BT06 Short Course 36 - Journey Through Midlife: Yours and Your Clients - Are You Ready? - Marilia Baker, MSWThe second half of life - whether you are 35, 45, 55 or 65, is a time of intense questioning. It is also a period of transition from the illusions of youth and first adulthood to the challenge and rewards of maturity. This short course addresses those challenges and provides generative ways to travel the journey. Identifying archetypal passages and developmental impasses in your clients will help you build concise, precise, and to-the-point interventions, designed to create meaning and purpose in their lives.
This special presentation is for those licensees needing to fulfill the requirements for Spousal and Partner Abuse. Bring your cases for discussion and commentary.
The Laws and Ethics Workshop covers emerging legal and ethical issues for mental health practitioners of all disciplines. The four-hour program addresses issues including confidentiality and privilege, note-taking, record-keeping, coping with subpoenas, the impact of professional society ethical codes on regulation of mental health practice, liability exposure with suicidal patients, and recent developments in “Tarasoff situations.”
This program focuses more closely on the needs of clinicians who fall into particularly high risk groups. Topics include confidentiality and privilege for children, coping with high-conflict divorce/custody families, the regressive impact of the regulatory environment on family therapy in particular, supervision/consultation issues that arise for professionals whose agency positions may include functions that conflict with ethical codes.
This workshop will expand on the premise of the keynote by more deeply exploring a working definition of the mind and mental health. At the core of this approach is the role of neural integration in developing a flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable state flow of the mind. This FACES state enables the clinician to feel the pulse of wellbeing as moving between the extremes of rigidity and chaos.
At last count, over 400 separate models of psychotherapy have been found to exist (Garfield & Bergin, 1994). Despite the claims and promises made by the proponents of the various treatment models, 40 years of increasingly sophisticated outcome research has not found any one model or technique superior for the resolution of the problems that clients bring into treatment, Indeed, most of the research has only confirmed "common sense" (Frank 1993). In this workshop, forty years of outcome research will be translated into practical, common sense and empirically supported therapeutic skills that you can use for the efficient and effective resolution of the problems that clients bring to treatment.
BT06 Workshop 04 - The Four Pillars of Relationship Change - Ellyn Bader, PhDDifficult couples challenge therapists with their aggressive interactions, their demands for intimacy, and the repetition of unyielding negative cycles. Dr. Bader will demonstrate how to use a developmental approach to target change in brief couples therapy by focusing on one of four pillars of change. Attendees will learn to take a strong leadership role so that clients change faster, with less conflict and more cooperation.
"Standard" cognitive therapy often is just not effective enough for clients with personality disorders. Participants will learn how to conceptualize patients and use this conceptualization to plan treatment across sessions and minute-by-minute within sessions. Special attention will be paid to developing the therapeutic alliance, structuring the session, maintaining a problem-solving focus, facilitating homework compliance, and using advanced cognitive and behavioral techniques to help these patients change their deep-seated beliefs at both an intellectual and emotional level.
BT06 Workshop 06 - Brief Adlerian Psychotherapy - Jon Carlson, EdD, PsyDAdlerian psychotherapy is an effective brief therapy model that integrates strategies from many approaches. Adler's ideas highlight the importance of not only understanding the individual but the social context. This approach emphasizes working from a multi-cultural orientation and highlights personal responsibility. The approach uses a four-step process: Engagement, Assessment, Insight and Reorientation. The focus of treatment is positive as the therapist uses encouragement strategies to help the client identify their assets and strengths. Video-tape examples of actual sessions will be used to highlight the process and demonstrate how effective short-term change is possible with this approach.