Couples, Kids, and Families

123 – Expanding Your Sexual Comfort Zone

Getting Beyond Myths and Stereotypes

TAMMY NELSON

Working with sexual issues in therapy and the often edgy erotic behavior people engage in can challenges a therapist’s own values and deeply held beliefs about sex and relationships. As an introduction to sex therapy, this workshop will include videos, live demonstrations, and small-group discussion around sexual practice, providing essential training to help therapists face their own preconceived notions and countertransference issues around eroticism and intimacy. In this workshop, you’ll:

• Work through your own sex-related stereotypes, resistance, guilt, and shame to create a safe, comfortable, and nonjudgmental environment for clients
• Learn about alternative sexual practices, open monogamy, fetishes, BDSM, paraphilias, cross-dressing, and a range of other behaviors
• Process responses and any vicarious trauma that may be triggered by issues around pornography, sexual exploitation, and other erotic practices
• Expand your ability to communicate about sexual issues in the consulting room

Tammy Nelson, PhD, is a board-certified sexologist, certified Imago therapist, licensed professional counselor, and author of Getting the Sex You Want and The New Monogamy.

Posted in Anxiety, Depression and Trauma, Couples, Kids, and Families, Personal and Professional Development, Thursday Pre-Conference Clinical: 9:30 A.M. – NOON & 1 P.M. – 4 P.M., Thursday: 9:30 a.m. - Noon & 1 p.m. - 4 p.m., workshops | Tagged Anxiety, Couples, Men, Sex and Sexuality, Tammy Nelson

201/301 – To Stay Or Go?

Working with the Mixed Agenda Couple

WILLIAM DOHERTY

It’s not easy when a couple enters treatment unsure about whether to dissolve a marriage or try to save it—especially when each partner leans in a different direction. These “mixed agenda” couples present challenges for even the most skilled couples therapist, particularly since successful couples therapy usually depends on both partners being at least nominally invested in working on the relationship. This workshop will demonstrate an approach called Discernment Counseling that helps partners develop clarity and confidence about whether to divorce or work on their relationship in therapy. You’ll discover how to:

Identify mixed agenda couples and avoid common mistakes in treatment, such as siding with the distancer or holding back hope because one spouse is not “in”
Help both parties own their contributions to the marital problems and weigh the pros and cons of exiting the marriage or trying couples therapy
Develop a detailed protocol of joint and separate conversations with spouses to clarify each partner’s goals and focus on what they can learn from the crisis of divorce

Continued with workshop 301.

William Doherty, PhD, is a professor and director of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project at the University of Minnesota. His books include Take Back Your Marriage, Take Back Your Kids and Medical Family Therapy with Susan McDaniel and Jeri Hepworth.

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Couples, Families, Kids, Sex and Sexuality, William Doherty

202/302 – Engaging Men in Attachment-Focused Therapy

Exploring the Neurobiology of Sex Differences

DIANA FOSHA

Far fewer men than women are making use of psychotherapy, even though the rate of serious problems among men—such as alcoholism, ADHD, and suicidality—are far higher. One reason is that basic therapeutic practices are more congruent with women’s ways of engaging than with men’s. Making use of clinical videotapes, this workshop will show you how to work with men’s attachment trauma and intense emotions, and simultaneously undo the shame men often feel about being in therapy. You’ll discover how to:

Use gender-specific, attachment-based interventions to engage men more fully in the therapeutic process
Incorporate the practice of dyadic mindfulness to consolidate therapeutic gains, foster resilience, and deepen the experience of feeling seen, felt, and understood
Apply meta-therapeutic processing to help men explore their experience in the moment, especially when positive change occurs, in ways that can feel empowering

Continued with workshop 302.

Diana Fosha, PhD, is the developer of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and founder and director of the AEDP Institute. She’s the author of The Transforming Power of Affect and coeditor of The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice, as well as many papers on healing transformational processes in experiential therapy and trauma treatment.

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., Mind, Body, and Brain, Personal and Professional Development, workshops | Tagged Anxiety, Challenging Clients and Treatment Populations, Depression, Diana Fosha, Men

207/307 – Couples on the Brink

When Is Enough Enough?

TERRY REAL

We’ve all encountered couples for whom therapy is a last ditch attempt before calling it quits. But how do we, as therapists, decide whether to throw our weight behind the relationship or let it end? This session explores the impact our own values, childhood experiences, and old family roles have on how we help couples answer this momentous question. Through case histories and discussion, you’ll learn how to think about ways to proceed in the face of challenges such as when:

One partner is ambivalent about the relationship and clearly disengaged from therapy
Your own personal deal breakers, such as physical or psychological abuse, are part of the couple’s history
Addiction issues cloud the viability of the relationship’s future
The couple’s on the brink after betrayal or infidelity

Continued with workshop 307.

