The Craft of Couples Counseling

Course Description:

Some couples come for relationship enhancement, some for help in going through divorce more smoothly, and some because they're stuck somewhere in the middle. To help clinicians help couples get unstuck, this workshop will cover subjects including:

• Getting the picture through the eyes of each partner

• Getting each of them to do so too

• Suspending or dissolving crystallized pessimistic predictor patterns

• Illustrating the mirror of conflict conceptualization to avoid repeating the history of Lott's wife

• Redirecting competitive blaming

• Providing a cognitive framework for mapping the argument at three levels

• Presenting a hierarchy of conflict resolution techniques

• Lowering utopian expectations, for example, so the couple can embrace the reality that some conflicts will not be resolved but can be managed

• Demonstrating the disadvantages of hard-nosed negotiation

• Developing a couple's ability to appreciated and apply a win-win approach to decisions with initial disagreement

• Inspire couples to show less depreciation and more appreciation

Goals and Objectives:

This workshop is designed to help you:

1. Conceptualize couple conflict usefully.

2. Harness this overview to increase mutual understanding and empathy.

3. Identify conflicts which need not be resolved (ever or now).

4. Identify skills to manage abiding conflicts.

5. Analyze and engage the couple's realistic basis for hope.

6. Encourage partners' mutual appreciation and the expression of it through logs of expressed positive thoughts and joint activities wish lists.

7. Support even difficult change efforts by expecting initial "unnaturalness" and praising the efforts.

8. Activate the couple in appropriate application of concepts covered in the course.

Presenters:

Arthur M. Bodin, Ph.D., ABPP

Cost: $125

Hours:  9 am to 12 pm and 1 pm to 4 pm

How to contact us:

Mental Research Institute
555 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA. 94301
USA