Generative processes are those that promote innovation, evolution and growth. To “generate” means to create something new. Thus, the core focus in of generative change is creativity: How do you create a successful and meaningful work life? How do you create great personal relationships? How do you develop a great relationship with yourself—your body, your past, your future, your wounds and your gifts? These are the basic challenges in leading an extraordinary life, and the processes of generative change offer a way to succeed at them.
We will debate the Promise of attachment science as a guide to the practice of individual couple and family therapy in the 21st century including what this science tells us about how to understand mental health issues and the most direct pathways to positive change, health and resilience.
Strategic therapy and present centered therapy have often received attention as discretely different phenomena. Cloe Madanes will present her views of strategic therapy and its relevance for present centered therapy. Erving Polster will do the same, showing the disparity and commonality of the two. Their individual views will animate a conversation with each other.
The application of culturally-informed practices taking into account socio-cultural and historical contexts and intersecting identity factors is essential to ethical practice. In this presentation cultural-centered frameworks are reviewed as tools to recognize unconscious biases and to enhance respectful and inclusive engagements with individuals, groups, and communities. This presentation is informed by the APA Multicultural Guidelines and the Multicultural Counseling Competencies (Sue, Arredondo & McDavis, 1992). Examples from clinical and organizational practice will be introduced.
The benefits of therapy tend to be confined to the clinic and to targeted clients with specific complaints. This workshop describes the process and outcome of distributing--face to face and through social media--the core therapeutic processes to the general public. Participants will experience the structure and process of a Safe Conversation, a relational psychoeducational process, the strategies and tactics of cultural healing and invited to join in developing a relational culture.
For too long, and in many ways unintentionally, we’ve tried to organize our world from disjointed mental constructs. This fragmented perspective of the world has led to more and more personal imbalance, social violence and increasing environmental degradation. In this workshop, we will examine how to engage heartfull, embodied intelligence to transform disconnected, fear-based and limited thinking and behaviors into nourishing and respectful life choices. You will explore processes that enrich your capacity to coach others into greater states of wholeness and presence through the body, the voice, movement and receptive listening.
MHE's 1965 paper "A Special Inquiry with Aldous Huxley into the Nature and Character of Various States of Consciousness" will be used so everyone can experience their personal version of Deep Reflection, the Double Dissociation Double Bind and the Quantum Qualia of their private consciousness and cognition for facilitating gene expression and brain plasticity to optimize their own growing edges.
Therapy has typically focused on explaining why people have their problems and why they sometimes make the poor choices they make. This workshop focuses on HOW, not why, people unintentionally make choices that negatively impact their emotional well-being and quality of life. We will identify obstacles to making the key discriminations that can give rise to better decision making, especially global cognitive style and a past orientation. We will explore the role hypnosis can play in encouraging the development of effective discrimination strategies that can lead clients to choose “this,” not “that.”
A central currency in the therapeutic exchange is negative experiences--depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, etc. This practical and positive approach assumes that each core human experience has equivalent potential to be positive or negative, depending on the human relationship to it; and thus focuses on how problems may be transformed to resources by skillful human connection. This process operates at two levels: (1) developing a generative state (in the therapist, client, and relationship field) and then (2) using specific methods of transforming negative experiences and behaviors. Multiple techniques and examples for will be given, along with an exercise and demonstration.
Mythic structures illumine and fortify personal and cultural change. In using the significant myths that inform cultures and persons, there are potent means developed by Dr. Houston of applying mythic and symbolic material towards the shifting needs and challenges of our time. Houston will explore and demonstrate some of these.