Detailed Schedule

The word “Solution” in the title of the Solution Focused Approach. The key tenant of this way of working actually has nothing to do with solutions, it has everything to do with hope. Just as when working with individual clients, working with couples means we have to use skillfully crafted questions that move the couple from despair to a hoped for future. As the couple answers these questions they come back together in deep and meaningful ways that will last. In this lecture the presenter will share the keys to asking the kinds of questions that consistently produce positive results for couples. 

1. Understand the power of hope in the Solution-Focused Approach and its transformative impact on couples.
2. Learn the art of asking the right questions that move couples from conflict or despair to a positive, hopeful future.
3. Explore practical techniques for helping couples reconnect and foster deep, lasting relationships through meaningful dialogue.

This approach is all about building a pathway for couples to rediscover connection and hope, which leads to lasting change.

This presentation will provide an overview of Solution Building Couples Therapy (SBCT). The presenter will introduce the Diamond Approach to SBCT and will provide detailed explanations of each step of the Diamond Approach. Participants will see real examples of actual couples engaged in SBCT. Participants will engage in in-depth discussions about how to conceptualize cases from this perspective.

At the conclusion of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Discuss the fundamentals of the Diamond Approach of Solution Building Couples Therapy
2. Articulate the underlying principles associated with Diamond Approach
3. Implement SBCT from the Diamond Approach with clients effectively

Modern relationships today take many forms, therapists can be a crucial part of helping clients create them intentionally, with a focus on honesty, transparency and equality. What all these relationship choices have in common is the dilemma of personal and relational integrity. How do couples negotiate commitment, keep their promises, and find their personal sexual freedom at the same time? This workshop looks at contemporary relationships and helps clinicians guide couples to create sustainable and flexible monogamy agreements that contribute positively to relational change. You’ll discover how to:

• Explore new types of monogamy and open relationships and how couples are creating them
• Identify how to help clients co-create their ideal relationship agreements
• Provide nonjudgmental guidance for those who break their agreements, have affairs, or have trouble visualizing their ideal vision of modern monogamy
• Examine your own biases and countertransference around non-traditional relationships

1. Understand open relationships using the three-part definition and how partners are affected in a marriage or committed partnership. 
2. Identify why the current therapy model isn’t working for modern monogamy and why it may even traumatize your clients. 
3. Identify the three phases of treatment for monogamy issues including the crisis, the insight and the vision phase
4. Discover the difference between implicit and explicit monogamy
5. Create a revised formula for treatment plans after monogamy breaches, to include long term sustainable commitment

Couples usually get stuck on the same topics and feel frustrated that they keep running around the same unsatisfying circles. This could be the big three (parenting, sex, and money) or it could be other topics. They come to couples therapy hoping to break out of these ruts—and fearful that they can’t. Often, they expect the therapist will explain to their partner why they need to make most of the changes and why the first partner is right about what they’re asking. This sets up the therapy to be just as stuck. Avoiding this trap requires the therapist to stay away from problem-solving and to instead focus on teaching the necessary skills for the partners to tolerate their differences—to focus more on the process of their disagreements than the content.
Breaking free of these old patterns requires strong leadership by the therapist to help each partner see how they contribute to the dynamic—and how they therefore have the ability to get more of what they want if they approach their partner differently. This begins by creating greater clarity for each partner about what they want and why they want it, beyond the surface level where they get stuck. Then we need to help the partners negotiate more effectively so they can create a sustainable agreement. Finally, we teach the partners how to do the better thing when it’s hard to do which is where the rubber really meets the road. By building better differentiation, the partners learn to not only resolve the current fights, but also to strengthen the relationship overall and enjoy each other more.

