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.
This workshop will help you examine how your values and life experience affect your treatment of couples on the brink of divorce, and will teach you a protocol for helping clients make a decision that has integrity for all involved and that improves the odds that couples will try to heal their broken bond.
This workshop focuses on the use of digital audio and video frame analysis and heart rate monitoring for gathering reliable information concerning attachment and arousal patterns within and between partners. The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) places particular emphasis on implicit body states that drive interaction between partners. Though clinicians are trained to use their senses to pick up micro-movements and micro-expressions through the body, face, and voice, precision equipment such as digital video and biofeedback devices can often provide compelling “proof” of what the clinician sees, hears, and senses when observing partner interactions.
This workshop explains and proves the meaning of the title, that romantic partners mostly do not know what they are doing or why. This is because partners are moving toward and away from one another in accordance of their internal working models, their anticipatory neurobiological systems, and their moment-to-moment experience of safety and or threat. These systems are extremely fast-acting and operate below ordinary cognition or knowing. In the absence of knowing, partners must confabulate in order to explain their behaviors and the consequences of behaviors. Attendees will learn how to work with this phenomena of “not knowing” from a psychobiological perspective and will learn so-called “bottom-up” interventions for bypassing ordinary cognitive mechanism that can distract and misdirect the therapy.
Internal Family Systems therapy synthesizes two paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind—and brings concepts and methods from many schools of family therapy to the world of sub-personalities. In addition to learning how to help clients access their Self, participants will learn the dif-ferent kinds of parts they will encounter in clients (managers, firefighters, and exiles) and how to help those parts transform. The workshop will provide tools to help therapists stay centered and open-hearted, as well as provide a user-friendly language for therapy that encourages disclosure and empathy.
People change due to the experiences they live, more than the information they receive. A brief overview of the experiential approach will be followed by a demonstration and discussion of the experiential methods used for assessment and treatment, which include couples and therapist sculpting, attunement, and the use of signals.
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.
CC11 Topical Panel 01 - Infidelity: What is the Essence of the Crisis and How Do Couples Move Forward? - Ellyn Bader, PhD, Marty Klein, PhD, Esther Perel, MA, LMFT, Jette Simon
CC11 Topical Panel 03 – Couples and Divorce: How Do You Assess When Separation/Divorce Make Sense or Does it? – Lilian Borges, MA, LPC, William Doherty, PhD, and Julie Gottman, PhD
Couples’ conflicts that hurt and go unprocessed often lead to chasms of emotional distance. This workshop explains and demonstrates with film how a couple can learn to process their own battles and move from resentment to understanding, accountability, and repair. The Gottman “Recovery Kit” will be explained and given to each participant.
Remarried couples are often poorly served by therapists who treat them without enough appreciation for the unique complexity and multiple loyalties of stepfamily life. This workshop will combine clinical assessment and treatment issues with a special focus on values issues such as commitment and fairness that often dominate conflict in stepfamilies.
How do we raise sexual issues? How should we respond when the couple does? Why doesn’t THIS couple enjoy sex, or have sex? Are aging or health issues complicating sexual problems? What’s the ONE cross-cultural issue that matters regarding sexuality? And what’s really a sexual issue—versus an issue of power, grief, resentment, or fear of rejection/abandonment? This PRACTICAL workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning.
Overtly angry and passive-aggressive partners often present the most difficulty for therapists. They frequently demand intimacy, while being unable to create the conditions for intimacy to occur or be sustained. They require a high level of activity from you to structure treatment, manage hostility in the office and confront hypocrisies that keep their development stalled. Learn to increase your personal strengths to harness the enormous developmental potential that exists in these couples.
This workshop probes the intricacies of love and desire—how they relate and how they conflict.. Participants will learn how emotional intimacy can inhibit sexual desire and why “good intimacy” doesn’t necessarily make for “good sex.” Through case material and video vignettes, we’ll explore how our emotional history: “how we were loved” shapes our erotic blueprints and expresses itself in the physicality of sex: “how we make love”. We will show how to break through erotic impasses and help couples balance the dual needs for security and freedom. This model applies to couples and individuals from all sexual orientations.
This workshop is designed to help you and your partner learn how to achieve courageous love, based on the presenter’s Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy. When couples have self-led conversations, their relationships harmonize naturally. They can discuss even highly charged issues productively and feel safe to reveal their most vulnerable parts to each other.
Couples therapy is often complicated and delicate when one partner has suffered childhood sexual abuse. The needs of both partners must be honored though one partner’s dream may be the other partner’s nightmare. This workshop describes the details of applying Gottman Method Couples Therapy to a case involving one partner’s history of severe sexual abuse.
This talk presents: 1) current information about porn, its users, and its impact on consumers and their relationships; 2) the common model of how porn use shapes sexual decision-making, and an alternative model that better matches people’s experiences; 3) an alternative to the “porn addiction” model for diagnosing and treating compulsive or impulsive behavior regarding porn.
Infidelity generally points out flaws in a relationship, and the revelation of an affair often triggers a crisis of trust and connection. We’ll examine the benefits and the costs of truth-telling and transparency, how couples can rebuild trust and intimacy, and how affairs can actually stabilize a marriage and prevent its dissolution. In particular, we will focus on how couples can turn the crisis into an opportunity. Combining didactic material, case studies and video vignettes, we will lay out a nuanced and multicultural therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations, fantasized or real, disclosed or shrouded in secrecy.
Knowing how to elicit positive emotion even in couples steeped in intensely negative interactions is the key to providing the motivation for change. In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of ways for creating “magical moments” in the therapy hour that offer a new template for couples, otherwise trapped in dysfunction, to allay repetitive cycles. You’ll learn how to use tools like focusing, sentence stems, doubling and directives to invite couples into new kinds of experience of connection. We’ll also examine the neurobiological principles that enable partners to expect and attract more positive experiences from each other.
Using a developmental lens is powerful to lead couples to make sustained change. Learn to use developmental principles to assess what is wrong and to direct your treatment decisions. Recognize arrested differentiation and see differentiation in action. Videotapes and clinical case examples will be used throughout the workshop to demonstrate how to promote development in hostile and conflict avoidant couples.
Like walking a tightrope, working with couples in trouble requires focus and balance. Both partners want you to take their side, and, at times, it’s easy to get swallowed up by the intense emotionality of the sessions. So, how can you maintain a sense of balance and create an atmosphere in which healing can take place? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the principles of Imago Relationship Therapy to connect with the issues the couple brings to you and transform the emotional temperature of the 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.
This workshop reviews the areas of professional functions that have been most associated with regulatory problems for mental health professionals, including sexual and nonsexual boundary violations, “law-psych” interfaces, competence, “moral” offenses, licensing board and malpractice actions. The workshop covers causes for these problems and ways of avoiding them and/or managing them.
This workshop reviews the areas of professional functions that have been most associated with regulatory problems for mental health professionals, including sexual and nonsexual boundary violations, “law-psych” interfaces, competence, “moral” offenses, licensing board and malpractice actions. The workshop covers causes for these problems and ways of avoiding them and/or managing them.