Terry Real, LICSW, is the author of the bestseller I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression and has been featured on numerous national news programs. He’s been in private practice for 30 years and is the founder of The Relational Life Institute, where he teaches therapist trainings and workshops for couples.

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Couples, Families, Kids, Men, Sex and Sexuality, Terry Real

209/309 – Creating a New Reality in Couples Therapy

Breaking Free of Weekly Sessions

HEDY SCHLEIFER

Everything we’re learning about the brain and the challenge of transforming deeply engrained emotional patterns tells us that the weekly appointment approach of traditional therapy is a limiting, highly flawed format. To help couples create new realities and move into a fuller experience of intimate connectedness, we need to provide opportunities for more immersive learning that fully engages the mind, body, and spirit of both partners. This workshop presents an intensive approach to helping couples transform their relationship. You’ll learn:

A step-by-step, experiential, multiday format that can provide a powerful boost to once-a-week therapy for guiding couples to explore a new style of connection and intimacy
How to expand mutual empathy by teaching partners how to “visit” each other’s emotional neighborhoods and better understand even the most painful places in their psyches
Strategies for guiding each partner to meet in a “main square” that they can mutually inhabit in emotional alignment with each other

Continued with workshop 309.

Hedy Schleifer, MA, LMHC, an internationally known couples therapist and clinical trainer, is the founder of the Tikkun Learning Center and the originator of Encounter-centered Couples Therapy (EcCT).

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Couples, Families, Hedy Schleifer, Kids, Mindfulness, Sex and Sexuality

211/311 – Harnessing the Power of Emotion in Families

An Introduction to Emotionally Focused Family Therapy

GEORGE FALLER

By zeroing in on the underlying attachment needs, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) offers a powerful, step-by-step process for transformational change. Learn how to help family members work through relational distress and past injuries to create new relational patterns for achieving deeper bonds and greater felt security. Whether you work with individuals, couples, or families, this training will show you how to create enactments in the consulting room that will deepen the impact of your work. In this workshop, we’ll:

Learn how to use the techniques and theoretical underpinning of EEFT to understand a family’s emotional dynamics, access attachment issues, and create new patterns of emotional healing
Recognize how protection patterns keep individuals from opening themselves to their vulnerability and block families’ natural ability to repair
Become familiar with the three-stage EFFT treatment process for achieving deeper connection, including how to create alliances with different family members, manage change events that access underlying vulnerabilities, and model positive new interaction patterns.

Continued with workshop 311.

George Faller, LMFT, is the founder of the New York Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. He teaches at the Ackerman Institute for the Family and is the director of training at the Center for Hope and Renewal.

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Families, George Faller, Kids

214/314 – From Dysfunction to Erotic Discovery

Transforming the Sexual Narrative

SUZANNE IASENZA

When couples come to therapy with problems involving desire, arousal, and orgasm, therapists often fall into the trap of thinking of them as somehow broken and in need of fixing. Instead, this workshop will offer an approach that guides couples from a state of disconnection to becoming a co-creative sexual discovery team exploring their own idiosyncratic pathway to pleasure. It will offer a three-part therapeutic process to help couples find alternatives to rigid scripts about what fulfilling sexuality is supposed to be like. You’ll learn how to:

Conduct a detailed sexual history for partners to help them understand their current sexual narratives and how to create more liberating stories
Empower both partners to make explicit their “menus” for preferred sexual activities as a way of expanding their repertoire for more genuine erotic satisfaction
Help couples use sensate focus as a meditative tool to enhance their sexual development

Continued with workshop 314.

Suzanne Iasenza, PhD, is faculty at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Postgraduate Program in Couples and Family Therapy of Adelphi University’s Derner Institute. She’s coeditor of Lesbians and Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Theory and Practice and Lesbians, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis: The Second Wave.

Posted in All Day, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Friday: 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., workshops | Tagged Couples, Expressive Arts, Mindfulness, Sex and Sexuality, Suzanne Iasenza

219 – 21st-Century LGBTQ

Not Your Mother’s Gay Community

MARGARET NICHOLS

You don’t need a niche practice these days to encounter clients, especially younger ones, who identify as queer, pansexual, gender fluid, or any number of new and creative sex and gender identities. The expansion of the LGBTQ community to a “big tent” tribe that validates widely different forms of sexual and gender expression has been accompanied by changing psychiatric models as well. So therapists trained even as recently as 10 years ago often practice with outdated models and approaches, and use terminology that some of their clients will consider insensitive. In this workshop, learn about:

