Innovations in Psychotherapy

For many clients with complex PTSD, life can feel like an exhausting onslaught of negative feelings: worthlessness, hopelessness, anxiety and loneliness. And for the therapists who treat them, it is difficult to instill hope while addressing the trauma-related instability and vulnerability. Fortunately, incorporating Internal Family Systems techniques into treatment has been shown to reduce the aftereffects of relational trauma and early attachment wounds, allowing therapists to help clients chart a path forward. In this workshop, you will apply neuroscientific principles to therapeutic decisions about extreme symptoms while addressing common adaptations to relational trauma, such as abandonment, shame and substance abuse. You will learn to help clients:

• Let go of distorted thoughts and beliefs, release disturbing sensations and free themselves from feelings of insufficient worth, loneliness and lovelessness
• Address the protective parts in a trauma-specific way and obtain permission from these parts to access hidden vulnerabilities
• Use cognitive, body-centered and emotional tools to release pain

This product is not endorsed, sponsored or affiliated with the IFS Institute and does not confer credits or IFS Institute certification.

Objectives

• Differentiate the types of traumatic stress, including those arising from early attachment ruptures.
• Distinguish how IFS differs from traditional phase-oriented treatments for traumatic stress.
• Demonstrate how IFS works with the internal protective parts to access traumatic ruptures.
• Integrate IFS principles with other psychotherapeutic treatment models.
• Assess the common clinical obstacles to recovery from traumatic stress

How can therapists facilitate real change in a more humanistic and client-centered way? This dilemma forms the cornerstone of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which starts from a simple question: how can we help our clients be more open, more aware and actively involved in building a meaningful life? Once we have helped clients answer this question, they can extend those gains to their relationships, their bodies and even to culture at large. Backed by more than 1,400 randomized trials and drawing on therapeutic approaches from around the world, ACT is especially well-suited to helping clients face today's greatest challenges: not only personal issues related to eating, sleep, exercise and physical illness, but also social concerns, such as how to be a better parent, how to deal with prejudice and how to become a kinder person. In this experiential workshop, you will learn all the main aspects of the ACT model. As well as:

• Why the most popular diagnostic frameworks today have serious shortcomings, and a more inclusive approach to diagnosis
• How ACT is applied in practice, through exercises you can do alone or with your clients
• How to give the body a more central role in your interventions
• How to help clients act in line with what matters most to them

Objectives

1. Identify the core psychological flexibility processes of the ACT model and how they interrelate.
2. Demonstrate at least three experiential exercises that focus on different flexibility processes in clinical sessions.
3. Share strategies for integrating psychological flexibility exercises into ongoing therapeutic work.

There are not many clinical problems that destabilize therapists as quickly as infidelity. Whether emotional or sexual, infidelity can feel like the kryptonite of love. How can we effectively help couples caught in the paralyzing aftermath of a romantic betrayal? In this presentation, the Gottmans will present the results of pioneering research, based on the first six-year randomized controlled trial of a treatment for couples affected by infidelity. Therapists will be introduced to an evidence-based protocol, based on Gottman Method Couples Therapy, to support clients through key steps that enable them to successfully overcome the aftermath of an affair and emerge stronger, more connected and more resilient as a couple.

Objectives

1. Identify the traumatic impacts of infidelity on both members of the couple.
2. Apply Gottman Method interventions to help couples rebuild trust and emotional intimacy after betrayal.
3. Apply practical strategies and rituals that foster long-term relational resilience and prevent betrayals from recurring in couples recovering from infidelity.

The difficulty in managing painful emotions is at the core of post-traumatic problems, and without attending to your clients' intense feelings of fear, disgust, anger and helplessness, you will not be able to heal their pain. In this session, Dr. Leanne Campbell will show you an emotionally focused therapy model that offers you a simple and proven 5-step, attachment-based process to create predictable, repeatable and lasting transformation in your clients.

Objectives

1. Describe the key components and goals of the EFIT model.
2. Identify emotional anchor points in order to plan interventions.
3. Apply attachment science to the field of psychotherapy.

Go beyond talk therapies to reach the essence and the true reason clients seek treatment: their distress. The widely researched Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and tapping have the power to rapidly relieve the traumatic residue of emotional dysregulation, including fear, worry, rage, terror, agitation and more. Remarkably, the often-overlooked physical dysregulation that manifests as a racing heart, tightness in the throat, stomach upset, pain, a clenched jaw or other bodily discomforts also disappears with EFT and tapping. With simple tools that clients can use to self-regulate and manage their emotional well-being, tapping is an accessible therapeutic approach that places the power of healing directly in the hands of your own clients. Integrate EFT and tapping into other common trauma treatment modalities to help with resistant problems and memory reconsolidation. Best of all, this hands-on, experiential workshop includes a live demonstration so you can see this technique in action.

Objectives

1. Choose an EFT and tapping intervention to calm the somatic reaction of the overwhelmed body.
2. Assess how EFT and tapping can be helpful in the reconsolidation of traumatic memories.
3. Integrate EFT and tapping to help release difficult thoughts and emotions, as well as the physical discomforts that accompany them.

