Harville Hendrix, PhD Healing is the restoration and maintenance of connection. This occurs only in relationship and is dependent upon the quality of the "between." For healing to occur, therapists must help couples shift their focus from personal to relationship needs. This session will teach and demonstrate concepts and processes that enable couples to replace conflict with safety and compassion.
The majority of people who seek psychiatric care have histories of trauma, chaos or neglect. Advances in the neurosciences, attachment research and in information processing show how brain function is shaped by experience, and that life itself can continually transform perception and biology. Overwhelming experiences alter the capacity for selfregulation and memory processing due to changes in sub-cortical, i.e., “unconscious” levels of the brain.
Effective treatment of post-traumatic problems needs to include addressing the imprint of trauma on the physical experience of the self as helpless and in danger. Recovery needs to incorporate dealing with defensive efforts that helped ensure survival, incorporate physical experiences that contradict feelings and sensations associated with helplessness and disconnection, as well as an effective way of integrating fragmented memories of trauma. Experiencing physical mastery (as in yoga and specific body based techniques) often is necessary to initiate new ways of perceiving reality and promote new behavior patterns.
This workshop will offer a theoretical and clinical orientation to the treatment of trauma, personal and relational, in couples therapy. The regulation of emotion and the healing power of attachment events will be emphasized.
Drawing upon 36 years of systematic multi-method longitudinal research with couples, Dr. Gottman teaches the differences between successful and unsuccessful couples in dealing with conflict and fostering romance and harmony. Dr. Gottman provides the basic clinical skills needed to help couples improve their relationships.
This workshop will introduce participants to some of the basics of Relational Life Therapy™, a truth-driven therapeutic approach. Participants will learn how to speak with radical precision and honesty to their clients about what they're doing to de-rail their relationships. You will learn how to "join through the truth" in a way that feels both profoundly respectful and compassionate while, at the same time, pulling no punches. We will look at gathering leverage, separating the person from their behavior, looking at the particular issues of grandiosity, and how to enlist a coalition with the adult part of the client.
The reason why most couples' characteristic fights never get resolved is because in our most heated moments, we stop fighting with each other. Core negative images (CNIs) start fighting and the two real partners get lost. This workshop teaches participants how to help partners identify, make explicit, accept, and ultimately work with one another's core negative images. As partners are taught to utilize each other's CNIs, rather than fight them, all sorts of creative and deliberating possibilities emerge.
Several new studies have uncovered a seismatic shift that has taken place regarding the purpose and practice of marriage. These research findings explain many of the difficulties we face behind the therapy door. Come get a research update and clinical applications for couple's therapy. Lecture, video, handouts, discussion, demonstration will be utilized.