Mary Jo Barrett, MSW, is the founder and director of the Center for Contextual Change, and the coauthor of Treating Complex Trauma: A Relational Blueprint for Collaboration and Change and Systemic Treatment of Incest.

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Mary Jo Barrett is the founder and director of the Center for Contextual Change. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Mary Jo Barrett has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.

William Doherty, PhD, is a professor and director of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project at the University of Minnesota. He is co-author of the book Helping Couples on the Brink of Divorce: Discernment Counseling for Troubled Relationships, with Steven Harris. He is cofounder of Better Angels, an initiative to depolarize America.

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. William Doherty has an employment relationship with the University of Minnesota. He receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. William Doherty is a member of the National Council on Family Relations, the International Council of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, and the American Psychological Association.

Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist of Polish-Jewish descent who has explored the tension between the need for security (love, belonging, and closeness) and the need for freedom (erotic desire, adventure, and distance) in human relationships.

Perel promoted the concept of “erotic intelligence” in her book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, which has been translated into 24 languages. After publishing the book, she became an international advisor on sex and relationships. She gave a TED talk in February 2013 called “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship,” and another in March 2015 called “Rethinking infidelity… a talk for anyone who has ever loved.”

Perel is the host of the podcast “Where Should We Begin?”, which is based inside her therapist’s office as she sees anonymous couples in search of insight into topics such as infidelity, sexlessness and grief.

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Esther Perel maintains a private practice. She has employment relationships with Columbia University, Ackerman Institute for the Family, Norwegian Institute for the Expressive Arts Therapies, and 92nd Street Y. She receives royalties as a published author. Esther Perel receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Esther Perel is a member of the American Family Therapy Academy and the American Association for Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists.

Richard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief, and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called "parts." These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s.

IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms.

In 2013, Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, MA where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Richard Schwartz is the Founder and President of the IFS Institute. He maintains a private practice and has an employment relationship with Harvard Medical School. He receives royalties as a published author. Dr. Schwartz receives a speaking honorarium, recording, and book royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Richard Schwartz is a fellow of Meadows Behavioral Healthcare and is a member of the American Family Therapy Academy and the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy. He is a contributing editor for Family Therapy Networker. Dr. Schwartz serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, the Contemporary Family Therapy, the Journal of Family Psychotherapy, and the Family Therapy Collections.