BT12 Workshop 32 – Rethinking Couples Therapy: A Radical Approach to Love, Sex and Infidelity – Esther Perel, MA, LMFT
Couples therapists are typically discouraged from seeing partners separately lest power imbalances, allegiances, or secrets further divide the couple. What’s lost in this approach? Through case examples, Esther Perel will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible environment to work creatively with infidelity.
Based on Perel’s Mating in Captivity, this bold take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our need for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. We will tackle eroticism as a quality of vitality in relationships extending far beyond mere sexuality and show how reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time.
Price:
$29.00Base Price - $59.00 Sale is $29.00price reduced from Base Price - $59.00
Family Constellations can be used in therapy as a process for treating sexual trauma. The experiential process accesses the heart as an organ of perception to explore, heal, and release sexual trauma while reclaiming clients’ empowered sexual selves. Employing a light meditation, therapist and client open the doors of awareness to ancestral and archetypal consciousness.
Attachment, trauma, sexual compulsivity, performance anxiety and community norms make gay sex tricky. Addressing this with clients is difficult too. This workshop defines sexual norms for gay men and teaches interventions and hypnosis scripts to maximize brief treatment.
Human sexual response is a complex system even when attempting to understand one person let alone two people in a relationship. It is helpful, therefore to have a way to organize decades of research and clinical practice in a manner which can be shared with clients. A practical schema will be presented to educate and motivate clients interested in improving their intimate connection. Lecture, video, original handouts and experiential exercises will be utilized.
Through case examples, Esther Perel, MA, LMFT will show how to effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality and infidelity by creating separate spaces where each partner can explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. We will show how to navigate privacy and secrecy, honesty and transparency, stage interventions around sexual impasses, and structure a safe and flexible therapeutic environment to work effectively with infidelity. Provide a multicultural perspective on differing notions of love, marriage and sexual behaviors, and to highlight the relationship between culture and sexuality.
In this workshop, clinicians’ level of comfort, barriers, and attitudes when talking about sexuality will be highlighted, along with useful strategies to provide better engagement with their clients. Additional strategies used to build upon a person’s individual strengths to assist them in overcoming cultural and personal sexual imprints are offered.
One out of every three couples struggles with mismatched sexual desire---a formula for marital disaster. When one spouse is sexually dissatisfied and the other is oblivious, unconcerned, or uncaring, sex isn't the only casualty; a sense of emotional connection can also disappear. Helping couples bridge the desire gap can be challenging when one spouse appears unmotivated or lacks empathy. It can also be challenging when therapists feel uncomfortable discussing sex. This speech presents a collaborative model for partners to work together to turn around the decline in their sex lives and reignite their emotional connection.
Dr. Fisher will present an fMRI study of intense romantic love, a primary mating drive, and the impact of this brain circuitry on human sexuality, human marital stability and therapy using SSRI antidepressants.