Margaret Blaustein

Treating complex childhood trauma: Targeting the building blocks of resilience
August 9-13, 2010

As many as one in four youth will experience a potentially traumatic exposure, and many of these will be multiple or prolonged. Far too many chronic stressors impact youth and families, including familial and community violence; sexual abuse; poverty and homelessness; targeting and discrimination due to ethnocultural or other group status; parental substance abuse and mental health issues; neglect; attachment disruptions and losses; and multiple placements. The impact of these and other stressors is far-reaching, and often repeats across generations as yesterday's impacted children become tomorrow's parents and caregivers. Establishing effective practice for this population is a priority, but is challenging, given their diverse histories, their varied presentations, the multifaceted contextual, cultural, and developmental influences which shape them, and the wide range of systems within which they seek care.

The Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Competency (ARC) framework is a core-components treatment model, developed to provide a guiding framework for thoughtful clinical intervention with complexly traumatized youth and their caregiving systems. Drawing from the fields of trauma, attachment, and child development, the framework recognizes the importance of working with the child-in-context, of acknowledging the role of historical experiences and adaptive responses in current presentation, and of intervening with the surrounding environment - whether primary caregivers or treatment system - to support and facilitate the child's healthy growth and development. Rather than identify step-by-step intervention strategies, the framework identifies 10 key "building blocks", or intervention targets, key skills/goals within each domain, developmental and cultural considerations, and potential applications across settings.

In this course, we will examine the theoretical foundations underpinning this framework; build skills and knowledge in each identified treatment domain; and discuss case applications and considerations across contexts. This course will include didactic lecture, large- and small-group discussion, examination of taped sessions, and experiential activities.

Ann Weiser Cornell

Inner Relationship Focusing Training for Healing Professionals
July 5-9, 2010

Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF) is a proven method for emotional healing and accessing life-forward energy, based on the Focusing work of Eugene Gendlin. It is a body-based self-awareness process that shifts one's relationship with problems, issues, life situations. Therapists and coaches can add IRF methods to the work they already do, and their clients can experience desired change in a context of safety and empowerment.

The essence of Inner Relationship Focusing is trust in each person's inner process of knowing, growth, and life-forward direction. You learn be Self-in-Presence, your natural state of calm interest and curiosity, and to find and consult a bodily "felt sense" that is more intricate and more reliable than emotions. The result: balance, wise choices, clear action, compassion for others and one's self. You can bring your gifts and your passion into the world.

Helping your clients find Focusing starts with you, with your own ability to connect with that deep place of inner knowing, and your own ability to be Self-in-Presence. When you are able to be present with your clients in Presence and in touch with your bodily felt sense, both of you can contact the here-and-now implicit dimension of change. You can more easily build rapport with your clients, increasing safety and connection. And you can bring in any other method you know in an integrated way.

This experiential workshop includes presentation, demonstration, and paired practice each day. Participants will learn and practice the IR Focusing process with each other, and come away with a solid ability to accompany felt senses.

Janina Fisher

Healing Broken Bonds: Traumatic Attachment and Affect Dysregulation
August 16-20, 2010

In the context of trauma, attachment failure is inevitable and inescapable, leaving behind a lasting imprint on all future relationships, including the therapeutic one. Instead of experiencing therapy and the therapist as a haven of safety, the traumatized client will be driven by powerful wishes and fears of relationship and vulnerable to affect dysregulation and recurrent crises.

In order to address the trauma, therapists increasingly find that they must first turn its effects on the client's attachment patterns. Until the client's disorganized attachment, traumatic transference, and disturbances in the capacity to self-regulate and self-soothe are addressed, the therapy either becomes stagnant or unstable. In this workshop, we will address the impact of traumatic and sub-optimal attachment experiences on affect regulation, exploring how to understand the effects of traumatic attachment from a psychobiological perspective and how to work with both the somatic and relational legacy of attachment.

Using interventions drawn from the neuroscience and attachment research and from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-centered talking therapy tailored to the treatment of attachment and trauma, this presentation will explore a neurobiologically-informed understanding of the impact of trauma on attachment behavior. Using lecture, video, and experiential exercises, participants will learn somatic interventions for challenging trauma-related relational patterns and discover how to become "neurobiological regulators" of the client's dysregulated emotional and autonomic states.

