Most of us are used to helping people stay together through difficult times. Yet, if and when a breakup becomes inevitable, we’ll want to know how to support clients to separate in a way that minimizes damage done and leads to peace and relational well-being moving forward for all involved. Join the woman who inspired the conscious breakup of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, and discover how the 5 steps of Conscious Uncoupling can help those whose hearts and lives are being put through the shredder to find freedom, forgiveness, and hope for a happier future.
Objectives
Apply three emotional regulation techniques to help clients reframe post-breakup distress into opportunities for constructive personal growth
Analyze two self-reflection strategies that enable clients to identify unconscious relational patterns and shift from victimization to accountability
Develop a conflict-minimization framework for post-divorce legal processes and co-parenting arrangements that prioritize mutual respect and child welfare
Outline
Find emotional freedom as they learn to use their big and overwhelming emotions as fuel for unprecedented, positive change;
Let go of victimization as they reflect on themselves as the source of the breakup in a way that fosters potentially life-altering “post traumatic growth”;
Discover the specific ways they’ve been unconsciously generating unhealthy relational patterns, and how they can now grow beyond them;
Dissolve residual anger or hurt in order to begin their next chapter with a clean slate; and
Create wholesome, healthy and cooperative ways to care for the kids, divide their property, and navigate the legal process that will ensure all involved are set up to win moving forward.
Target Audience
We often focus on helping couples navigate conflict, pain, and disconnection in relationships—but what about the moments of goodness? For many, intimacy, kindness, or vulnerability can feel just as threatening, uncomfortable, and something from which to disconnect. This workshop explores the protective functions behind rejecting or sabotaging goodness in relationships, both from the position of receiving it and giving it. Therapists will learn how to help clients build the capacity to receive and give goodness in their romantic relationships, and how to build the tolerance in their nervous systems in order to do so.
Objectives
Outline
Target Audience
In a culture flooded with idealized images of love and connection, many couples struggle to navigate the space between closeness and autonomy without falling into all-or-nothing thinking. This workshop equips therapists with practical tools to help clients establish healthy boundaries rooted in clarity and care, rather than fear or avoidance. Participants will explore how relational anxiety, perfectionistic expectations, and social media pressures can undermine connection—and how to guide clients toward functionality over flawlessness. Grounded in relational science and clinical wisdom, this training supports couples in choosing connection even when conflict or imperfection is present.
Objectives
Differentiate between healthy boundaries and relational cutoffs and describe their distinct impacts on emotional connection.
Identify and challenge all-or-nothing relationship beliefs that contribute to dissatisfaction and anxiety in couples.
Apply at least two clinical strategies to help clients reframe unrealistic relationship expectations, particularly those influenced by social media.
Outline
Boundaries vs. Cutoffs
How to define and model boundaries that preserve emotional connection
All-or-Nothing Thinking in Relationships
Helping clients challenge polarized beliefs about love and worthiness
Tools to address relational anxiety and build tolerance for ambivalence
Functionality Over Perfection
Assessing reciprocity and “good enough” relating
The Social Media Effect on Couples
Deconstructing “relationship envy” and curated perfection online
Strategies to help clients anchor their relationship in reality
Therapeutic Interventions for Building Connection in Imperfect Relationships
Risks and limitations
Target Audience
As therapists, we can’t avoid the impact that digital media, online porn, and evolving tech have on intimacy and trust. For many couples, the use of porn is a secret—one that fuels betrayal, confusion, and shame. But porn isn’t always the problem—sometimes it’s the symptom. In this workshop, we will review a practical three phase integrative relationship therapy framework for helping couples explore their boundaries around technology, redefine monogamy agreements, and reestablish erotic connection. Participants will walk away with tools to work with porn use in a way that invites curiosity, compassion, and connection.
Objectives
Outline
Explore the difference between secret porn use and consensual erotic exploration
Understand how technology impacts erotic integrity and monogamy agreements
Learn integrative relationship therapy phases of intervention and language in each step to help couples talk about porn without shame or blame
Identify when porn use is a problem—and when it’s not
Strategies for integrating porn use into a new monogamy framework using integrative relationship therapy skills
Target Audience
In the ever-evolving landscape of intimate relationships, couples therapists are challenged to move beyond outdated diagnostic lenses and instead engage with contemporary, relationally attuned frameworks. In this dynamic and interactive workshop, Alexandra Solomon and Vienna Pharaon will share cutting-edge models for conceptualizing couples' struggles—grounded in relational self-awareness, family-of-origin patterns, and developmental needs. Participants will learn how to reframe presenting problems in ways that deepen empathy, sharpen clinical focus, and support treatment plans that honor both individual and relational growth. With a focus on integrative thinking and real-world application, this training will expand your toolkit for making sense of complex dynamics in the therapy room.
Objectives
Outline
Rethinking “The Problem”
The Role of Relational Self-Awareness and Emotional Inheritance
From Chaos to Clarity
Risks and limitations
Target Audience
Do escalated couples and families make you want to quit being a therapist? Join us as we explore those moments of greatest difficulty in sessions, from still-face to high reactivity to despair and rage. Shut-down withdrawers and hostile pursuers often bring out the worst in therapists. Our best attempts at creating positive change often lead to more silence or further criticism. Grounded in the neuroscience of human attachment, this training takes the best of proven interventions and applies them to the recurring blocks and triggers that all therapists encounter.