More than any other obstacle, shame can block the joy and peace that traumatized clients seek in therapy. Feelings of worthlessness prevent them from taking in positive experiences. Instead of seeing their achievements and strengths as accurate reflections of who they are, shame sabotages their progress. Paradoxically, as clients improve with treatment, assert themselves more and reach their goals, these changes can evoke other forms of shame, such as self-doubt and self-judgment. In this workshop, you will explore how to understand and accept the role that shame plays in overcoming traumatic events, undo the negative beliefs rooted in traumatic events that fuel feelings of inferiority and worthlessness, and connect with feelings of shame and move beyond them to make room for more pride and self-love.

Objectives

• Summarize the role of shame and self-contempt as symptoms of trauma. Identify the neurobiological effects of shame.
• Distinguish the physiological and cognitive factors that contribute to chronic shame.
• Describe the survival advantages of shame.

Clients suffer a loss and, suddenly, the rhythm of their lives changes. It is as if they had left home without a map and found themselves in unknown territory. Their bodies activate survival strategies to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by suffering, and their brains create stories to try to make sense of what has happened. Polyvagal theory offers a guide for finding the way. By listening to our autonomic nervous system and honoring its wisdom, we can learn to move through the world differently and adopt a new rhythm.

In this experiential workshop, Deb Dana, an expert trainer in Polyvagal Theory and author, will show how biology influences the experience of loss and the ways to collaborate with the nervous system to move forward. She uses the principles of Polyvagal Theory to analyze loss, explore ways to follow autonomic responses after a loss and learn to harness the power of ventral energy to remember a loss, while creating rhythms that nurture new patterns. Deb will carry out a live demonstration that will show Polyvagal Theory in action by exploring an autonomic story of loss.

Objectives

1. Use the principles of Polyvagal Theory to understand a client's response to loss.
2. Develop a timeline of changes in autonomic patterns after a loss.
3. Select skills to improve access to ventral regulation after a loss.

Despite advances in trauma research and claims about treatments considered "gold standard," there is no single method that works for everyone. Trauma treatment requires addressing many different systems that may be affected in distinct ways in each person. Understanding how to adapt and apply interventions to people suffering from traumatic stress is as important as the interventions themselves. In this workshop, you will learn:

• What we currently know about the effects of trauma on brain development
• How to determine which clinical intervention is best for specific problems
• How we can change people's internal map of predictions and expectations by introducing new experiences with precision, attunement and interactions
• Why the potential role of some unconventional approaches, such as yoga, martial arts and theater, are interesting topics in current research

Objectives

1. Investigate how traumatic stress affects human beings differently at the various stages of development.
2. Describe the research on the impact of traumatic experiences on the perception of the future.
3. Develop a model for selecting individualized trauma interventions based on the client's needs.

Don't miss this closing presentation! Bestselling author, child psychiatrist and award-winning educator Daniel Siegel joins Frank Anderson, author, psychiatrist and therapist, to discuss how to equip children with tools to face the overwhelming challenges they encounter, with skills based on "mindsight" and working with IFS parts.

Social-emotional learning arises from the cultivation of "mindsight" and greater access to the energy of the self: our capacity to perceive the mind, from the inside and the outside, and to move that mental life toward integration while honoring differences and fostering compassionate bonds and connections.

Take home strategies for teaching children to distinguish and value the different aspects of their states of mind, and learn to integrate, adapt and build resilience in the face of life's overwhelming challenges.

Objectives

1. Use a definition of the mind from the framework of Interpersonal Neurobiology to apply the concept of energy regulation to optimal mental functioning.
2. Explain how the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model helps children increase affect tolerance and self-regulation capacities.
3. Assess states of chaos and rigidity that reveal an impediment to integration, which is the foundation of well-being.

The data are clear: most of us will live more than one love story over the course of our lives. We talk a lot about the skills and paradigms that people and couples need to create an intimate relationship. But we don't talk enough about the skills and paradigms that people and couples need to end an intimate relationship. Learning relational meta-skills can help clients face endings — and new beginnings — with greater integrity and relational self-awareness, reducing collateral damage to both themselves and others. In this workshop, discover an integrative approach to help your clients better understand the common thoughts, feelings and problems that arise during a breakup, as well as to integrate the loss and prepare to date others again. You will explore:

• How to teach relational self-awareness as an essential meta-skill for managing and clarifying boundaries, and making sense of the end of a relationship
• How to help clients advocate for their relational needs with their romantic partners
• An integrative approach to help clients move from relational fear and ambivalence to empowerment and clarity

Objectives

1. Identify how to help clients set boundaries and advocate for their relational needs with new romantic partners.
2. Determine with clients the importance of relational self-awareness for creating a satisfying romantic relationship.
3. Identify the most common therapeutic mistakes when working with clients who are ending a relationship or beginning a new one.