted, conflict is transformed into creative tension, love is born and sustained, and personal healing and growth are facilitated.
Couples who appear warm and friendly can be deceptively difficult. They fear intensity, anger and deep involvement. We will focus on principles for managing sessions, core competencies required in the therapist, and what it takes to support each partner's development to enable more intimacy and sexuality.
The story of intimacy and sexuality in committed modern couples is one that often tells of dwindling desire and includes a long list of sexual alibis, claiming to explain the inescapable weakening of erotic connection. The absence of fantasy, the proliferation of pornography and affairs, as well as a lack of understanding of the nature of erotic desire all contribute to the depression, loneliness and despair. In this workshop we will probe the intricacies of love and desire. Through case examples and video vignettes, Ms. Perel will introduce innovative strategies for partners to take emotional risks when negotiating their dual needs for connection and autonomy, predictability and passion. This model applies to young, old, married and not, heterosexual and same sex couples.
No other aspect in the lives of couples, today as well as yesterday, generates more fascination, gossip and fear as infidelity. In our society, sexual infidelity is mostly seen as a symptom of a relationship gone awry. The revelation of an affair can trigger a crisis that shakes the very foundation of trust and connection in the couple. The purpose of this workshop is to present a multi-cultural, non-judgmental perspective to probe the meanings of affairs, rethink fidelity, and address the complexities of marriage, sex, intimacy, and monogamy. We will look at the value and the price of honesty and truth telling, and explore the circuitous ways affairs aim to stabilize a marriage and prevent the dissolution of the family.
Using a developmental lens is a powerful way to lead couples to make sustained change. Learn how developmental principles can help you assess what is wrong and then guide and shape your treatment decisions. Videotapes and clinical case examples will be used throughout the workshop to demonstrate how to challenge symbiosis, facilitate differentiation and build the capacities to sustain intimacy.
Is our brain built for love or war, connection or self-preservation? The attachment drive for a secure base involves neurological and neuro-endocrine systems and subsystems that determine such things as proximity seeking and contact maintenance. Couples most commonly enter therapy due to repeated, anticipated, and intense periods of mutual dysregulation whereby attachment injuries and adaptations become reanimated. In order to make the most of attachment theory, the psychotherapist must incorporate a working knowledge of the neurobiological processes that underlie all primary attachment relationships.