Remarried couples are often poorly served by therapists who treat them without enough appreciation for the unique complexity and multiple loyalties of stepfamily life. This workshop will combine clinical assessment and treatment issues with a special focus on values issues such as commitment and fairness that often dominate conflict in stepfamilies.
CC17 Workshop 10 - Beyond Words: Somatic Interventions for Couples Treatment - Janina Fisher, PhD
In traumatized couples, talking about 'what happened' often evokes more conflict than empathy and does not alter their habitual trauma-related animal defense survival responses of fight, flight, freeze, submission, or cry for help. By teaching couples to observe their somatic responses to ea
The workshop will explore how faulty neuroception can have an impact on autonomic regulation and social behavior and how understanding the features that trigger different neuroceptive states (safety, danger, and life threat) can be used as a strategy of treatment.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
This talk presents: 1) current information about porn, its users, and its impact on consumers and their relationships; 2) the common model of how porn use shapes sexual decision-making, and an alternative model that better matches people’s experiences; 3) an alternative to the “porn addiction” model for diagnosing and treating compulsive or impulsive behavior regarding porn.
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses three brain systems that evolved for mating and reproduction: the sex drive; feelings of intense romantic love; and feelings of deep attachment to a long term partner. She then focuses on her brain scanning research (using fMRI) on romantic rejection and the trajectory of love addiction following rejection. She concludes with discussion of the brain circuits associated with long-term partnership happiness and the future of relationships in the digital age—what she calls “slow love.”
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
This workshop in law, ethics and regulation focuses on three of the four most frequent causes for actions against mental health professionals, nationwide. Since the 2010-2011 law/ethics/regulation workshop focused primarily on boundary violations (including sexual contact between professional and patient/client), this 2012 -2013 workshop focuses on incompetence, criminal convictions and cases involving high conflict custody problems.
Couple therapists must be able to organize each session in such a way that allows for measuring progress in their treatment plan. One such way is to think of placing the couple and therapist in discreet “containers” or exercises that stress the couple. These exercises, tasks, or games allow the therapist to test and retest hypotheses, test a particular capacity, or otherwise allow the therapist to view couple performance in real time. These containers include a task, timing, and possible roles casted by the therapist and may include a role the therapist must also play. An example might be a psychodrama whereby partners must replay a recent event – step by step – as the therapist, as investigator, gets the facts. Or another container might involve a deal breaker issue whereby partners are required to persuade each other out of a deal breaker while the therapist plays the role of mediating only the manner in which partners argue their points.
Most clinical conversations about couple relationship problems occur in individual therapy, not couples therapy. But individual therapy models offer little guidance for how to address relationship problems. The result is that therapists sometimes collude with their client’s view of the partner and offer one-sided narratives of complex relational problems. This doesn’t help the client and can undermine the relationship. Even couples therapists sometimes make the same mistakes when doing individual therapy. This workshop will provide specific tools and guidelines for helping individual clients in the context of their relationship, while avoiding common traps when we are seeing just one member of a couple.
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.
CC17 Workshop 12 - The Sober Truth: Doing Effective Couples Therapy with Addicted Partners - Sue Diamond Potts, MA, RCC
Addiction is rampant in our society. Many of us have been both bombarded professionally with this reality and touched personally in some form. Addicts are like tornadoes ravaging their way through the lives of others, and people in need of immediate care are left bleeding on the sidelines. And yet,