Difficult relationships are often confusing. This disorder, rather than the content differences, often keeps us from finding resolution. Learn a simple, yet detailed, content-free process to sort out this unconscious confusion, reach clarity, understand other's experience, and spontaneously change perceptions and responses to become more resourceful. A demonstration will be given.
The experience of being a therapist can often seem routine, dealing with similar issues, telling well-worn stories, and applying favored methods. Yet occasionally there are moments, even whole sessions, that appear miraculous in their innovation. This workshop explores the process and mechanisms of creative breakthroughs, based on interviews with the world's most innovative clinicians.
Personal identity is a crucial guide to the way people live their lives. Dr. Polster will examine how therapy may accentuate and empower familiar identities and how to resuscitate those which are dimmed. Conceptual elaboration will be joined with live therapy sessions, showing how concepts connect with therapeutic work.
Mindfulness and acceptance methods are powerful methods in clinical practice that greatly simplify the therapeutic tasks at hand. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) will be described as an example of these methods and specific techniques will be shown. ACT targets common core processes that research are the basis for much psychopathology or restrictions on psychological health.
The Personal and professional dimensions of a therapist's life often intersect, leading to reciprocal influence that takes place in sessions. This experiential workshop explores the ways that therapists are often transformed by their work helping others and enhances their productivity and life satisfaction.
Psychotherapy will maximize its effectiveness by targeting the most powerful sources of change: the therapeutic relationship and the patient him/herself. This clinical workshop will provide integrative methods for customizing therapy relationships to individual patients. Participants will learn to reliably assess and rapidly apply four evidence-based guidelines (patient preferences, stages of change, resistance level, and real-time feedback) for constructing the "relationship of choice."
Therapy re-opens stuck people to fluidity. By faithfully connecting small but inexorable sequences of words and actions, an impelling force is created for movement into whatever feels naturally next. Through live therapeutic sessions, Dr. Polster will show how this process engenders therapeutic vitality and openness to personal fluidity.
There is no map for becoming a fully human being, but there is a soul's compass. Orienting to true north requires interior freedom, curiosity and moment -to-moment awareness. The means to uncovering these intrinsic aspects of self, and the blocks to their recognition, are intrinsic to all the world's wisdom traditions.
Thanks to a number of recent studies, there is now solid empirical evidence for what distinguishes highly effective therapists. In this workshop, participants will learn in detail the qualities and practices that separate the great from the good. Participants also will find out about a system of feedback procedures that can be used to develop a profile of their most and least effective moments in therapy - what works and what doesn't. Not only will attendees get a far more exact idea of their clinical strengths and weaknesses and how to use the findings to improve their own practice, but they will also come away with concrete tools that will immediately boost clinical abilities and effectiveness.