Participants will learn:

• to identify trauma-related attachment patterns
• to describe disorganized attachment behavior and its effects on affect regulation
• to describe the theory and practice of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• to be able to utilize Sensorimotor Psychotherapy techniques to address attachment and trauma-related issues in psychotherapy
• to describe somatic interventions to address preoccupied, avoidant, and disorganized/unresolved attachment styles
• to employ interactive neurobiological regulation to address affect dysregulation

Harville Hendrix

IMAGO: A Theory and Therapy of Couplehood
July 19-23, 2010

If you dread your next appointment with a couple, avoid doing couples therapy altogether but would like to, or love couples and want to do it better, this course is for you. Taught by Harville Hendrix, Ph D., co-founder of Imago Relationship Therapy, makes it a rare opportunity to study with one of the masters of marital therapy and learn a theory and methodology that will help you love working with couples. Not only will you discover a radical new theory of couplehood, you will be immersed in watching demonstrations of the dialogue process and getting some coaching as you practice this transformational process.

Imago Relationship Therapy, a theory and therapy of couplehood, integrates, synthesizes, and extends the insights of the major Western psychological systems, behavioral science, and spiritual disciplines into a uniquely comprehensive and systematic system of love relationships. Imago Therapy translates the theory into practice.

The "Imago" is a composite image in the unconscious of the significant character traits and behaviors of childhood primary caretakers. Our unconscious pairs us with an "Imago match"-an individual who is like our caretakers in significant ways-to recreate our childhood psychological dynamics in an attempt to heal the central wounds we carry. Imago Relationship Therapy uses this context to transform relationships into a therapeutic encounter for each partner's psychological and spiritual self-completion.

This skill-building, week-long seminar will give you the means of getting to the heart of most couples' most profound power struggle - their failure to get each other to meet leftover developmental needs from childhood. Instead, each partner tries to coerce the other to match the distorted inner image of their early caretakers (called the Imago) through blame, shame and criticism. Through Imago Relationship Therapy you'll learn a way of offering couples another option - to create a conscious and committed relationship in which they increase their capacity to offer acceptance and compassion to both themselves and their partner.

The workshop is open to all mental health professionals. It is credited by the Imago International Institute toward certification for anyone who wishes to continue his or her training to become a certified Imago Therapist.

Francine Lapides

Keeping the Brain in Mind: How knowing more about the brain can help you become a better therapist
July 26-30, 2010

We are bombarded daily by unrelenting stress. Our nervous systems struggle to keep up, and unless we were securely "wired up" from infancy, our mind/brain/body systems dysregulate too easily. This inability to emotionally regulate manifests itself in the symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, somatic illnesses, loneliness and conflict that our clients bring to us. That same emotional arousal feeds our runaway addiction to substances, food, sex, work, rage, electronic devices and the compulsion for constant activity.

This symposium will review the emerging research in neuroscience, with approaches derived from the latest formulations and work of Allan Schore, Dan Siegel, Daniel Stern, Antonio Demasio, Joseph LeDoux, Stephen Porges, Bessel van der Kolk, Pat Ogden, Louis Cozolino, Stan Tatkin and others, that point to the need for healing in the circuitry of the right hemisphere, dominant for intuition, empathy, intense emotionality, a coherent sense of "self", deep attachments and the knowledge of how "to be" in intimate relationship.

We begin with a brief explanation of the neural anatomy necessary to understand this model, review the relevant aspects from the attachment literature, and then turn to individual psychotherapy and the importance of the right hemispheric healing that goes on beneath the words and the particular theoretical clinical approach we espouse. We will then briefly explore our work with our clients' relationships, building an understanding of the dominance of the emotional limbic brain, the subcortical structures that can override rationality and thus require that we, as therapists, do more than teach "good communication skills."

The course ends with an exploration of empathy and love as the main tools of deep relational work, and an empowering explanation of how we act in our offices, as "neural architects," reshaping and remolding our client's brains, and engaging so deeply that the work profoundly reshapes our brains as well.

Experiential exercises are employed to engage those same right hemispheric subcortical structures in the participants and give more than an intellectual grasp of the material. Participants will be guided in a "Mindfulness" exercise illustrating changes in the left and right hemispheres during the experience. The 'Still Face' experiments of Ed Tronick at Harvard will be briefly replicated, to provide a subjective experience of the sudden loss of interpersonal connectivity that tethers us to one another and to our own intrapersonal sense of "Self". Rich clinical vignettes and case material will also be discussed and the seminar is accompanied with dozens of colored illustrations and photographs.

