BT12 Conversation Hour 10 – Rethinking Couples Therapy: A Radical Approach to Love, Sex, and Infidelity – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Educational Objectives:
Learn the philosophies of various practitioners and theorists.
BT12 Short Course 54 – Love and Intention: Improving Strategic Outcomes – Michael Munion, MA
This workshop provides a framework for assessing clients along two important dimensions that impact therapeutic outcome: motivation and sense of agency (one’s perception of their ability to create change in their own lives). This assessment fosters interventions that enhance the capacity for strategic interventions to be truly brief and solution focused. The participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to observe and practice this approach.
BT12 Workshop 32 – Rethinking Couples Therapy: A Radical Approach to Love, Sex and Infidelity – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Couples therapists are typically discouraged from seeing partners separately lest power imbalances, allegiances, or secrets further divide the couple. What’s lost in this approach? Through case examples, Esther Perel will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible environment to work creatively with infidelity.
BT12 Workshop 41 – Mating in Captivity: Reconciling Attachment, Security and Erotic Desire in Couples – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Based on Perel’s bestseller, Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of aliveness and vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality, and consider how the need for secure attachment and closeness can co-exist with the quest for individuality and freedom.
Based on Perel’s Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our need for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and show how reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time.
Through case examples, Esther Perel, MA, LMFT will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible therapeutic environment to work effectively with infidelity. Provide a multicultural perspective on differing notions of love, marriage and sexual behaviors, and to highlight the relationship between culture and sexuality.
Few couple interventions are as elegant and beautiful as the lovers pose. It is like a surgical table for therapists to extract and repair deep, implicit memory issues between partners and, by proxy, original childhood caregivers. The therapist “casts” each partner into roles appropriate for the therapeutic direction as decided by the therapist. Though the lovers pose is as it sounds, for lovers holding one another, it is also the caregiver-infant pose, the Pietà pose (holding a dead loved one), and inner child pose. This demonstration will also provide instructions for getting into and out of the pose which involves a three-step process.
Since the Solution Focused Approach is conversational in nature, and, based on questions, the clinician who is working with couples needs to be comfortable asking these kinds of questions when there are more than one person in the room. This can be tricky due to the nature of couples therapy. This talk will center on how to conduct couples session using this approach and how to use the question process to navigate even the trickiest sessions.
For half a century, close to half of all American marriages crash and burn. Of those couples who stay together, how many do so happily and passionately? Why do so many men and women start off in love and end up in misery? Why is it that the field of couple's therapy has done far too little to alter these grim statistics? In this presentation, Terry Real will introduce a radical new couple's therapy approach that aims to empower the woman, and reconnect the man with a startling and liberating therapeutic truthfulness.