How do we raise sexual issues? How should we respond when the couple does? Why doesn’t THIS couple enjoy sex, or have sex? Are aging or health issues complicating sexual problems? What’s the ONE cross-cultural issue that matters regarding sexuality? And what’s really a sexual issue—versus an issue of power, grief, resentment, or fear of rejection/abandonment? This PRACTICAL workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning.
Overtly angry and passive-aggressive partners often present the most difficulty for therapists. They frequently demand intimacy, while being unable to create the conditions for intimacy to occur or be sustained. They require a high level of activity from you to structure treatment, manage hostility in the office and confront hypocrisies that keep their development stalled. Learn to increase your personal strengths to harness the enormous developmental potential that exists in these couples.
This workshop probes the intricacies of love and desire—how they relate and how they conflict.. Participants will learn how emotional intimacy can inhibit sexual desire and why “good intimacy” doesn’t necessarily make for “good sex.” Through case material and video vignettes, we’ll explore how our emotional history: “how we were loved” shapes our erotic blueprints and expresses itself in the physicality of sex: “how we make love”. We will show how to break through erotic impasses and help couples balance the dual needs for security and freedom. This model applies to couples and individuals from all sexual orientations.
This workshop is designed to help you and your partner learn how to achieve courageous love, based on the presenter’s Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy. When couples have self-led conversations, their relationships harmonize naturally. They can discuss even highly charged issues productively and feel safe to reveal their most vulnerable parts to each other.
Couples therapy is often complicated and delicate when one partner has suffered childhood sexual abuse. The needs of both partners must be honored though one partner’s dream may be the other partner’s nightmare. This workshop describes the details of applying Gottman Method Couples Therapy to a case involving one partner’s history of severe sexual abuse.
This workshop will help you examine how your values and life experience affect your treatment of couples on the brink of divorce, and will teach you a protocol for helping clients make a decision that has integrity for all involved and that improves the odds that couples will try to heal their broken bond.
This workshop focuses on the use of digital audio and video frame analysis and heart rate monitoring for gathering reliable information concerning attachment and arousal patterns within and between partners. The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) places particular emphasis on implicit body states that drive interaction between partners. Though clinicians are trained to use their senses to pick up micro-movements and micro-expressions through the body, face, and voice, precision equipment such as digital video and biofeedback devices can often provide compelling “proof” of what the clinician sees, hears, and senses when observing partner interactions.
This workshop explains and proves the meaning of the title, that romantic partners mostly do not know what they are doing or why. This is because partners are moving toward and away from one another in accordance of their internal working models, their anticipatory neurobiological systems, and their moment-to-moment experience of safety and or threat. These systems are extremely fast-acting and operate below ordinary cognition or knowing. In the absence of knowing, partners must confabulate in order to explain their behaviors and the consequences of behaviors. Attendees will learn how to work with this phenomena of “not knowing” from a psychobiological perspective and will learn so-called “bottom-up” interventions for bypassing ordinary cognitive mechanism that can distract and misdirect the therapy.
Internal Family Systems therapy synthesizes two paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind—and brings concepts and methods from many schools of family therapy to the world of sub-personalities. In addition to learning how to help clients access their Self, participants will learn the dif-ferent kinds of parts they will encounter in clients (managers, firefighters, and exiles) and how to help those parts transform. The workshop will provide tools to help therapists stay centered and open-hearted, as well as provide a user-friendly language for therapy that encourages disclosure and empathy.
People change due to the experiences they live, more than the information they receive. A brief overview of the experiential approach will be followed by a demonstration and discussion of the experiential methods used for assessment and treatment, which include couples and therapist sculpting, attunement, and the use of signals.