In this course you will:

• Learn about the origins of psychopathology as trauma to the early developing nervous system, especially in the right hemisphere, resulting in an inability to regulate affect and arousal.
• Acquire a grasp of the neurology underlying intense and dysregulated states, including mood disorders, anxiety, addiction, trauma, and dissociative disorders.
• Acquire an appreciation for how we, as psychotherapists, function as "neuro-architects," reshaping both the function and neural structure of our client's brains.
• Expand your capacity to teach affect regulation skills to clients and/or their families.
• Read the neurological literature with increased familiarity with physiology, terminology, and prevailing assumptions and beliefs.

Barry Magid

Sitting Still: With Oneself and Others
August 16-20, 2010

Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism are each disciplines of attention. Each asks us to stay still with feelings, thoughts and reactions that we ordinarily reflexively avoid or move away from.

In analysis, the relationship with the analyst evokes our hitherto warded off feelings of hope and dread, and simultaneously serves as the container for them as they arise. In Zen, the physical act of zazen ("sitting Zen") - is the primary container within which we stay still with our mind-body as it is. Both disciplines can be seen as engines of personal transformation that function, paradoxically, by leaving everything just as it is.

This workshop will offer extended periods of zazen along with theoretical and clinical discussion. The talks will combine material from both the Zen and the psychoanalytic tradition - from Zen, "public cases" or koans - will be offered as models of what it means to be just this moment. From the analytic side, we will investigate concepts of self and no-self; relational and self psychological models of multiple selves vs. the cohesive self and how these relate to the Buddhist concepts of impermanence and emptiness. We will ask how the lessons of Buddhist practice can be used to critique psychoanalytic theory and conversely, how our psychoanalytic understanding can illuminate blind spots in the way Buddhism has worked with emotion, and how to understand the repeated cases of sexual misconduct that have plagued contemporary Western Buddhism.

George McCloskey

Assessment and Intervention for Child and Adolescent Executive Function Difficulties
June 28-July 2, 2010

This presentation will provide a comprehensive perspective on definition, assessment and interventions for child and adolescent executive function difficulties. Among the topics covered will be: (1) a functional, multidimensional definition in the form of a comprehensive model of executive functions; (2) how executive function use varies based on domains of functioning (perception, emotion, thought and action); (3) how executive functions vary based on arena of involvement (intrapersonal, interpersonal, environment, symbol system); (4) the various roles of executive functions in classroom learning and production and everyday behavior; (5) the relationship of executive functions to childhood psychopathology and clinical diagnostic categories; (6) a multidimensional framework for assessing the executive function capacities of children and adolescents; (7) student and teacher classroom observation methods for improving academic production and classroom management; (8) a model for conducting functional behavior assessments and developing behavior support plans that are based on current knowledge of executive functions and cognition and their mediating effects on the connection between antecedents and behaviors; the EF-driven FBA model helps to frame the problem and the intervention in non-punitive, goal-oriented statements that can be monitored for effectiveness of outcomes; (9) intervention strategies that vary based on a continuum from degree of external control to degree of internal self-regulation; 10) the planning, implementation, and outcome assessment of school-, clinic-, and home-based interventions designed to deal with child and adolescent executive function difficulties.

Case studies of children and adolescents demonstrating executive function difficulties will be discussed throughout the presentation.

Joseph Sestito

Brief Cognitive and Eriksonian Solutions for Children and Adolescents
August 2-6, 2010

This course is about how to use cognitive-behavioral therapy combined with Ericksonian methods to rapidly bring about positive changes in child and adolescent clients. Participants will, at the same time, be shown how to use these approaches to promote their own healing and renewal.

First, you will learn about doing a brief assessment at the beginning and end of each session and how to pinpoint the specific Activating Event about which the child or adolescent - or the therapist! - is upsetting themselves. You will also learn how to pinpoint the specific dysfunctional emotions related to the Activating Event, how to uncover the dysfunctional beliefs that are leading to these emotions and how to help children replace these irrational beliefs with self-helping, rational ones.

