Based on interviews with over a hundred of the most prominent theoreticians in the field, as well as studies of famous individuals (Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Vaslav Nijinsky, Lenny Bruce, Charles Mingus) who have had spectacularly negative outcomes in therapy, this workshop explores what can be learned from failures as well as successes. Participants will explore the nature of their own consistent errors and misjudgments, how we all tend to deny and disown these experiences, and what we can do to be more accepting of our failures and more proactive in preventing them in the future. There will be opportunities to identify personal and professional struggles that are going on right now and work through impasses and frustrations through a peer supervision model that can be applied to any work setting.
This workshop will focus on providing treatment strategies clinicians and other human services providers can use in their work with youth who are troubled by circumstances that complicate the negotiation of the "normal developmental struggles" of adolescence. A framework for understanding adolescents who are prone toward angry, aggressive and explosive behaviors will be presented. Specific strategies for enhancing effective assessment, engagement and treatment with troubled adolescents will be provided.
Each of us has a central unconscious question that organizes and colors all our experience and behavior. A poorlyworded question can result in pervasive frustrating problems, while a well-worded question provides a solid foundation for an interesting productive life. Experience how to discover and revise or replace your core question.
This "playshop" will consist of experiential clinician development exercises. While it is widely agreed that the person of the therapist is central to patient change, there are limited methods for developing ways to BE a therapist. This program centers on eliciting and developing therapist acuity. Dr. Zeig will present a systemic modeling method that can be easily transferred to make therapy and supervision more powerfully experiential.
Many therapists dread working with adolescents because of their unpredictable high risk behavior. Although adolescents may appear disconnected and uninvolved, they are extremely sensitive to family moods, expectations and conflicts and their behavior is often a refection of what is happening in the family at any given time. This family centered approach is focused on identifying and changing the triggers both inside and outside the family that lead to destructive behavior such as substance abuse, self-mutilation, violence, depression and suicidal symptoms. Guidelines for clarifying issues, correcting distortions, opening up significant areas of communication and establishing positive interactions with family members will be demonstrated with video tapes that show the step-by-step process of change.
Whether brief or long-term, the treatment of childhood trauma should include an opportunity for the youngster to abreact (express strong emotion), correct (find individual, community or even fantasized solutions), and to discover contexts (perspectives and understandings of the events that occurred). Dr. Terr will thoroughly discuss and exemplify these three modes of treatment, selecting brief therapies as the clinical examples.
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.
This workshop examines the nature of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and presents an integrated model of treatment of specific issues in brief, solution-focused episodes. Core elements of a safety plan and development of a community resource network are described. Careful management of the therapeutic relationship is a critical part of this approach. Some specific protocols for common BPD issues, such as suicidal ideation and self-injurious behaviors are elaborated.
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.