PRECONFERENCE SEMINAR: THE THERAPIST’S USE OF SELF: BEING THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE WITH CHALLENGING COUPLES AND FAMILIES

Limited capacity

     At times in our professional careers, all of us have been faced with clinical situations in which we were intimidated by or experienced therapeutic paralysis in reaction to particular clients’ provocative and perplexing presenting problems and extensive treatment histories, families with multiple symptom-bearing members carrying serious DSM V diagnoses, and couples and families that seem to thrive on one crisis to the next. With these challenging and nightmarish client situations, it can feel like we are trapped in and neutralized by the gravitational pull of a stellar black hole.

     In this hands-on, practice-oriented seminar, several effective ways therapists can tap the full range of their inner resources and creative selves for getting unstuck and being the catalysts for therapeutic change with complex and difficult client practice situations are presented. Participants will come away from this workshop with a plethora of therapeutic tools and strategies, feeling inspired, energized, and more daring and confident working outside of their comfort zones with their most challenging clients.

As a result of attending this webinar, participants will be able to:

  • Clients as the true heroes. Key research findings on what clients’ report therapists do that optimizes for their treatment success
  • Practicing out on the edges: The therapist’s use of-self toolkit
  • Become a reflective practitioner to keep an open mind, maintain therapeutic maneuverability, and increase your accuracy with intervention-client fit
  • Honing your observation and listening skills to seize important client anomalies and ripe moments in sessions to open up space for therapeutic breakthroughs
  • Cultivating your therapeutic inventiveness: Prospecting for ideas outside our field for finding useful metaphors, crafting bold and intriguing questions and therapeutic interventions
  • Identify and utilize your top inner resources, life passions, and strengths to further cultivate and expand your unique therapeutic style and range
  • Monty Python meets Cirque du Soleil: Bringing more humor, playfulness, drama, and an element of surprise to your therapeutic practice
  • Construct, select, and tailor-fit therapeutic experiments and rituals in line with clients’ stages of readiness for change, theories of change, psychological reactance levels, and goals
  • Use idea-generating tools and strategies for tapping the inventiveness and imagination powers of our clients to co-construct creative and high-quality solutions
  • Trouble-shooting guidelines for getting unstuck with complex and stuck client situations

The seminar format will combine didactic presentation, extensive use of videotape examples, and skill-building exercises.

Recently, Matthew Selekman has written a book that addresses these aspects.

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