Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson will start the Conference off with a Keynote on why Attachment, Differentiation and Neuroscience matter in Couples Therapy. Skillful integration of these approaches will enable you to more calmly manage couples hostility, outrageous demands and conflict/intimacy avoidance.

Attachment injuries are a specific type of betrayal in romantic relationships that traumatize and fundamentally change basic relationship assumptions for injured partners and often create impasses in therapy.  This workshop will present 7 processes to restore love after an attachment injury and demonstrate elements of the healing process using therapy video.

Some couples seem intractable and unchangeable, and their devotion to maintaining their misery seems mysterious. We often dread their next appointment. This workshop will demystify this well known dynamic and describe and demonstrate concepts and processes that make working with the couple from hell joyful, even desirable.

Sexual infidelity is generally regarded as a grave symptom of a troubled relationship, and the revelation of an affair often triggers a crisis that threatens the entire foundation of trust and connection in a couple. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the complexities of marriage, sex, intimacy, and monogamy in couples from a multicultural, nonjudgmental perspective. We’ll explore the motivations behind affairs and their possible meanings in different relationships, both heterosexual and gay. We’ll examine the benefits and costs of truth-telling and transparency, how couples can rebuild trust and intimacy, and why affairs can actually stabilize a marriage. With an eye on the existential, clinical and ethical aspects involved, we will focus on how our own assumptions, values, and personal experiences can influence our therapeutic work and elude the needs of the couple. Combining didactic material, case studies, and video vignettes, we will lay out a nuanced therapeutic approach for working with extramarital relations, past and present, fantasized or real, disclosed or shrouded in secrecy.

This workshop will identify the common mistakes in working with mixed-agenda couples (one leaning out and the other leaning in), and will teach you a protocol for “Discern-ment Counseling” to help clients make a decision that has integrity for all involved and that improves the odds that couples will try therapy to heal their broken bond.

A psychobiological approach to couple therapy utilizes a bottom-up versus a top-down approach to psychotherapy. This means that the couple therapist utilizes very fast, often surprising interventions in order to access implicit systems as revealed in micro expressions and micro-movements in the face and body, respectively. This workshop will introduce several exciting bottom-up techniques to use in couple therapy including the use of surprise statements, movements, poses, and music.

Many people approach the inner workings of their erotic mind with great trepidation, believing that the content of their fantasy life is inappropriate in the context of a loving relationship. Therapists can help clients develop a view of fantasy as a narrative that creates a safe space to experience the pleasure that can invigorate their loving relationship. They decipher the meaning of sexual fantasies approaching them more as dreams or complex symbolic structures than as literal narratives of secret intentions. In recognizing the depth, complexity and healing qualities of the erotic imagination, we explore sexual fantasy as a staging ground for action and escape that turns the tables on those responsible for earlier experiences of demoralization, defeat, and even trauma.

Our cultural taboos about erotic fantasy are so strong that, for many people, the very idea of discussing sexual fantasy leads to anxiety and shame. As therapists we need a clearer distinction between issues of privacy and secrecy in the arena of sexuality, as well as a range of clinically valuable ideas about when and how to bring fantasy into a relationship and– just as importantly– when and how not to.

We have advanced training opportunities in
couples therapy these days, but not a lot of
training in the everyday skills of conducting
sessions with couples who interrupt each
other, flare at each other, mind read, and
emotionally bail out of sessions. Here’s an
hour’s worth of practical tools.