1. Identify how couples get and stay stuck on the same old fights
2. Explain to each partner why it’s more helpful to focus on the process of their arguments rather than the content
3. Apply more effective strategies to help each partner shift their half of the dynamic

For decades, many male couples have successfully navigated open relationships. But it’s been done quietly, and the mental health and couples fields have only recently begun addressing models of consensual non-monogamy.
Join Rick Miller, LICSW during this keynote as he discusses his work with male couples who have navigated the terrain of open relationships in the context of couples therapy. He will provide guidelines for success and failure, including his model in which couples incorporate honest communication, and modes for assessing how the model is working and what can shift. 
He will provide videos of a couple who have struggled with honesty and fears, yet found a way to strengthen their joint intimacy by incorporating individual needs.
Attendees are encouraged to step out of their own comfort zones to consider appreciating and supporting a consensual non-monogamy model with couples wishing to explore their options.

1. Attendees will learn about how open relationships can be successfully carried out in a long term relationship while simultaneously deepening intimacy.
2. Attendees will learn how to provide guidelines to couples who are considering opening up their relationship.
3. Attendees will learn to challenge their existing beliefs regarding relationship models as well as how increase their confidence in navigating these discussions in couples therapy.

In relationships, couples often find themselves trapped in unhealthy patterns—emotions, behaviors, and dynamics that feel almost impossible to escape. These recurring negative patterns can be thought of as “bad trances,” unconscious states that influence how partners interact with one another. Just as a trance limits an individual’s ability to break free from automatic thoughts and actions, these relational trances prevent couples from making meaningful changes in their interactions. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to identify and break these negative trances using key insights from hypnosis, allowing couples to build healthier, more conscious connections. No prior hypnosis knowledge is required—this workshop will give you practical, easy-to-implement strategies to help couples reset their dynamics and foster positive change.

This workshop will blend theory and hands-on practice, offering you tools that can immediately improve the therapeutic outcomes for couples dealing with entrenched patterns. Whether you are new to hypnosis or already familiar with its concepts, you’ll leave with a deeper understanding of how to guide couples toward healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

1. Identify three common signs of a “bad trance” in a couple’s relationship.
2. Demonstrate two effective techniques for breaking negative relational trances.
3. Apply a simple hypnosis-based trance technique to shift the dynamics between a couple.

Male couples face challenges of being overly independent, and frequently come to couples therapy due to loneliness and feelings of betrayal based on awkward communication styles. Though each partner yearns for their intimate and emotional needs to be met by the other, many gay men lack these skills due to the secrecy and shame which are typical aspects of gay development. 
He will share a video of a couple who went from experiencing distance and questioning their relationship to achieving intimacy and connection through the couples work they did.
This workshop will define how norms in the gay community encourage avoidance, and how male couples can benefit from learning how to communicate, hear, and nurture each other, enhancing secure functioning. Clinicians will feel confident with existing modalities for treating couples and will be able to adapt these skills to successfully treat male couples.

1. Attendees will list developmental challenges unique to gay men.
2. Attendees will learn how to decrease avoidance and promote intimacy with male couples.
3. Attendees will discuss how to encourage male couples to increase their modes of communication with each other.

EFT is a structured, experiential model of couple therapy, rooted in adult attachment theory, that helps partners move from conflict, distance and distress to increased openness, trust and deeper emotional engagement; from an insecure to a secure and enduring attachment bond.
The effectiveness of EFT is strongly supported by over 30 years of respected outcome research, with success rates of up to 70%, and a growing body of process research that helps identify the most impactful interventions that help create lasting change.
Most therapists see couples and many lack a clear, empirically supported treatment model that increases effectiveness. This introductory presentation provides new and experienced therapists the theory and essential practice elements for working with emotion as used with diverse populations and presenting issues.

1. Introduce participants to the dance of couple disconnection from an attachment perspective.
2. Discuss the 5 basic moves of the EFT Tango, the EFT guide to working in the present process.
3. Equip therapists to utilize the affect assembly to support couples in changing the emotion of their dance of distress.

