VAMFT Conferences

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a short term (8-20 session) structured approach to couple therapy developed in the 1980’s by Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg. The conceptual foundation of EFT is attachment theory with its emphasis on the importance of maintaining a secure emotional bond. EFT interventions are unique in that they integrate the experience of individual emotions with systemic interventions that help couples restructure their interaction patterns. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of EFT. Studies find that 70-75% of couples move from distress to recovery and approximately 90% show significant improvement. Research also demonstrates that the results last at least three years. EFT can be used with varied cultural groups and with both traditional and non-traditional couples, including same sex couples. The workshop will provide an overview of both the theory and practice of this therapeutic approach.

$50 per day for VAMFT members - (you must identify yourself to the VAMFT registrar as a member)

The first day is likely to be helpful for agency staff and the second day for clinicians. You are welcome to attend one or both.

Inova Kellar Center is co-sponsoring this conference.

These workshops provide participants with an opportunity to both complete an ethics training program and learn more about the application of Collaborative Strengths-Based Brief Therapy with Children and Adolescents. The ethics training will provide practical advice concerning how to follow your ethical obligations to clients while conforming to all legal requirements that cover the practice of psychotherapy. The Collaborative Strengths-Based Brief Therapy Approach helps therapists work effectively with children and adolescents who present with oppositional, explosive, self-harming, eating-distressed, school-disruptive and heavy substance-abuse behaviors. Such clients can be a nightmare for even the most seasoned therapists. This “hands-on” practiceoriented workshop will help participants learn how this approach can capitalize on the strengths of clients and family members. A special emphasis in this workshop will be placed on the therapist’s creative use of self and inventiveness.

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Trauma, all too often, is a predictable event that underpins the everyday life experiences of many children and families involved in therapy. Unfortunately, most approaches to trauma today — including EMDR, somatic therapies, hypnosis, and most psychodynamic treatments — focus exclusively on the individual. Ignoring the impact of the trauma on the client's family overlooks powerful dynamics that are crucial to treatment outcome. Participants in this workshop will learn how to involve the trauma sufferer's partner and other family members as resources in the healing process. Participants will learn how to better educate clients about the typical symptoms of trauma, the stages of trauma recovery, how to help family members both soothe and set limits with the traumatized person, and the typical pitfalls families encounter—including the depleting response of "enough already" — as a family member tries to heal from a trauma. Special attention will be devoted to examining the critical intersection that often exists between trauma and the dynamics of socio-cultural oppression.

These workshops provide participants with an opportunity to complete an ethics training program with a family perspective and learn more about the application of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). The IFS Model has evolved over the past twenty years into a comprehensive approach that includes guidelines for working with individuals, couples, and families. This creative Model has integrated systems thinking with the concepts of the mind’s multiplicity. The workshop will review the history and development of IFS, explore the 3 categories of sub-personalities that most often present in therapy, describe the dynamics of this 3-group system, and discuss the qualities of “SELF” and its role as the leader of the intrapsychic system.

Pragmatic/Experimental Therapy for Couples (PET-C) integrates new knowledge about the human brain’s executive functioning with knowledge about the interpersonal skills required to maintain a long-term, intimate relationship. This integration will enable workshop participants to develop techniques that short-circuits clients’ internal states that sabotage the ability to think and act in ways that have proven necessary for long-term relationship success. Beginning with a review of the research literature highlighting those necessary relationship skills, Dr. Atkinson will use lecture, skill-building exercises and videotaped examples of one couple’s therapy to help participants develop the means for enhancing the internal brain states of couples that naturally lead to intimacy and connection. Participants will develop the skills needed to a) increase those specific interpersonal skills that lead to relationship success and b) influence the brain states that foster these skills and inhibit those states that are barriers.

 

This workshop will detail a philosophy and methods of working briefly and effectively with people who have been traumatized. An array of new methods have shown that previous conceptions and methods of working with trauma are unnecessarily long-term and re-traumatizing. Through lecture, videotaped examples and handouts, participants will be equipped with new tools and ideas to work briefly, effectively and respectfully with even severe and long-standing traumas.

Contact hours: 6

Sustaining intimacy in a long-term relationship is a challenge for all of us, therapists and clients alike. While most people want to be in an intimate and sexually satisfying relationship these issues are often not explicitly addressed in couples therapy. The purpose of this workshop is to help therapists identify how and when to address these issues during the course of therapy and to gain a better understanding of how their own life experiences can affect how therapists manage these topics.

Most workshops focus only on what to do to make therapy effective. But we all know that mistakes are common in therapy and particularly in couples' therapy which Jay Haley once said is the most difficult of all therapy to do well. This workshop will have something for both beginning and experienced therapists, each of whom tends to make different mistakes. Since therapists destroy their most self-incriminating tapes, the best examples of bad couples' therapy, comes from films. Several clips will be shown and analyzed, along with gripping real case video of a woman pondering whether to her family or go off with her lover. The workshop will also describe how therapists' values about committment influence work with couples, for better or worse, and how we mess up so frequently (and could do better) with remarried couples.

This highly practical workshop will make your marriage and couples' therapy more effective, whatever your model.