The changes in the LGBTQ community and the radical changes in our best practices, including why affirmation of gender diverse children, rather than their gender, is preferred and why attempts to cure paraphilias are discouraged
The difference between pansexual, gender queer, gender fluid, polyamorous, and transgender
A broader understanding of sexuality and intimacy from research on same-sex, kinky, and monogamous couples

Margaret Nichols, PhD, has been a licensed psychologist and AASECT Certified sex therapy supervisor working in the LGBTQ community for 35 years. She founded the New Jersey Hyacinth AIDS Foundation and is the founder and president of the Institute for Personal Growth. Her recent publications include chapters in textbooks Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy and Systemic Sex Therapy.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Personal and Professional Development, workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Couples, Cultural Social and Racial Issues, Families, Kids, Margaret Nichols, Sex and Sexuality

220 – Don’t Ask Me to Forgive You!

A Radical Approach to Healing Interpersonal Wounds

JANIS ABRAHMS SPRING

Forgiveness has been held up as the gold standard of recovery from interpersonal injuries, but in real life, hurt parties often find that they can’t or won’t forgive, particularly when the offender is unrepentant or dead. In this workshop, you’ll learn to reframe the issue in ruptured relationships not as forgiveness, but as acceptance without forgiving. We’ll explore how to:

Differentiate between forgiveness as it’s traditionally defined and acceptance as a tool to free clients from bitterness or preoccupation with their wounds
Coach hurt parties to reframe the personal meaning of a deeply wounding experience without the additional dimension of shame
Design ways to create an apology that’s specific and heartfelt
Empower both parties to acknowledge a fair share of responsibility for the wound as a way of fostering personal growth and perhaps reconnection and forgiveness

Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD, ABPP, is a former clinical supervisor at Yale University and author of After the Affair, How Can I Forgive You? and Life with Pop.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Personal and Professional Development, workshops | Tagged Anxiety, Depression, Janis Abrahms Spring, Trauma

221 – Men and Integrity

Exploring a New Way to Engage Your Male Clients

PATRICK DOUGHERTY

Therapists often struggle to find leverage in working with defensive or avoidant male clients reluctant to engage emotionally with their partners or in the therapy room. But while they resist deeper psychological inquiry, evoking the masculine virtue of integrity can help men develop a new vision of who they wish to be. Then from this place of integrity, they can become more focused on taking responsibility for their own behavior and why they act and react the way they do. We’ll explore how to:

Help men internalize and organize behavior around the five attributes of integrity: honesty, vulnerability, guilt/remorse, listening, and direct expression of feelings
Learn techniques to get men to embrace their vulnerability and acknowledge difficult-to-address issues, such as sexual intimidation, threatening behavior or passive withdrawal
Practice drawing up specific action plans for men that will lead to their making amends to their partner while also restoring their own sense of dignity and integrity

Patrick Dougherty, MA, LP, a psychologist in private practice for more than 35 years and has been focusing on men’s issues for over three decades. He’s the author of Qigong in Psychotherapy: You Can Do So Much by Doing So Little and A Whole-Hearted Embrace: Finding Love at the Center of It All.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Personal and Professional Development, workshops | Tagged Anxiety, Depression, Men, Patrick Dougherty

222 – Empowering Anxious Children and their Parents

One Notch Outside the Comfort Zone

AUREEN WAGNER

While cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to effectively help as many as 80 percent of anxious kids, the exposure to perceived danger it requires is inherently counterintuitive for anxious kids and parents, who typically work hard to shield themselves from this very goal. So how can a therapist strike that delicate balance that fosters trust and safety while inspiring clients to nudge themselves one notch outside their comfort zones? In this workshop, we’ll explore the role of rapport, education, and empowerment in facilitating the client’s readiness for exposure-based CBT. You’ll discover:

The four steps for cultivating treatment readiness in different age groups: stabilization, communication, persuasion, and collaboration
Child-friendly applications of realistic thinking and gradual exposure techniques through case histories and role-playing exercises
How to help parents contain their own anxiety and keep it from exacerbating their child’s condition

Aureen Wagner, PhD, an anxiety treatment expert and international speaker, is the author of several books, including Up and Down the Worry Hill, Worried No More: Help and Hope for Anxious Children, and Treatment of OCD in Children & Adolescents: Professional’s Kit.