This keynote session will delve into the complex world of sexual desire, exploring why discrepant desire is such a challenging issue for clients and therapists alike, and providing a comprehensive systemic framework for understanding and addressing it. Attendees will be offered a practical and innovative tool for parsing complex and interconnected factors, providing a deeper understanding that will reshape your approach to one of the most pervasive and complicated relational sex issues.

1. Participants will be able to identify and explain the multifactorial components influencing sexual desire, including sexual, physical, emotional, relational, cultural, and sociopolitical factors
2. Participants will be able to apply the presented rubric/Venn diagram tool to assess and categorize the various factors contributing to desire discrepancy in clinical cases
3. Participants will be able to describe the importance of trauma history, systems of power and privilege, and other contextual elements to both the personal experience of desire, as well as dynamics between partners

Are you finding it challenging to make progress with couples experiencing mismatched libidos? This in-depth workshop will equip you with powerful techniques to simultaneously engage and constructively challenge both the lower and higher desire partners. Learn to explore common inhibiting factors affecting sexual desire, identify and avoid typical therapeutic pitfalls, and learn effective first-session strategies to lay a strong foundation for treatment. Observe video demonstrations of pivotal therapeutic moments and discover methods to establish personalized, meaningful goals for each partner.

1. At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to describe two main features of a self-motivated aspirational goal
2. At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to identify three potentially harmful clinical pitfalls when working with a desire discrepancy
3. At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to describe an approach to warmly challenging a higher desire partner who pressures their partner for sex

In this cutting edge training we will discuss the varieties of affairs and the many ways that relationships can heal from the betrayal that affects intimacy. We will review the stages of recovery that lead to long term healing. Issues around trust, forgiveness, new visions of monogamy, sexuality and connection for the future of the couple’s relationship will be addressed. We will review three phases of treatment and the steps of the recovery process. It is crucial to understand the triangulation that can occur when therapists do not explore their own bias and countertransference and we will look at how to avoid unintentional shaming and client retaliation. We will look at the power of the third in the relationship, including the therapeutic as well as the romantic. This workshop will delve into the meaning of each type of affair and
participants will learn interventions to help repair, restructure and redefine the future and help clients create a new monogamy for a stronger more insightful and connected partnership.
This workshop will move beyond a victim, perpetrator and rescuer model of therapy and will create sustainable monogamy agreements where transparency and authenticity promote resiliency.

1. Understand infidelity using the three-part definition and how partners are affected in a marriage or committed partnership. 
2. Learn the betrayal trauma effects on relationships and how collusion and bias play a part in the secondary gain of the role of the third in infidelity
3. Identify why the current therapy isn’t working and why some systems of recovery from affairs can retraumatize clients. 
4. Identify the three phases of treatment after an affair including the crisis, the insight and the vision phase and how they can improve treatment outcomes
5. Discover the difference between implicit and explicit monogamy and create new monogamy agreements
6. Create a revised formula for treatment plans after infidelity breaches, to include long term sustainable monogamy

RLT (Relational Life Therapy) has three phases. One is waking up the clients (joining through the truth). Two is doing deep trauma work in the presence of the partner. And, three is relationship skill building.
It is a combination of all three of these phases together that produces the quick profound transformational change RLT is known for. This workshop will give therapists a new map to give to their clients—how to think relationally along with the beginnings of a new tool set for example ‘how to speak up for yourself with love’, how to handle a disgruntled partner, and others. I’ll share with you a new vision of how to live relationally and nuts and bolts concrete practices to achieve it.

Participants will be given the tools they need and invited to:

1. Introduce participants to a new vision of equipping our clients to live fully relational lives
2. Equipping therapists to teach ‘relational mindfulness’—from triggered to intentional.
3. Introduce participants to concrete relational skills for example letting go of ‘objective reality’ in favor of negotiating subjective differences.

Couples therapists have more conversations and treatment options than before, including discussions about relationship structures as well as sexuality. Participants will have the opportunity to hear about different approaches to couples therapy and relationship structures and ask any questions they may have.