Participants will be shown basic trance induction methods, so they can utilize the powerful Rational Response Interpersonal Technique, which enables the child to go away with their new, rational beliefs as a gut level experiential reality - not just an intellectual understanding. You will see, in action - through practice and live demonstrations - the way in which this combined approach is much more robust and lively than CBT used by itself. Beyond this, you will see how non-hypnotic Ericksonian ideas can be used even within the context of the entire CBT process to enhance its effectiveness. For instance, "seeding" an idea or intervention earlier in therapy will greatly increase the child's receptiveness to it later. Participants will gain an arsenal of therapeutic tools to bring back to the office, a refreshed understanding of themselves and their work with young people, and a powerful, innovative, and integrative model.

Salman Akhtar

Five Clinical Challenges
August 10-14, 2009

Like all other emotionally charged dialogues, the work of psychotherapy hardly proceeds without awkward, puzzling, and tormented periods. Indeed, these "crises" are so ubiquitious that the quintessentially American psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan quipped that one ought to be "beware of a smoothly going treatment". While true in general, this perspective does not permit overlooking that some situations and developments during the course of treatment post a greater challenge for the therapist than others. Five such areas are 1) establishment and maintenance of boundaries, 2) negotiating money-related resistances and enactments, 3) working with culturally different and bilingual patients, 4) resolving stalemates, impasses and disruptions, and 5) understanding and managing suicidal crises. These scenarios, along with their psychodynamic roots, phenomenological pictures and technical handling constitute the essence of this course.

Ira Chaleff

Transforming Hierarchical Relationships into Productive Partnerships
August 24-28, 2009

Most organizations are hierarchical in nature. Even small organizations develop hierarchical cultures. In large organizations - public corporations, hospitals, government agencies, even many churches - hierarchy is a strong feature of the culture. Hierarchy itself is not necessarily a problem, but it often distorts the relationships between those in formal "leader" and "follower" roles. Candor is the first victim. Learning is the second, as without candor in conversation, learning is limited.

No manager walks into work every day intent on frustrating the people that work for him or her. Yet many do. How does this occur? Why can't adults work through these issues with each other? Why, instead, do many formal "leaders" fail or "followers" leave for more conducive work environments? How do major scandals occur such as those that have plagued our corporations, government agencies, churches, and now investment banks? How do those around leaders open up the channels of communication so leaders operate on real, not rose colored data? How do we create partnerships when power differentials seem built into the hierarchy, as for example in the doctor-nurse relationship?

For the last fifteen years I have explored the leader-follower dynamic from the follower end of the telescope. When you are not THE leader, how can you help the leader use power wisely and not squander or abuse it? Courage is needed. But also skill and tact. This workshop will examine what is involved in creating true partnership. We'll work three ends of this telescope - you as a follower, a leader, and a coach to leaders and followers.

James Gordon

Using Mind-Body Medicine to Move Through and Beyond Anxiety, Depression and Chronic Illness
August 3-7, 2009

Most people who come into a therapist's office are, in one way or another, "stuck." In fact, it's a word they often use to describe themselves. They keep repeating the same self-limiting, self-defeating stories to themselves, respond to stress in ways that inhibit their capacity for psychological growth and change, and perpetuate disease-producing physiological patterns. This is true for people diagnosed with depression and anxiety and PTSD, as well as those with such chronic conditions as pain, hypertension and diabetes.

Very often, the clinician's first challenge is to help clients and patients to wake up to these self-perpetuating, self -defeating patterns. The work that follows requires showing these stymied, struggling people ways to move through and beyond these impasses.

In this workshop, you'll learn and experience a wide range of mind-body techniques that are designed to help people get unstuck and move ahead with their lives - including several kinds of meditation, guided imagery, movement and dance, and nutrition as well as work with drawings and dialogue. You'll learn too how to integrate this model into your life and your practice. You'll leave with a new perspective on yourself and the people you work with-not primarily as sufferers from a disease or disorder, but as seekers of physical, mental, and spiritual balance, fellow travelers on a journey to health and wholeness.

Robert Hill

Positive Aging: A 21^st Century Approach for Transforming the Challenges of Old Age
July 13-17, 2009

As the science of longevity succeeds in helping us live longer, our older clients require therapeutic knowledge and techniques not offered in most training centers. In this workshop, we'll explore a therapeutic approach called "Positive Aging" which helps older clients anywhere along the health continuum draw upon their inherent capacities for happiness.

