Adlerian psychotherapy is an effective brief therapy model that integrates strategies from many other 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. Videotape examples of actual sessions will be used to highlight the process and demonstrate how effective short-term change is possible with this approach.
As the rate of depression increases around the world, it is apparent that depression is about more than just "bad chemistry." The evidence is clear that social factors play a huge role in depression's onset and course, and these can be better addressed through psychotherapy than with medications. Key aspects of effective treatment will be described in this workshop.
Non-verbal techniques can constitute excellent companion methods to traditional testing and assessment tools, and clinical interviewing for evaluation and diagnosis of client/patient personalities, relationships and problems. In addition, they can provide additional avenues for intervening that can be utilized with many diverse populations of different ages and backgrounds, including those who may be hard to reach by verbal psychotherapeutic techniques. This workshop will demonstrate the use of these techniques and involve participants individually and interactively in their utilization so they will acquire skills to enrich their practices.
Psychotherapy will maximize its effectiveness by targeting the most powerful sources of change: the therapeutic relationship and the patient him/herself. This clinical workshop will provide integrative methods for customizing therapy relationships to individual patients. Participants will learn to reliably assess and rapidly apply four evidence-based guidelines (patient preferences, stages of change, resistance level, and real-time feedback) for constructing the "relationship of choice."
Change is a three-part rite of passage: separation from the known; wandering in the wilderness; and the return transformed. The second stage is hardest to navigate, often interrupted by the premature need for closure. A specific skill set including inquiry, mindfulness, curiosity and stillness provides essential competencies for moving through change.
Research shows that brief treatments paired with hypnosis is more effective than treatments alone for many types of problems. The science and art of hypnosis is now widely recognized as a component tool for psychotherapy and has been employed successfully as a comfortable part of private practice and agency practice for years. As hypnosis spreads throughout the mainstream of psychotherapy, it is important to get competent information regarding its use. This workshop is intended to correct any lack of understanding and training in this important area. The rationale, indications and basic use will be explained and demonstrated with practical exercises to help convey the key language skills that are requisite.
This is an entirely experiential workshop where you can learn how to facilitate the classical four-stage creative process with three easy-tolearn activity-dependent approaches to therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy. How you as a psychotherapist can relax with a bemused smile while your clients do all the work in resolving their issues.
A key idea in Milton Erickson's work was that a person's problematic experiences and behaviors can be skillfully accepted and utilized as the basis for therapeutic change. Self-relations psychotherapy develops this idea further, emphasizing symptoms as indicating the death of an old identity and the impending birth of a new identity. Thus, we don't try to "get rid of" depression, anxiety, or other "acting out/acting in" expressions, but instead invite them into a human relationship of "sponsorship", where their healing and helpful nature may be realized. In this workshop, we will see how a therapist can generate a ritual space where symptoms and other disturbing experiences can be "midwifed" into new identities.
Many therapies involve brief lengths of treatment. A structure will be presented for organizing the tasks and skills involved in different phases (pre, early, middle, late and follow-through) of therapy. Numerous case examples, including video, will illustrate brief therapy techniques both in initial sessions and in the course of longer treatments.
The challenge of personal transformation is faced differently in the East and West. Typically, Eastern meditation emphasizes how to cultivate higher states of consciousness that "go beyond" ego identifications, while Western therapy focuses on how to "work through" problematic states. This workshop explores an integrative model that suggests how to use both approaches in a complementary way: sometimes "transcending, sometimes "transforming", and often doing both at the same time. The connection between meditation, generative trance, and selfrelations will be a central focus.