The more our lives are guided by predictive technology, the less we are able to cope with the natural uncertainties of life. And no where is there more uncertainty in our day-to-day lives than in our relationships – meeting new people, developing friendships, and trusting intimate partnerships all require facing ambiguity and uncertainty. Many are choosing to dis-engage to avoid this anxiety and may miss out on the richness that comes from deep and meaningful relationships. In this session, we’ll explore:
Objectives
Outline
Relational anxiety as a function of technological dependence
How technology is impacting couples’ relationships
How therapists can identify and help with this kind of relational anxiety
Target Audience
Therapists often feel challenged working with couples in the aftermath of infidelity. PTSD symptoms can surface in the form of unrelenting obsessing about the details of a partner’s affair. In this presentation, Ellyn will describe when and why obsessing is valuable and when it is not. She will also demonstrate via video how to start interrupting this negative ongoing traumatic pattern.
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Outline
The 3 stages of infidelity treatment
Recognizing PTSD and traumatic reactions in infidelity
Interrupting conflict avoidance patterns
Creating safety in couples therapy
Target Audience
Discover how to build an emotionally-focused map for working with romantic bonds and using a model of culture to enhance clinical attunement and attachment love with couples of color. Culture identity is typically treated as a demographic category. By extension, the internal working model of cultural identity is a clinical blind spot. In his book Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples, the presenter suggests that therapists work most effectively with Black couples (and Couples of Color) when they have a conceptual model for cultural matters, including internalize wounds, dynamic cultural identity, race-based events, and racial trauma. This intermediate workshop addresses useful clinical concepts (e.g., negative cultural priming, racial distress cues, cultural identity as a dynamic process) and how they can be integrated into couples’ therapy. Case studies and video clips of clinical interventions illustrate the work.
Objectives
Outline
Introduction, Objectives, and Overview
Model for integration of Cultural matters with couple therapy
Emotions, attachments, and cultural
Video tapes demonstration
Target Audience
Modern relationships today take many forms, and couples are creating them intentionally, with a focus on honesty, transparency and equality. What all these relationship choices have in common is the dilemma of personal and relational integrity. How do couples negotiate commitment, keep their promises, and find their personal sexual freedom at the same time? This workshop looks at contemporary relationships and helps clinicians guide couples to create sustainable and flexible monogamy agreements that contribute positively to relational change. You'll discover how to:
Objectives
Outline
What is Open Monogamy?
Three Parts.
Why do people cheat, even in open relationships?
Define Types of CNM
Diagnosis, prognosis, Cases
Erotic Recovery
Trust, Forgiveness
Revised Formula for Treatment Plan
Three Phases of Treatment
Crisis, Insight, Vision
Long Term Monogamy Plan
Future Treatment Recommendations
Target Audience
Our own traumatic reactions are triggered more often in our intimate relationships than any other place in our lives. Yet trauma treatment remains highly individualistic, often seeing recovery as a pre-requisite to intimacy. But what if healing trauma can happen most effectively within relationships?
In this provocative clinical workshop, we’ll unpack the relational nature of trauma recovery, and show that rather than intimacy being merely a result of recovery, it can be the doorway that gets your clients there. In this session you’ll learn about the three-part system of the psyche, how they each operate in relationships, and how clients can learn specific skills to use their relationships as a crucible for recovery.
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Outline
The problems with individualization of trauma treatment
How trauma healing can happen in relationship
How to use a client’s relationship to map relational patterns and change them
Target Audience
People searching for love today are facing a complex minefield of issues that make dating more complicated than ever. Dating apps, reality TV that turns love into a kind of game show like “Love is Blind” and “90 Day Fiance,” and endless advice columns on “how to attract a partner,” and “red flags” to run from have all turned dating into a new kind of social experiment. As a result, clients are coming to us more confused and anxious than ever about their dating experiences.
In this session, we will explore how to help singles and early-stage couples in today’s difficult dating world can enhance emotional intimacy and attachment at the beginning stages of the coupling process. Participants will be equipped with innovative ways to journey with their singles and early-stage couples to see and address the ways in which social cultural differences are keys to unlock the pathways to see and know their potential partner or current partner and themselves. To truly have intimacy, we can’t be blind in love. We have to see and fully embrace the whole person; this presentation will facilitate such discussion and clinical skills to achieve this goal.