In this workshop, you'll learn an assessment approach for identifying clients' skills for coping with different aspects of the aging process. This workshop will provide a context for learning transformative strategies that you can teach to your older clientele to help them reframe problems into opportunities for better living. Regardless of how healthy you were when you were younger, the longer you live the more likely you will need to contend with the vicissitudes of aging including physical and cognitive impairment, age-related disability, and loss. Positive Aging was specifically designed as an approach to address issues experienced by all older persons. It is not simply a self-enhancement approach for the healthy, but a powerful set of skills that anyone can employ to find meaning and contentment in later life even in the presence of substantial challenge.

Dan Hughes

An Attachment-Focused Treatment for Children and Youth with Complex Trauma
August 3-7, 2009

When children and youth experience repetitive, intrafamilial trauma due to exposure to abuse, neglect and losses, the areas of impairment that they manifest are much more pervasive than those which characterize PTSD. These "domains of impairment" involve attachment, biological states, affect regulation, dissociation, behavioral control, cognitive functioning and self-concept. (SeePsychiatric Annals, May, 2005) As a result, successful treatment for such complex trauma must also be comprehensive enough to facilitate the developmental momentum necessary to begin the process of reducing these areas of impairment. Such treatment needs to offer interventions that provide safety, self-regulation, self-reflection, traumatic experiences integration, relational engagement, and positive affect enhancement. (National Child Traumatic Stress Network Workgroup on Complex Trauma,Psychiatric Annals, May, 2005) These six treatment goals are highly congruent with the developmental factors which are facilitated by attachment security. As a result, principles congruent with attachment security might well serve as a guide for the interventions that are likely to be the most successful.

Children and youth exposed to complex trauma are at risk to manifest a form of functioning that is consistent with features of attachment disorganization. Such individuals are at risk for many forms of psychopathology as they enter adulthood. In contrast, attachment security is a protective factor against psychopathology. As a result, an overall, organizing, treatment goal would be to facilitate a child or youth's readiness, ability, and opportunity to develop attachment security with a caregiver, or if that is impossible, with the therapist herself.

Attachment-focused treatment provides the child with an attachment-figure who is available, sensitive, responsive, and who provides interactive relational repair. This adult also manifests a coherent state of mind with respect to attachment. Therapeutic interactions involve characteristics of intersubjectivity, namely affect attunement, joint attention and awareness, and congruent intentions. Contingent, nonverbal, affect-laden communications predominant in the ongoing dialogue that is both affective and reflective (A/R Dialogue). When the child or youth has a suitable caregiver, the therapist includes that person in the treatment in order to facilitate attachment security within that relationship. The therapist also provides recommendations to the caregiver regarding the child's day to day care that are congruent with the attachment principles described. If there is no suitable caregiver, the therapist provides individual treatment and serves as an attachment figure herself.

Videotapes of treatment sessions and role plays will be incorporated into each session.

Bob Marshak

Covert Processes: Exploring the Hidden Barriers to Organizational Change
August 17-21, 2009

Most organizational change efforts focus almost exclusively on "making the case for change." The case for change is invariably a well documented, logical analysis of the compelling reasons why the organization and the people in it must change. Especially for executives, making the case for change tends to be the most central dimension of any change initiative. However, although always necessary, the case for change is rarely sufficient to actually achieve intended outcomes. Instead, there are also "non-rational" dimensions that involve hidden or covert barriers that play a critical role in all change efforts. Unless attended to they become covert traps and surprises that will block or detour intended outcomes.

In this workshop we will explore five hidden dimensions that impact organizational change, including: organizational politics, inspirations, emotions, mindsets, and psychodynamics. All of these hidden processes limit choice, block creativity, and trap individuals, groups and organizations in repetitive and often self-defeating behavior patterns. The workshop will bring together the spoken and the unspoken, the literal and the symbolic, and the conscious and the unconscious in order to help participants learn how to hear what is not said, see what is not present, and feel what is not expressed. The workshop will include presentations, application exercises, small group experiences, and self-reflection.

Esther Perel

Mating in Captivity: The Paradox of Intimacy and Sexuality
July 27-31, 2009

Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Can we want what we already have? Why does the transition to parenthood so often spell erotic disaster? Why does good intimacy not guarantee great sex? This bold, new take on intimacy and sex grapples with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. The story of intimacy and sexuality in committed modern couples is one that often tells of a dwindling desire and includes a long list of alibis, claiming to explain the inescapable weakening of erotic connection. The absence of fantasy, the proliferation of pornography and affairs, the overwhelming expectations placed on adult intimacies as well as a lack of understanding of the nature of erotic desire all contribute to this predicament. Contrary to popular belief, sexual problems are not always the result of relational problems, and improving the emotional relationship may do little to improve the sex. In fact, sometimes the very qualities that nurture intimacy can be sexually deflating. Modern couplehood strives for oneness, yet eroticism thrives in the space between self and the other.

