Like walking a tightrope, working with couples in trouble requires focus and balance. Both partners want you to take their side, and, at times, it’s easy to get swallowed up by the intense emotionality of the sessions. So, how can you maintain a sense of balance and create an atmosphere in which healing can take place? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the principles of Imago Relationship Therapy to connect with the issues the couple brings to you and transform the emotional temperature of the session.
Too little acknowledgment will lead to alienation of one of both partners in couples therapy, but too much acknowledgment without a compelling invitation to move on from conflict, blame and the past to new possibilities won’t work either. Learn how to maintain that delicate balance and let the couple teach you when to use which method.
Everybody lies. Some lies are loving and harmless. But, others are enormously destructive. Couples’ patterns of deception often begin innocently but end in couples destroying the love they once had. Self- deception, conflict avoidance and felony lies all undermine commitment and connection. Learn to identify and disrupt deception, confront evasiveness and hypocrisy and facilitate differentiation.
Attachment theory posits, along with those healthy ones, the ‘securely attached,” two important types of troubled groups – those with “anxious,” and “avoidant,” attachment styles. Said in plain English, this amounts to pursuers and distancers. But the pursuer/distancer dynamic has been a central concern to couples and family therapy since it’s inception in the nineteen-fifties. This workshop will look at some of the many ways this dynamic has been thought of and treated – from recursive feedback loops, to “love addiction/love avoidance,” to attachment styles and beyond.
Two particularly challenging issues that surface in couples therapy are addiction and self absorption. Through the lens of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, Sue and Ellyn will describe how to make strategic treatment decisions that propel couples toward sobriety and more collaborative functioning. They will review the troublesome traits of the self-absorbed partner and illuminate ways to increase other-differentiation and increase caring and compassion.
Engaging withdrawn men in therapy is often challenging, particularly when the man is engaged in compulsive sexual behaviors such as affairs and pornography. Therapists will learn to how to engage withdrawers both with their own internal experience and disowned aspects of the self and with their partner. Therapy video will be used to demonstrate the process.
Heuristic (hyoo' ristik) Enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves. A "hands on" approach to learning. What would it look like if the primary goal of therapy were to enable clients to discover, experience for themselves the goals they set in therapy. A simple model for heuristic helping will be presented.
Now that you understand the neuropsychology of attachment, how are you going to use it in a session where one partner is yelling at the other for abandoning him/her who is in turn trying to take refuge under the coach? Learn how to put theory into practice using an experiential approach to explore old neural circuitry around attachment and build new pathways. We will be using the present moment and mindfulness integrated into therapy to slow things down and rewire the brain.
In the old way of thinking, couples were depicted as a communication system that could be improved with relational skills or as interacting psychopathologies needing treatment by a mental health professional. In the new way of thinking, couples are a system of mutually reinforcing interactions that create anxiety or safety, wounding or healing. They also are the source of culture and the fulcrum of social transformation. What happens in the couple happens in the culture; what happens in the culture happens in the couple.
Our natural sexual setpoint explains a lot about arousal, desire and intimate satisfaction. We will explore this issue with research, facts and humor, with the objectives of understanding the effects of estrogen on desire and the effects of testosterone on desire.