Learn skills to match the affect of partners and help them put words to their inner experience, shifting their focus from blaming their partner(view-of-other) to their own vulnerability(view-of-self). Renew your confidence by getting help in the areas where you lose focus and get lost in reactivity and mis-attunement. Learn multiple strategies to make explicit, expand and work through the blocks and defenses we all experience. Go deeper with George as he breaks down the moment-to-moment decisions that inform the treatment process so you can immediately incorporate powerful, proven techniques into your own work. Through video clips, experiential activities and vibrant dialogue, we will learn how to freshen up, better attune, and refine our skills.
Objectives
Outline
Assumptions of attachment theory with regard to adult relational problems
EFT interventions for high conflict
Common therapeutic impasses
Process model of emotion
Function of protective strategies and negative cycles
Risks and limitations
Target Audience
In this workshop, you’ll learn effective strategies for guiding couples away from social media-inspired armchair diagnoses of their partners and help couples break free from pathologizing language and the overuse of therapy speak. Equip yourself with tools to show clients healthier, more authentic connections—without the jargon. Stop labels from damaging intimacy and start empowering couples to truly understand each other.
Objectives
Outline
A brief overview of how social media has influenced the misuse of therapy speak in relationships and the negative impact it has on couples
A step-by-step method for how to intervene when an inaccurate or weaponized term has been used in session, and also how to assess and address if a clinical term or diagnosis might be relevant for the couple’s work.
How to guide clients in expressing hurt or concerns in a more effective and vulnerable way and support clients in replacing defense mechanisms with healthier coping strategies.
Risks and limitations
Target Audience
Vulnerability is where attachment bonds are tested—and strengthened. Learning to navigate it well is the key to creating lasting change. Helping couples succeed in emotional vulnerability is at the heart of transforming relationships from guarded to deeply connected. Real healing and intimacy take root when partners feel safe to be seen in their rawest emotions. As a therapist, your ability to guide clients through those tender moments can be the turning point in their relationship.
Objectives
Outline
Key attachment dynamics in couples therapy to focus on
Understanding the therapist’s role in fostering emotional safety for each partner
Distinguish between reactivity and authentic emotional vulnerability
Using vulnerable moments to strengthen the relationship
Risks and limitations
Target Audience
This workshop explores your journey as a couple therapist, focusing on both professional developmental “milestones” and the sneaky but powerful ways that working with couples shapes the self of the couple therapist. Participants will examine the paradoxical twin tasks of, on the one hand, amassing experience to hone our abilities (to recognize patterns, to conceptualize cases, and to intervene in ways that are grounded and authoritative), and, on the other hand, maintaining a beginners mindset and capacity for wonder. Additionally, participants will learn how to use their family of origin experiences and relationship history to deepen rather than inhibit the work of building a treatment alliance with partners who are often deeply polarized. Participants will leave this workshop with a deepened sense of their strengths and growing edges as a couple therapist.
Objectives
Outline
The developmental trajectory of a couple therapist including research on core skills and turning points that indicate growth
The paradoxical twin tasks of pattern recognition and beginner mind
The role of creating a community of peers
Inside out: The impact of your personal relationships (FOO and intimate relationships) on your work as a couple therapist
Outside in: The impact that being couple therapist has on your intimate relationships
Risks and Limitations
Target Audience
In recent years, the provocative work of couples therapist Esther Perel has resonated in the popular culture by exploring the dynamics of eroticism in long-term relationships and what the all-too-common experience of infidelity can teach us about the paradoxes of the search for intimate connection in today’s world.
In her new book, The State of Affairs, and her popular podcast, Where Should We Begin? Perel has opened up a wider cultural conversation about our notions of traditional couplehood and the role therapists might play in helping couples explore beyond our one-size-fits-all notions of intimacy and commitment.
Perel will look at the ways our relational lives are undergoing a radical makeover. She’ll discuss the rise of algorithm as matchmaker, the commodification of human beings in the swiping culture, and the pressure to curate enviable lives on social media.
Objectives
Outline
The History of Relationships
Taking the Time to Listen in the Consultation Room
Target Audience
Psychologists, Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, and other Behavioral Health Professionals
Copyright : 03/23/2018When couples come for therapy, partners often arrive in urgent distress, sometimes in the heat of hostility, pain, and hopelessness. And as the therapist, you’re expected to help—fast. How do we avoid being swept up in the chaos? In this workshop, you’ll explore powerful questions and interventions you can use in early sessions to develop a collaborative treatment plan that increases motivation and offers hope, even with the most distressed couples. We’ll discover how to:
Objectives
Outline
Target Audience
In recent years, research has identified key, measurable elements of happy and stable long-term relationships. They include trust, attunement, listening compassionately and nondefensively within conflict, a relational safe haven, and emotional commitment. In this workshop, you’ll acquire tools for approaching couples therapy more effectively. You’ll discover:
*Please note this is the same content as The Magic Trio: What We Know Makes Couples Therapy Work at the 2018 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, you cannot receive self-study credit for this program if you have already attended the live activity.
Objectives
Outline
Target Audience
Psychologists, Physicians, Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, and other Behavioral Health Professionals
Copyright : 03/24/2018