Drawing on the work of Steven Mitchell, we'll contrast two fundamental, yet opposing human needs of safety and predictability on the one hand, and of freedom and adventure on the other.

• Probe the ambiguities of love and desire, the paradoxical relation between domesticity and sexual desire, and explore ways to balance our need for security and closeness, with our quest for separateness and passion.
• Learn how emotional history shapes our erotic blueprints and expresses itself in our sexual fantasies and in the physicality of sex.
• Present a nuanced, relative and multicultural understanding of the differing definitions of love, marriage, and sexual behaviors, and highlight the relation between culture and sexuality.
• Present an original approach to treat the decline of desire during parenthood and show how to grant the body its profound capacities for emotional expressiveness reaching beyond intimacy as mere verbal communication.
• Explore the differences between sexuality and eroticism, show how erotic intelligence is vastly larger, richer and more intricate than the biology of sex and how it stretches far beyond any repertoire of sexual techniques.
• Map the gender similarities and differences and develop the concept of multiple sexualities.
• Discuss the motivations behind affairs, the multiple meanings of infidelity, the choices of truth telling, transparency, and boundaries, and offer a framework to rethink infidelity.
• Plumb the inner workings of the erotic mind and recognize the depth, complexity and healing qualities of our erotic imagination.
• Introduce innovative strategies to unlock erotic blocks and cultivate eroticism between partners, take emotional risks and open up a sexual communication between them.

With an eye on the existential, clinical and ethical aspects involved we will examine how our assumptions, moral values, and personal experiences influence our therapeutic work. This model applies to couples and singles from all sexual orientations. We'll include lectures, exercises, video vignettes and small group discussions.

Marjorie Schuman

Contemplative Relational Psychotherapy
August 24 - 28

Contemplative Relational Psychotherapy (CRP) is a psychodynamic treatment model which is informed by both psychoanalytic and Buddhist views of the mind. It weaves together the relational theory of contemporary psychoanalysis with the insights available in Buddhist mindfulness meditation. Together, these perspectives cultivate greater awareness of the dynamic unfolding drama of life and allow the potential meanings which are implicit in suffering to unfold in the therapeutic process.

Relational psychotherapy is based on the premise that the psyche is by nature organized for and in relationship. The history of our attachments, separations, and losses are embedded in the structure of the mind and brain and determine our current lived experience. The cornerstone of CRP is deep, interactive inquiry into the unique relational experience of the client, explored in the here and now of psychotherapy and understood in the context of developmental events.

The contemplative dimension of CRP is rooted in the notion that, given the right conditions, the basic nature of mind is to seek its own unifying clarity and compassion. In CRP, the therapist's meditative, empathic, holding, and containing functions provide these conditions intersubjectively. The interactive dialogue and shared space of the psychotherapeutic relationship facilitate the client's capacity to respond skillfully to life circumstances which are always uncertain, constantly changing, and often beyond our control. Because CRP is fundamentally interpersonal in nature, its effectiveness is enhanced by the depth of the therapist's own contemplative experience and personal insight.

This course is didactic, experiential, and interactive. A variety of meditative processes and dyadic exercises will be used to help participants learn to bring contemplative awareness into the relational encounter of psychotherapy. Although the focus in CRP is on psychodynamic treatment, the contemplative relational framework will be of value to clinicians who work in other therapeutic modalities. No prior experience with Buddhist meditation is necessary.

Jette Simon

Imago Relationship Therapy: A Path to Conscious Couplehood
July 13-17, 2009

For many therapists, keeping balance and focus in work with couples is one of the great challenges of practice. Even extensive training as an individual therapist typically does not help most therapists avoid the common missteps in couples work, such as being drawn into taking sides or being overwhelmed by the intense emotionality of relationship conflict. Imago Relationship Therapy offers not only a comprehensive theoretical framework guiding each step of effective couples treatment but also a set of powerful therapeutic skills that can help couples forge a healing, transformative connection with each other.

This skill-building, week-long seminar will give you the means of getting to the heart of most couples' most profound power struggle - their failure to get each other to meet leftover developmental needs from childhood. Instead, each partner tries to coerce the other to match the distorted inner image of their early caretakers (called the Imago) through blame, shame and criticism. Through Imago Relationship Therapy you'll learn a way of offering couples another option - to create a conscious and committed relationship in which they increase their capacity to offer acceptance and compassion to both themselves and their partner.

