The emotional mystique between gay sons and their mothers has long been unexplored, but now new evidence suggests that a mother’s response to her son’s sexuality isn’t the only factor in his future success. How she nurtures him based on his interests, rather than his sexual preferences, is key, especially in a society with narrow definitions of masculinity.
Much of this Workshop will address issues of culture, race, sexual orientation, diversity and social justice and equality, etc. A major premise is the idea that all therapy is multicultural therapy. This means that every client brings to therapy a unique world and therefore the challenge for every therapy is for the therapist to be able to enter the unique world of each client. This therapy method is especially adept at working with cultural differences as it is highly adaptable and therefore able to work within the unique world of the client.
The Culturally Sensitive Strength-Based Strategic Therapy method was developed to integrate various principles founded by the Mental Research Institute (MRI) and Jay Haley’s Strategic Therapy approach as well as other methods to address these issues. In this workshop, guidelines will be presented for learning the principles of Culturally Sensitive Strength-Based Strategic Therapy. There will be an emphasis on effective strategies in working within the cultural context of the client and how this is critical to successful therapy. A structure will be presented for organizing the specific tasks and skills involved in different aspects of the method including activating the client’s strengths. Case examples, some on video recordings, will illustrate many innovative brief therapy techniques.
As challenges to well-being increase, practitioners are called to move beyond interventions to improve functioning to those that help clients flourish. Doing so will help clients to exercise greater resilience and do “better than zero.” This session offers strategies to develop gratitude, meaning, and character strengths that foster greater overall well-being.
A Strengths-Based Therapy approach provides practitioners with essential principles and practices for improving effectiveness and outcomes with adolescents and families. Participants in this work-shop will be introduced to current research findings on effective practice and will learn key strategies to strengthen the therapeutic relationship and alliance, maximize client contributions to change, and respond efficiently to client progress. The strategies offered can be applied to a wide range of settings with a continuum of concerns.
Most people will never know what it is like to survive without housing. Solutions to homelessness rest not only in addressing the inadequate supply of affordable housing, but in assisting the homeless with reclaiming their resilience and sense of “self”. Learn 5 ways to interrupt the chronic homeless individuals’ patterns, activate strengths and boost neural integration and neuroplacticity.
This workshop is designed to examine certain assumptions of traditional psychotherapies and to provide the participant with a powerful exposure to strength-based treatment. At the conclusion of the session, participants will have gained knowledge and expertise about incongruency versus congruency as a core component of successful treatment outcomes and the therapeutic relationship. With Steven Kuester.
In this "hands-on" practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn effective engagement strategies with children, empirically-based parent management skills, and several family play and art therapy strategies that tap the inventiveness of the child and his/her family members to generate new ideas and co-construct solutions.
Adolescent self-harming behavior is on the rise and is one of the most challenging presenting problems school professionals, healthcare providers, and therapists will face in their clinical practice settings. In this "hands-on" practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn several distress management tools and strategies to strengthen the adolescent's self-soothing and coping capacities and family connection building rituals and therapeutic experiments to foster closer and stronger parent-adolescent relationships. Parent management skills for constructively responding to their adolescents' inevitable self-harming slips will be presented.
Adolescent self-harming behavior is on the rise and one of the most challenging presenting problems therapists will face today in their clinical practice settings. Therapists referred these clients are often intimidated by their cutting and burning behaviors, the DSM IV labels they have been given, and the army of helping professionals involved with them and their families. many of these adolescents have experienced multiple treatment failures, feel emotionally disconnected from their parents, and come from families where there may be difficulties with marital or post-divorce conflicts, invalidating family interactions, gender power imbalance issues, or family secrets. In this hands-on, practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn a collaborative, strengths-based therapy approach that capitalizes on the strengths and resources of the adolescent, family members, concerned peers, adult inspirational others, and involved helpers from larger systems to rapidly co-construct solutions