The Eroticism of Play: Going beyond the Cliché
Come join renowned sexologists Drs. Emily Nagoski & Lexx Brown-James as they examine how the erotic power of play impacts intimacy and relationship bonding. During this keynote, you'll learn how to use play as a supportive intervention to increase relationship intimacy when it is not specifically explicit. Building upon frameworks from Adrienne Marie Brown's Pleasure Activism and Tricia Hersey's Nap Ministry, Drs. Nagoski and Brown-James present going beyond cliché of play to support providers in removing their own playfulness obstacles to help their clients experience greater levels of pleasure in relationships. Additional training beyond this workshop would be required for independent practice and implementation of these techniques.
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Mapping a Couple’s Vulnerability Cycle: Validation and Challenge in Couple Therapy
In couple therapy, two partners usually come in with very different stories about the problem, and both want to feel seen and understood. But how do you build an alliance with two people who see things differently? In this workshop, Dr. Fishbane and Dr. Solomon will teach an approach that bridges these seemingly incompatible needs by creating a case formulation that integrates Family-of-Origin dynamics, cultural factors, and interpersonal neurobiology. This relational framing will help you hold the tension between support and confrontation. You will learn:
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Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT): Utilizing the DEEP Assessment to Target Couples Distress
IBCT is a widely used evidence-based treatment for couples that was adopted by the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs as its evidence-based treatment for couple distress. The DEEP analysis guides the assessment of couples, feedback to them, and treatment of them in Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT). Learn how to use this easy to implement assessment tool in couples therapy to target the issues couples need addressed. Additional training, supervision, and consultation beyond this single workshop would be required for independent application and implementation of these techniques.
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Couples Intensives: An Effective New Path for Couples Therapy
Couples work can be challenging, and partners often come in wanting fast results. Meanwhile, the traditional 1-hour weekly session has proven to be both frustrating and limiting for many couples and their therapists. The start and stop of weekly sessions leave clients wondering “Are we getting anywhere?” In this presentation, we will introduce you to a model for providing couples intensives that condense months of therapy into several days, and how to add this type of therapy to your practice. Participants will receive several handouts to support this new way of working.
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Couple Therapy for PTSD: The Healing Power of Cognitive-Behavioral Conjoint Therapy
Intimate relationships are inextricably tied to trauma recovery. Cognitive-behavioral conjoint therapy for PTSD (CBCT for PTSD) is a couple-based treatment for PTSD with the simultaneous goals of treating PTSD and enhancing intimate relationship functioning. This presentation will give you an inside look at this evidence-based treatment and the data supporting its effectiveness and discuss future treatment innovations to optimize the role of couple therapy in trauma recovery.
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Tackling Shame in Couples Therapy: Engaging Partners to Create Connection over Disconnection
Shame is a powerful emotion that can keep partners stuck in negative interaction cycles. If left un-addressed, interventions often fail. This session will teach you to identify the downward negative shame spiral many partners get stuck in when participating in couples therapy. Couples therapists will learn how to identify shame in both the more critical and more withdrawn partner. They will also learn different strategies using an integrative approach to addressing shame.
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Treating High Conflict Couples: Using Narrative Therapy Informed Relational Interviewing (NIRI)
The history of couples in conflict has been overly focused on the individual issue that is unresolved: from money to who does the dishes. However, these conflicts are embedded in narratives that are themselves embedded in cultural, economic, and systemic systems. These systems are filled with unspoken expectations, obligations, norms, and responsibilities. Narrative-based approaches involve a deliberate shift away from individualized conflict within a couple and moves toward helping couples see the bigger picture. In this workshop through transcripts and video demonstrations, we will highlight how narrative approaches can unlock deeply held and destructive patterns that couples haven’t been able to unlock themselves.
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Helping Couples Build Their Love Blueprint: Re-shaping Their Experiences and Expressions of Love
In this workshop we will uncover a novel model of love that emerged through decades of research and clinical experience of working with couples across 41 countries. Many couples face disillusionment in their quest for fulfilling love. This session introduces participants to the Emergent Love model as an addition to what we know from the Greek categories of love. It will also delve into the concepts and tools to work with "love blueprint”; “8 common relational configurations” and identifying “six essential ingredients for cultivating enduring love”. It will offer practical strategies to help couples reshape their perceptions, experiences, and expressions of love. Participants will be equipped with transformative insights to empower couples towards deeper connection and fulfillment in their relationships.
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Bridging the Intimacy Gap: Understanding the Need for Intimacy and Autonomy in Partnership
One of the most common complaints for couples seeking therapy is the loss of intimacy – that spark between partners that fuels the relationship. Surprisingly, the lack of feelings of connection often stem from having lost a sense of yourself as an autonomous individual. In fact, one of the number one things people say after a relationship ends is “I felt like I lost myself.” But what if the key to bringing partners closer together is actually the opposite – helping them each find themselves? In this session we’ll explore:
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Self-Led Sexuality through IFS Therapy: A Parts Work Approach for Healing, Intimacy, Pleasure and Connection
There are few issues that trigger our parts more than sex.