To achieve these goals you will learn the Imago Intentional Dialogue, a powerful clinical tool for facilitating the core healing experience of the Imago approach: mirroring, empathy and validation. At the end of the week you will also take away a solid appreciation of how to create a safe space for couples and the tools required to help them to both tolerate and learn from their differences. We'll also explore how the insights from interpersonal neurobiology and mindfulness practice can create new possibilities in troubled relationships.

This seminar, which will offer a safe learning environment filled with experiential opportunities, specifically is designed to deepen your personal awareness as you expand your theoretical framework and acquire cutting-edge clinical tools.

Note: This training will be accepted as the equivalent of the first two days of the Imago Clinical Training Program for those who wish to go on to become Certified Imago Therapists.

Polly Young-Eisendrath

The Wisdom of Emptiness: Psychological Applications of Buddhism
August 17-21, 2009

Buddhist principles recognize how self-focus creates tremendous suffering. And yet, Americans have overdosed on the self and problems show up in our restlessness, our poor self-esteem, our parenting, and our organizations. This workshop will offer both didactic and experiential opportunities to engage in the transformative dialogue between psychology - especially Jungian and psychoanalytically-informed practices and Buddhist methods and teachings. Such a dialogue provides a new appreciation for the particular imprint of our individuality and the enduring centrality of our interdependence. The teachings of the Buddha can be a practical resource. They provide a fresh wisdom for knowing ourselves in "the between" rather than "the within." Participants in this workshop will have an opportunity to make a radical shift away from self-focus to a view from the no-self in relation to psychotherapy, creativity, leadership and parenting.

There will be daily mindfulness practice, time for discussion and questions from your own experience, as well as plenty of fun.

Salman Akhtar

A Family of Shadows: Mothers, Fathers, Siblings, Grandparents, and Others in the Internal World
August 11-15, 2008

While the newborn infant is not a neuropsychological tabula-rasa, it is his relationship with the early caretakers which evokes potentials that contribute to the 'basic core' of his latter adult character. Before arriving to that relatively well-structured state, however, a large number of interactions with caretakers (and others in the interpersonal surround) have to be internalized and amalgamated into a harmonious gestalt. It is in this context that the role of mother and father acquires a profound significance. Contact with their bodies, fantasies about their bodies, real and imagined relations with them as individuals and as a couple (and defenses against all this) contribute to the evolving psychic structure. Patterns of attachment, degrees of separation, and scenarios of oedipal situations all come into play here. Siblings, grandparents, other relatives, and even caretakers, neighbors, clergy, and schoolteachers also impact upon personality development. At the same time, the internalization of these roles and interactions must pass through the crucible of constitution, drives, and culture. Layering of such internal objects and secondary revisions affect their representation in the adult mind as much as retrospective fantasies and distortions of memory do. Such considerations will form the focus of this course with illustrations from day-to-day life, movies, poetry, and fiction as well as from clinical experience with patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Thomas Bien

Mindful Therapy: The Art of True Presence and Deep Listening
July 28-August 1, 2008

We cannot be deeply present without nurturing ourselves. Whether we are present as therapists, colleagues, managers, or friends, listening to others requires being present to ourselves. In addition to providing new insights into the work of psychotherapists and others who seek to listen deeply, an important goal of this workshop is to provide a space for healing and transformation. This workshop approaches mindfulness as not only a set of techniques, but more importantly as a way to be more deeply present. While psychotherapists are the primary audience, others who seek to listen deeply, professionally or personally, will also find a lot of help here.

While mindfulness has become a topic of great interest among psychotherapists, work to date has focused on teaching mindfulness techniques to clients. Such approaches can be helpful, but the most useful aspect of mindfulness may lay elsewhere-- namely, in helping the therapist become more deeply open and present. Metaanalysis suggests that factors such as the therapeutic relationship are more important than the therapist's specific clinical techniques, despite the attachment therapists have toward these. In an age of distraction, however, it is increasingly difficult to be deeply present to anything. Our administrative load can even create a figure-ground shift: peripheral matters come to feel central, while the people feel like the distraction. And since none of us lives in a protective bubble, we must do our best through the difficulties manifesting in our own lives as well. For all these reasons, it is not easy to simply shift gears and suddenly become deeply available to another person. While our capacity to listen deeply is often somehow assumed, in reality, with so much to do, we cannot take it for granted that we are as present as we would like.

