How do you forgive a partner who is unremorseful or dead? Is forgiveness the only healthy, moral response to violation? When is forgiveness cheap? This keynote will help hurt partners overcome their hate and hurt, and help offending partners earn forgiveness.
For the first time in history, empowered women are asking for emotional intimacy in their relationships. Many men are coming up short leaving them unfulfilled, frustrated, bewildered and unloved. Traditional therapy sidesteps this basic asymmetry - Rational Empowerment Therapy addresses it. In this address, participants will be introduced to the art of relational empowerment. This radical new approach to intimacy and couples therapy will look at the five losing agendas that waylay good people from fulfilling their goals. This address also will introduce participants to the fundamental techniques of Terry Real's Relationship Turnaround, a method of producing quick, profound and permanent change in troubled couples.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses the brain networks associated with romantic love to explain frustration, attraction, abandonment, rage, the despair response, love, addiction, stalking, love, suicide, and other phenomena associated with romantic rejection. She concludes that long term use of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can jeopardize romantic love and attachment to a mate.
For the first time couple therapists can truly be scientific practitioners. We know more and more about the nature of the problem - marital distress and the nature of adult love. We also can specify which interventions work and how they work. We have maps, targets, directions and a way home.
The traditional marriage of our parents, grandparents and before was the companionable marriage. This lecture introduces a new 21st Century skill-set, relationship empowerment, which enables women to stand up for increased closeness in their relationships, while helping men understand new demands and how to meet them successfully.
This presentation will cover the assessment and detection of spousal and partner abuse, as well as intervention strategies. Community resources, cultural factors and same gender abuse dynamics also will be discussed.
This lecture will posit that marriage is alive and well and evolving into a new form, replacing a personal, psychological marriage focused on the satisfaction of individual need with a partnership marriage that produces healing and evokes psychological and spiritual growth. This transition is an instance of a shift from the "individual paradigm "to the "relational paradigm."
This keynote address will offer an overview of the neural basis of mindful awareness and how this important way of being present and receptive to one's own inner processes creates enhanced capacity for emotional resonance and empathy.
Mindful awareness has been scientifically proven to promote social, emotional and physical well-being, and is an effective part of treatment to prevent relapse of drug addiction and chronic depression. Mindfulness also enhances empathy, and in that way may promote healthy interpersonal relationships. This ancient practice of being fully aware in the present moment, without grasping onto judgments, has been found in cultures around the world. At the heart of this proposal is that the state of mindful awareness harnesses specific social and emotional circuits in the brain. The development of these “resonance circuits” creates an integrated brain state that creates the benefits of improved immune and cardiac function, enhanced empathy and self-understanding, and a deeper connection to oneself and others.
Starting with a review of recent studies on the neurobiology of trauma, Dr. van der Kolk will examine the utility of approaches from the fields of hypnosis, body oriented therapies and EMDR, both with research data and videotaped clinical interventions. The integration of these approaches during different stages of treatment will be discussed.