1. Participants will learn about three different relationship structure modalities and develop skills in treating couples who utilize these structures.
2. Participants will learn a key component of making and keeping agreements that can be strengthened in therapy
3. Participants will define open monogamy and learn critical interventions for flexibility and fluidity in relationship agreements to improve treatment outcomes with couples in conflict

Leading men, women and non-binary people into true intimacy is synonymous with leading them beyond patriarchy. Traditional gender roles were never built for intimacy, but for stability. For example, the traditional term masculinity MEANS invulnerability—the more invulnerable you are the more manly you are and visa versa. Yet, you cannot be intimate and invulnerable at the same time. Leading men into intimacy means nothing less than reconfiguring who they are as men. Traditionally women and partners of men are socialized to over accommodate and resent. More modern women and partners have been taught to speak up with individual empowerment, but rarely with ‘relational empowerment.’ RLT (Relational Life Therapy) teaches people to stand up for themselves and love and cherish their partner in the same breath. “Loving power” also goes beyond the morays of patriarchy, we therapists are intimacy merchants. Our work is at once therapeutic and social activism. This address invites participants to acknowledge this concept and learn to use it skillfully.

Participants will be given the tools they need and invited to:

1. Understand the intimacy people are wishing for now is historically new.
2. Leverage the desire of increased intimacy to move beyond traditional masculinity.
3. Teach dissatisfied partners to stand up for more of what they want in new loving ways.

It’s said that the truth shall set you free, so why do romantic partners lie to each other? Or to their therapist? And how important are the facts anyway in couples therapy?

Actual or perceived dishonesty can wreak havoc on a relationship and can stall therapeutic progress. Most couples therapists don’t want to get bogged down on fact checking, but sometimes the details do matter–perhaps to the other partner, perhaps as revealing about the individual speaking, and perhaps as revealing about the couple’s dynamic.

Outright falsehoods, lies of omission, and even shading the truth can signal conflict avoidance, a lack of differentiation, insufficient empathy, poor self-awareness, out of control behavior, poor emotional regulation in the receiver, and much more. Join our panel to discuss why clients struggle with the truth and how to address it with both partners, from the small lies of convenience to the larger betrayals. Honest conversation is both a vehicle for growth as well as a goal of treatment.

1. Identify the many ways that partners struggle with honesty in their relationship and in therapy
2. Describe the challenges for therapists when dealing with various types of lies
3. Discuss a variety of ways therapists can address perceived or identified dishonesty

Hypnosis is often viewed as a mysterious, external practice, but it is, in fact, deeply woven into the fabric of psychotherapy—particularly in couples therapy. Trance states, which allow individuals to shift perspective, process emotions, and experience deep healing, are integral to many therapeutic approaches, from psychoanalysis to family systems. Whether consciously recognized or not, couples therapists are already utilizing hypnotic tools in their work. This keynote will illuminate how hypnosis plays a vital role in enhancing couples therapy, deepening emotional understanding, and breaking through stuck relational patterns. By becoming more attuned to the hypnotic elements present in therapeutic work, therapists can sharpen their skills and provide even more profound and impactful treatment for their clients.

This session will explore the foundational mechanisms of hypnosis, how they align with the therapeutic process, and how you can intentionally use hypnotic tools to guide couples toward lasting change. Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or new to hypnosis, you’ll leave with a new understanding of how to integrate trance into your couples therapy practice for greater results.