Posted in Anxiety, Depression and Trauma, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Anxiety, Aureen Wagner, Families, Kids

223 – The Immigrant’s Odyssey

Coaching Clients through the Acculturation Process

PRISKA IMBERTI

The continuing public debate on immigration too often obscures the traumatic losses immigrants experience when they move here—loss of family, friends, professional status, language, culture, and sense of belonging. In this workshop, we’ll deepen our understanding of the stresses and hardships inherent in the immigration journey, and discuss ways that therapists can connect with immigrants, convey respect and encouragement, and coach them in self-empowerment. You’ll learn how to:

Identify with the experience of being a cultural outsider and use it as a way to better connect with immigrant clients
Help them mourn their losses and appreciate their resilience, endurance, and courage
Explore the conflicts between immigrants (who often concentrate solely on survival) and their children (whose struggles with identity and heightened expectations can provoke anxiety, depression, and self-doubt)

Note: This workshop fulfills many state-board requirements for training in cultural competency.

Priska Imberti, LCSW-R, BCC, is a bilingual and bicultural family therapist. She’s the founder and director of CRECER, Inc., a psychotherapy center that provides comprehensive psychotherapy and psychoeducational services to the community, focusing on immigrant issues.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, Personal and Professional Development, workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Challenging Clients and Treatment Populations, Cultural Social and Racial Issues, Families, Kids, Priska Imberti

228 – Addressing Attachment Issues with Traumatized Teens

Getting Hooked—and Unhooked

MARTHA STRAUS

To work with troubled and traumatized adolescents, it’s crucial for therapists to first foster their own capacity for self-awareness and self-regulation. It’s not easy, though, especially when our young clients’ extreme reactions—ranging from angry arousal to frozen shutting down—can trigger our own sense of helplessness, failure, dissociation, and rejection. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to use this nonfunctional cycle to get unhooked by:

Identifying specific adolescent attachment styles that interact with or trigger our own
Exploring the React, Reflect, and Respond model to best help our clients
Using The Four M’s—mirroring, mentalizing, mindfulness, and modulation—to increase connection and mood regulation
Focusing on attunement—including strategies of validation, self-disclosure, and the compassionate sharing of adult feelings and opinions—to bring traumatized teens back into relationship with themselves and you

Martha Straus, PhD, a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University New England, is the author of No-Talk Therapy for Children and Adolescents and Adolescent Girls in Crisis: Intervention and Hope, and the forthcoming Developmental-Relational Interventions with Traumatized Teens: The Challenge of Attachment.

Posted in Anxiety, Depression and Trauma, Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Morning: 11 A.M. – 1 P.M, workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Challenging Clients and Treatment Populations, Families, Kids, Martha Straus, Trauma

317 – The Myth of Sex Addiction

A Non-Pathologizing Approach to Out-of-Control Sexual Behavior

JOE KORT

Rather than providing a pathway to healing, the sex addiction model too often contributes to clients being sexually lost and at odds with their own nature. Therapists are left with both being unable to help clients with their continued out-of-control sexual behaviors and also with the consequences of being the recipient of a pathologizing label. This workshop will educate therapists on having a sexual health and strength-based dialogue with their clients as an alternative to the sex addiction model. We’ll focus on:

How to help clients develop a non-pathologizing understanding of their own individual sexuality and erotic identity
A comprehensive assessment and alternative treatment that emphasizes the nonsexual meanings of sexual behaviors and fantasies
Helping therapists explore their own countertransference with clients struggling with sexual behaviors the therapist experiences as problematic
Differentiating normative male sexuality from out-of-control sexual behaviors around the use of porn, fetishes, and sex with partners

Joe Kort, PhD, LMSW, is a certified sex therapist specializing in individual, couples, and group psychotherapy for gay and straight clients. He’s the author of Is My Husband Gay, Straight, or Bi? A Guide for Women Concerned about Their Men.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Afternoon: 3 P.M. – 5 P.M., workshops | Tagged Challenging Clients and Treatment Populations, Couples, Joe Kort, Men, Sex and Sexuality

318 – Healing From Infidelity

A Toolkit for Helping Clients

MICHELE WEINER-DAVIS

If you work with couples, you’re probably no stranger to the clinical challenge of helping them heal from infidelity. Using vivid video examples, this workshop will provide a comprehensive roadmap to the complex, zigzag nature of the road to recovery, where progress can be marked by setbacks from week to week and even within the therapeutic hour. Whatever your therapy model, you’ll learn:

Whether and how to discuss the details of the betrayal
Whether to give an ultimatum to end the affair
How to help partners begin to rebuild trust and address questions about ongoing dishonesty
How to coach couples through a structured yet flexible healing process

Michele Weiner-Davis, MSW, LCSW, is the director of The Divorce Busting Center in Boulder, Colorado, and author of several bestselling books, including The Sex-Starved Wife, The Sex-Starved Marriage, and Divorce Busting.

Posted in Couples, Kids, and Families, Friday Afternoon: 3 P.M. – 5 P.M., workshops | Tagged Adolescents, Couples, Families, Kids, Michele Weiner-Davis, Sex and Sexuality