Objectives
Outline
Introduction
Body
Conclusion
Target Audience
Working with couples who have high levels of active conflict can feel like an unwinnable game. When every conversation is a new opportunity for aggression or escalation, the therapy office can feel more like a sparring ring than a healing space. If not addressed, these dynamics stop therapy. How do we change the rules of the game to create an atmosphere that feels more open and collaborative? Maybe even FUN? This interactive workshop will explore creative opportunities to change the tone of therapy work, pivoting the focus from tension and negativity to kindness and play. In this session, you will explore,
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Outline
Target Audience
Counselors
Social Workers
Psychologists
Psychotherapists
Therapists
Marriage & Family Therapists
Addiction Counselors
Case Managers
Physicians
Nurses
Other Mental Health Professionals
More than ever, couples where each partner has a career are facing a choice between their work and their relationships. It’s not just about money, which is a perennial couples issue, but that sometimes one partners’ career may fall by the way side in preference of the other’s career. When this comes up in therapy, how do we guide our clients? In this workshop, Dr. Alexandra Solomon will offer a framework and tools you can use to help your clients bring Relational Self-Awareness to the intersection of love and work. You will leave this workshop with a framework for assessing how intergenerational patterns, gender role socialization, and larger cultural narratives converge on couples and how to help couples minimize friction and maximize flow.
Objectives
Outline
Operationalizing work, identifying larger cultural themes, and defining key questions
Exploring ambition in couples therapy
Assessing intergenerational patterns that underlie couples conflict about work
Helping couples get unstuck: facilitating deeper dialog about the impact of work
Helping couples create a vision and relationship agreements
Target Audience
Adults with ADHD are over-represented in therapy offices—and especially over-represented in couples therapy. If the couples therapist does not recognize the impact of ADHD on the couple’s dynamic, they will fall into the same disempowering trap that the partners are stuck in. Fortunately, an informed therapist can apply specific interventions to break the couple out of the under/over-functioner dynamic and promote each partner’s agency to make positive changes. Some of this involves helping the partners actively manage the ADHD in order to reduce its impact on daily life. The rest involves helping the partners do the universal work of negotiating different preferences, but through the lens of how ADHD impacts relationship functioning. Because ADHD can exacerbate common relationship dynamics, knowing how to work with couples with one ADHD partner will make you a better therapist with every couple you see.
Objectives
Outline
An individual condition. . . with relationship dynamics
Actively Manage ADHD—By Both Partners
Re-balance the relationship
Target Audience
It’s increasingly common for one partner in a relationship to have certain erotic kinks, fetishes, or sexual fantasies that the other partner doesn’t share. These differences in erotic orientation run the risk of creating shame, betrayal, secrecy, and defensiveness that can lead to intense relationship distress. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Being able to give clients a sexual and relational roadmap to navigate these differences can make all the difference. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:
Objectives
Outline
Teach partners erotic compassion toward themselves and each other
Target Audience
Informed by the science-based model, Schema Therapy, along with other proven models for treating couples, there is some consensus that core unmet emotional needs can lead to maladaptive life themes (schemas) and self-defeating coping behaviors. Schema chemistry can play an important role in partner selection, for example, choosing someone who may replicate a familiar experience with a parent or other significant caregiver, or someone who appears to fill a longstanding void—often resulting in longings and needs that go unfulfilled and schema triggering, conflict escalations, detachment, and violations of trust, create deeper fractures in attachment and intimacy.
Dealing with issues of narcissism in the intimate relationship poses an even greater challenge in the treatment room, where the narcissist’s typical devaluing, approval-seeking, entitled, controlling, “victim/martyr”, and passive-aggressive reactions and behaviors, are often paired with a partner who is burdened by the challenges of self-doubt, self-diminishment, subjugation, and self-sacrifice. Narcissists are notorious for denial, defensiveness, devaluation, and defiantly detached reactions when confronted about their hurtful contributions to the problems in the relationship. Restoring trust and intimacy can seem like an overwhelming and insurmountable endeavor.
Unlike most other approaches to couple’s treatment, schema therapy offers a protocol that does not insist on exclusive conjoint work. This approach appreciates the value of flexibility where individual treatment and conjoint treatment are part of an integrated plan, when necessary.
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Outline
Target Audience
A common experience for clients is the resistance of one partner attending couples therapy, leaving individual therapists and couples therapists to navigate the relationship without the other partner in the room. Without the other partner's presence, therapists will want to tailor their interventions carefully to consider the information that they are missing given they are providing individual therapy for relationship issues. This session will provide details on the systemic perspective of change and the common negative cycles that couples get into (and how to identify the relationship pattern when it is not-so-obvious), how you can assess these cycles with one partner absent, and the clinical interventions and steps that you can take to help clients make meaningful changes within themselves and in their relationship.
Objectives
Outline
A Systemic Perspective and Assessing Negative Relationship Patterns
Identifying Attachment-related coping mechanisms
Developing Motivation and an Inward Focus for Change
Barriers to making changes intrapersonally and interpersonally
Strategies focused on improving communication and changing negative cycle
Key Issues for Therapists to Mine
Target Audience
<ul>
<li>Counselors</li>
<li>Social Workers</li>
<li>Psychologists</li>
<li>Marriage & Family Therapists</li>
<li>Addiction Counselors</li>
<li>Physicians</li>
<li>Physician Assistants</li>
<li>Nurses</li>
<li>Nurse Practitioners </li>
<li>Other Mental Health Professionals</li>
</ul>