1. Recognize two common trance-like techniques already used in couples therapy.
2. Define hypnosis.
3. Explain the relevance of hypnosis to couples therapy

In couples therapy, it’s not uncommon for therapists to find that one partner may need to explore their personal issues separately to facilitate healing within the relationship. Referrals for individual work can sometimes feel complicated, but when used strategically, they can be a powerful tool for enhancing the couple’s therapy journey. This workshop dives into the art of working with a partner individually while maintaining a focus on their relationship dynamics. We’ll explore the attachment framework to help clients understand their attachment styles, reduce defenses, and build empathy for their partner’s needs. Together, we’ll discuss why and when individual therapy is appropriate, how to ensure it aligns with couples therapy, and how to handle the potential challenges and ethical considerations that come with individual sessions. Whether you’re new to referring or looking to refine your approach, this workshop will provide a roadmap for successfully navigating the individual therapy aspect of couples work.

This workshop will blend case examples, practical strategies, and ethical guidelines, equipping you with the confidence and clarity needed to make informed decisions about referring a partner for individual work.

1. Identify the pros and cons of referring a partner to individual therapy within the context of couples counseling.
2. Name at least two key reasons for referring a partner to work individually on relationship issues.
3. Understand the most critical mistake to avoid when conducting individual sessions with a partner in the context of couples therapy.

Many couples therapists treat individuals with troubled marriages when the spouse will not participate in couples therapy. Often the therapy has started out as individual work and then serious relationship complaints surface. But we lack explicit models for helping these individuals, and it’s all too easy to start colluding with the client against the partner who’s absent from the room—a stance that’s counterproductive to improving the relationship and helping the client learn from its difficulties. The challenge is to maintain a systemic, relational perspective even when we are seeing only one partner. This workshop will provide specific tools and guidelines for helping individual clients in the context of their relationship.

1. Identify challenges in working with individuals when their partner does not participate in couples therapy.
2. Describe common mistakes therapists make with these clients
3. Discuss strategies and techniques for helping clients achieve their personal therapy goals and improve their relationship if that is their goal.

This course will describe key factors in emotional well-being and orienting participants toward opportunities for experiential activities that lead toward a therapeutic goal. A unique perspective will be taken through exploring the impact of social determinants of health and minority stress on relational dynamics, and how to navigate this in therapy. Various theoretical frameworks will be utilized to conceptualize cases and integrate interventions into practice.

1. Participants will be able to describe at least 2 strategic ways of labeling emotional experiences and goals in an experiential way.
2. Participants will be able to explain how social determinants of health and minority stress impact relational dynamics.
3. Participants will be able to list experiential techniques that can access idiosyncratic mechanisms of change with couples and families.

Politically mixed couples face special challenges during a time of political polarization, and even couples who vote similarly may have conflict over how strongly they feel about the current political environment and how to deal with extended family differences over politics. This is new territory for couples therapists, complicated by the fact that many of us have strong political convictions. This presentation will cover sources of today’s polarization, special assessment issue for couples in conflict over politics, and tools for helping them buffer their relationships against these political stressors and engage in constructive coping.  The presenter will also discuss how he has adapted couple therapy principles in designing workshops that bring “reds” and “blues” together through the national nonprofit Braver Angels.

1. Identify the scope and sources of today’s high levels of political polarization.
2. Discuss how political stress can affect couple and family relationships, and ways to assess theses effects.
3. Describe tools for helping couples cope with political differences in ways that buffer their relationships and potentially improve them.

This panel explores the complexities of relational trauma within couples therapy, examining how past attachment wounds, betrayal, and unresolved trauma impact intimate relationships. Experts will discuss therapeutic approaches for identifying trauma-related dynamics, fostering emotional safety, and promoting healing within couples. The session will integrate insights from attachment theory, neurobiology, and evidence-based interventions, offering clinicians practical strategies to navigate trauma-informed therapy with couples.

1. Identify key signs and symptoms of relational trauma in couples, including attachment wounds, emotional dysregulation, and maladaptive coping patterns.
2. Apply trauma-informed therapeutic strategies to help couples establish safety, rebuild trust, and develop healthier relational patterns.
3. Analyze the impact of past individual trauma on present relational dynamics, integrating attachment and neurobiological perspectives into clinical interventions.