And when you work with clients who struggle with sexual issues, they’re often dealing with shame, guilt, confusion, and a lack of understanding about their own experiences.
Plus, the sensitive nature of sexual topics can make it difficult for clients (and let’s face it, many therapists) to open up and explore these issues in therapy at all.
But sex and sexuality are huge parts of your clients’ lives…and you need to be able to address them in their treatment.
Now in this program you’ll learn to use the popular IFS therapy approach to address sexuality in your work…all without needing to be a specialist.
You’ll join Patricia Rich. She’s a Certified IFS Therapist, Approved Consultant and an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and Supervisor whose work has been praised by IFS therapy developer Richard Schwartz.
Intended for those with a basic familiarity with IFS, she’ll invite curiosity about the parts of the client system that play roles in their sexual dilemma, teach techniques to find and befriend these parts, and offer ways to recognize the emergence of the client’s core Self Energy.
She will also guide you, the therapist, toward your own parts so that you can gain the clarity to help your clients to explore sexuality while maintaining appropriate boundaries, staying within your scope of practice and knowing when a referral is necessary.
Whether you work with couples or individuals, you’ll gain tools that can respectfully and gently facilitate access to this inner terrain and open new avenues for sexual growth and healing.
And with IFS therapy it will all feel so much more accessible for both you and your clients. No more struggling or avoiding these crucial conversations altogether.
So don’t wait. Register now!
This product is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with the IFS Institute and does not qualify for IFS Institute credits or certification.
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Exploring Sexuality through the Lens of IFS
Self and Parts in the Internal Sexual System
Your Self Energy is Key: Therapist Parts Related to Sexuality
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The Other AI: The Rise & Influence of Artificial Intimacy
The more our lives are guided by predictive technology, the less we are able to cope with the natural uncertainties of life. And no where is there more uncertainty in our day-to-day lives than in our relationships – meeting new people, developing friendships, and trusting intimate partnerships all require facing ambiguity and uncertainty. Many are choosing to dis-engage to avoid this anxiety and may miss out on the richness that comes from deep and meaningful relationships. In this session, we’ll explore:
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Relational anxiety as a function of technological dependence
How technology is impacting couples’ relationships
How therapists can identify and help with this kind of relational anxiety
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Disarming the Narcissist in Couples Therapy
Is successful couples therapy even possible when one of the partners won’t admit their flaws or reflect on how their behavior impacts the other person?
In this can’t miss session, best-selling author, therapist and narcissist expert, Wendy Behary guides you through the techniques you can use to disarm these clients in couples work and give their partners the tools they need to set limits and draw the line on unacceptable behavior.
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The Cure for Trauma is Intimacy
Our own traumatic reactions are triggered more often in our intimate relationships than any other place in our lives. Yet trauma treatment remains highly individualistic, often seeing recovery as a pre-requisite to intimacy. But what if healing trauma can happen most effectively within relationships?
In this provocative clinical workshop, we’ll unpack the relational nature of trauma recovery, and show that rather than intimacy being merely a result of recovery, it can be the doorway that gets your clients there. In this session you’ll learn about the three-part system of the psyche, how they each operate in relationships, and how clients can learn specific skills to use their relationships as a crucible for recovery.
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The problems with individualization of trauma treatment
How trauma healing can happen in relationship
How to use a client’s relationship to map relational patterns and change them
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When One Partner Has ADHD: A Guide for Couples Therapy
Adults with ADHD are over-represented in therapy offices—and especially over-represented in couples therapy. If the couples therapist does not recognize the impact of ADHD on the couple’s dynamic, they will fall into the same disempowering trap that the partners are stuck in. Fortunately, an informed therapist can apply specific interventions to break the couple out of the under/over-functioner dynamic and promote each partner’s agency to make positive changes. Some of this involves helping the partners actively manage the ADHD in order to reduce its impact on daily life. The rest involves helping the partners do the universal work of negotiating different preferences, but through the lens of how ADHD impacts relationship functioning. Because ADHD can exacerbate common relationship dynamics, knowing how to work with couples with one ADHD partner will make you a better therapist with every couple you see.
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An individual condition. . . with relationship dynamics
Actively Manage ADHD—By Both Partners
Re-balance the relationship
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Couples Therapy Meets Sex Therapy: Toward an Integrated Approach
You can’t help couples really achieve more intimacy without exploring the sexual dimension of their relationship. But generally, clinicians who focus on attachment tend to pay less attention to sexuality, and vice versa. This recording will focus on a dialogue between two clinicians with contrasting approaches as they offer their perspective on effective ways to address the pressures that can reduce sexual fulfillment in contemporary relationships. You’ll explore the increasing prevalence of nontraditional couples who practice kink, polyamory, and open relationships. Discover how to develop a more integrated couples approach by:
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