Fifty million Americans currently care for an aging partner or parent. Using poignant movie clips, Janis will address the joy and imposition of caregiving in families and in couples. She’ll also offer universal lessons on how partners can help each other grow old gracefully and survive this ordinary, extraordinary journey.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Too little acknowledgment will lead to alienation of one of both partners in couples therapy, but too much acknowledgment without a compelling invitation to move on from conflict, blame and the past to new possibilities won’t work either. Learn how to maintain that delicate balance and let the couple teach you when to use which method.
The workshop will explore how faulty neuroception can have an impact on autonomic regulation and social behavior and how understanding the features that trigger different neuroceptive states (safety, danger, and life threat) can be used as a strategy of treatment.
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$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Society has lost control. Many in the culture are living in a downward spiral of a new addiction, chasing money, power, success and a wilder, faster pace of life. What is the impact on our understanding and treatment of the addicted couple and family who must live and work in a culture that is out of control? Dr. Stephanie Brown will present her new work on American culture’s addiction to FAST, and outline how all couples therapy must now include an understanding of addiction.
Using a simple three-part model of spirituality, you’ll learn how to infuse a spiritual sensibility into couples therapy even with clients that are non-religious, dogmatically religious or who are hostile towards spirituality or religion.
Couples therapy typically pathologizes porn use while legitimizing the grievances of the user’s partner. While this approach may seem logical, it rarely increases sexual/relationship satisfaction. How do we hold both partners while they struggle to define their behavior, contract, and emotions? This talk examines a different approach to intrapsychic conflict and power struggles over porn use. We’ll explore underlying rela-tional issues, including: Is conflict about pornography a way to avoid confronting defi-cits in the sexual (or non-sexual) relationship? Are one or both partners acting out body image issues? Is porn use infidelity?
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$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
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.
CC13 Dialogue 01 – Sex Therapy – Lonnie Barbach and Marty Klein
Educational Objectives:
Given a topic, describe the differing approaches to psychotherapy, and identify the strength and weaknesses of each approach.
The Love Code provides a metaphor to explore the neural mechanisms underlying how and why we attach, bond, fall in love and seek out safe and trusted others in an unsafe world. This presentation will explore the body’s need for intimate engagement and social bonding from an adaptive perspective. Within the theoretical context of the Polyvagal Theory, the presentation will illustrate how specific features in our social environment may trigger neurophysiological systems, through a process of “neuroception,” that enables us either to be fearful and disengage or to feel safe and enter enduring intimate relations.
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$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Lerner will describe the key aspects of having a clear and courageous voice with a difficult partner when a relationship is stuck in silence, fighting, distance, and blame.
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$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
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.
The workshop will explore clinical applications of the Polyvagal Theory. The Polyvagal Theory links the evolution of the autonomic nervous system to affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, vocal communication and contingent social behavior, and provides a plausible explanation of several features that are compromised during stress and observed in numerous psychiatric disorders. Humans have evolved as highly social and mutually dependent beings. Yet, when overwhelmed by stress and threat, our autonomic nervous systems adaptively dictate more primordial strategies.
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$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy ™ deals with the most stuck, most intractable cases by dealing squarely with issues of character. His Relationship Bootcamp begins with this slogan: “Other Workshops Teach You Skills: We Deal With the Part of You That Won’t Use Them.” WHAT you do matters less than WHICH PART OF YOU is at the wheel—the mature, present part of you, or an immature, triggered part of you. “We teach individuals in couples how to be relational—changing each individual’s character as we change the relationship between them.”
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
CC13 Workshop 02 - When Society Loses Control: Attachment, Trauma, and a Developmental Process of Couple and Family Addiction and Recovery - Stephanie Brown, PHD
What is the process of “normal” couple and family recovery in the context of cultural loss of control? We will define addiction as a traumatic disorder of attachment for individuals and the family. We will review the Family Recovery Research Project, with an emphasis on the couple, outlining the stages of active addiction and recovery and the key themes and tasks of development that arise, along with the implications for couples therapy at every stage when the culture remains chronically stressed, chaotic and FAST.
What do most couples really want from sex? It isn’t endless orgasms, or sex around the clock. Most people want the same old things: connection, pleasure, excitement, mystery, validation. And magic. When the prospect of getting these is slim, satisfaction declines, and desire falls. This is not a “dysfunction;” improving genital “function” is not the answer. The key, instead, often lies in addressing power struggles and control issues; the existential challenges of adulthood; and the need for a new vocabulary. We will discuss how to move couples from perfunctory, infrequent sex to a more vibrant and intriguing experience. We’ll also look at what therapists need internally to help couples discuss sex.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Why has depression been seen as a “woman’s disease”? Depression is not unwomanly, but many feel it as unmanly—setting up what Real calls, “compound depression.” Men, he says, feel ashamed of feeling ashamed, depressed about being depressed,” causing them to hide it, and causing those around them—even medical professionals—to shy away from confronting the condition. Even more important, however, is the fact that many men express depression differently than women. Real will speak of “covert depression” which lies at the core of many of men’s typical “bad behaviors.” like drinking, workaholism, withdrawal, and anger.
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.
We’ve never wanted more from our romantic relationships but both men and women—in different ways and for different reasons—lack the skills to meet our new ambitions. What do men and women want from each other? Why are relationships so fraught? And how can we be more effective as clinicians? The nature of marriage has changed and therapists must meet challenges unique to our new landscape.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
This keynote explores the incredibly powerful ways we can restore hope in the flat-lined couples we encounter—both in and out of our offices. Be inspired with new, 11th hour strategies for helping challenging couples want to work things out.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
This workshop in law, ethics and regulation focuses on three of the four most frequent causes for actions against mental health professionals, nationwide. Since the 2010-2011 law/ethics/regulation workshop focused primarily on boundary violations (including sexual contact between professional and patient/client), this 2012-2013 workshop focuses on incompetence, criminal convictions and cases involving high conflict custody problems. The workshop emphasizes awareness and management of risk factors in the major areas of high risk practice via music videos illustrating the principles taught in the program.
This workshop in law, ethics and regulation focuses on three of the four most frequent causes for actions against mental health professionals, nationwide. Since the 2010-2011 law/ethics/regulation workshop focused primarily on boundary violations (including sexual contact between professional and patient/client), this 2012-2013 workshop focuses on incompetence, criminal convictions and cases involving high conflict custody problems. The workshop emphasizes awareness and management of risk factors in the major areas of high risk practice via music videos illustrating the principles taught in the program.