The gay male subculture emphasizes easy sexual hookups as a norm, without questioning whether this is actually healthy for a couple. This workshop will define how male couples choose exclusivity successfully, how healthy attachment is an important component for considering an open relationship and provide guidelines for managing open boundaries within a couple. Norms in the subculture will be compared to stereotypical heterosexual couples, including what actually constitutes deception or affairs, and how transform deception to a deeper intimacy.
Sexual infidelity often triggers a crisis that threatens the entire foundation of trust and connection in a couple. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the complexities of marriage, sex, intimacy, and monogamy in couples from a multicultural, nonjudgmental perspective. We’ll explore the motivations behind affairs and their possible meanings in different relationships, both heterosexual and gay. We’ll examine the benefits and costs of truth-telling and transparency, how couples can rebuild trust and intimacy, and why affairs can actually stabilize a marriage. With an eye on the existential, clinical and ethical aspects involved, we will focus on how our own assumptions, values, and personal experiences can influence our therapeutic work and elude the needs of the couple.
This workshop will identify the common mistakes in working with mixed-agenda couples (one leaning out and the other leaning in), and will teach you a protocol for “Discernment Counseling” to help clients make a decision that has integrity for all involved and that improves the odds that couples will try therapy to heal their broken bond.
A psychobiological approach to couple therapy utilizes a bottom-up versus a top-down approach to psychotherapy. This means that the couple’s therapist utilizes very fast, often surprising interventions in order to access implicit systems as revealed in micro expressions and micro-movements in the face and body, respectively. This workshop will introduce several exciting bottom-up techniques to use in couple therapy, including the use of surprise statements, movements, poses, and music.
Most couples have at least one partner who withdraws. To bring about lasting change, withdrawers have to engage in the process of therapy and most importantly they must reengage in the relationship. Using video examples, this workshop focuses on how to engage withdrawers and help them reengage with their partners.
The first emotion our ancestors evolved was fear—and we remain highly threat reactive today, continually overestimating threats and underestimating opportunities and resources. We’ll explore multiple methods for helping clients “cool the fires” of fear and anger, and internalize inner strength and an appropriate sense of safety.
Building on the keynote on “taking in the good,” we’ll explore ways to use positive experiences to soothe and potentially replace negative material (e.g., relationship upsets, pain from childhood). Through discussion and experiential activities, we’ll match healing experiences to disturbances in the brain’s core motivational systems (Avoid harm, Approach reward, Attach to “us”).
Deficits such as affect blindness, alexithymia, and poor theory of mind will likely lead to mutual dysregulation in couples during periods of distress or threat and is the driving force behind relationship dissatisfaction and dissolution. This workshop will introduce attendees to the most common social-emotional deficits and will demonstrate how to identify these deficits and what to do about them in couple therapy.
The secret to helping couples have a powerful, transformative experience in therapy is to get them to deeply explore---while in each other’s presence---their own character structure and family-of-origin trauma. For the therapist, this process involves six steps: arriving at the couple’s relational diagnosis, helping them articulate their repeating loops, getting the backstory of their childhood adaptation, imaginatively reparenting each inner child, loving confrontation, and helping