Mindfulness can be usefully abstracted from its Buddhist roots, yet there is also much to be gained by understanding the soil out of which mindfulness has grown. Buddhism itself, here taken as a kind of wise, ancient psychology, can deeply enrich our understanding and practice of mindfulness, and suggest many direct applications with clients as well. This course explores such foundational Buddhist insights as the Four Noble Truths, The Dharma Seals, the Brahmaviharas, and the Three Poisons in light of their clinical insight and utility.

Periods of practice will follow periods of instruction. Exercises begin with mindful breathing, sensory awareness, and guided meditations, and build from there to direct practice of mindful listening. Participants should come prepared with a notebook and pen for written exercises.

Deborah Korn

Ego Strengthening and Resource Development in the Treatment of Trauma Survivors
July 21-25, 2008

This workshop offers a conceptual framework and a practical approach to working with clients in the early stages of trauma treatment. These clients often present with some of the following characteristics:

• suicidality, self-injury, and addictive behaviors
• phobia of affects, somatic experience, attachment, and traumatic memories
• rigid defenses and overdeveloped avoidance patterns
• pervasive fears and blocking beliefs
• strong dissociative tendencies and symptoms
• emotional dysregulation marked by alternating hyperarousal and hypoarousal
• inability to access and stay grounded in an "adult" ego state
• inability to access and maintain resources essential for effective trauma processing (e.g. compassion for self, curiosity, courage)

A broad range of resource development and ego-strengthening approaches/protocols will be introduced through live demonstrations or videotape presentations. Attention will be devoted to assessing the developmental and attachment needs of the client, establishing a useful case conceptualization, and developing an integrated treatment plan with achievable goals. Guidelines for decision-making and evaluating readiness for trauma processing will be reviewed. The model proposed in this workshop acknowledges the strengths, competencies, and survival resources inherent in each person. Interventions are designed to honor and deepen existing resources while simultaneously introducing new skills and resources where developmental deficits or maladaptive patterns are found. This workshop is open to all clinicians.

Aaron Nelson

The Neuropsychology of Memory: What Every Clinician Needs to Know
August 11-15, 2008

Our ability to remember is an amazing feat - a miracle - which most of us take for granted. The process of converting perception to representation to recollection invokes the participation of multiple brain regions and neural networks working in exquisite collaboration. The plasticity of these component processes, as well as the associated neuroanatomy, is what gives our memories their ever-changing quality.

Although memory loss is a hallmark of neurodegenerative disease, not all memory failure is abnormal. Where is the boundary between normal age-related change and incipient disease? Can we improve on normal memory? What are the ethical challenges posed by cognitive enhancers? We have made great strides in our understanding of how memory and the brain change over the life span, yet there is so much we still don't know.

Andrew Newberg

Spirituality, the Mind, and Beliefs
August 18-22, 2008

This course is about the relationship between spirituality, beliefs, and the mind. It will explore how spirituality and our beliefs affect mental health and how various practices can improve mental health. It draws upon sources from medicine, psychology, pastoral care and spiritual and religious disciplines. Participants will learn how to critically review research on brain function and spiritual experience. They will learn what scientific modalities are now available to study the relationship between the body and spirit. They will also learn the limitations of scientific modalities. The course will explore the relationship between the brain, the mind, and spiritual experience and will consider current theories on their relationship. There will be an emphasis on how beliefs, both religious and non-religious, affect the human person, particularly in regard to mental and physical health. A significant focus will be on the theological and philosophical implications of this field of research and will challenge participants to develop new approaches to their own work. There will be a discussion of the practical applications of various practices such as meditation. One such approach that we have developed, called Compassionate Communication, will be demonstrated. The course will challenge participants to develop new approaches to their own study/work.

Ronald T. Potter-Efron

Therapeutic Approaches to Anger, Rage and Domestic Violence Counseling
August 18-22, 2008

The field of anger management and especially domestic abuse counseling emerged as somewhat of a maverick discipline during the 1980's and 90's. It was primarily informed by a male power and control paradigm that was frequently implemented within an anti-therapeutic, anti-couples counseling milieu. This useful but limited model has been gradually challenged because of the need to treat clients who don't fit well into its conceptualization such as violent women, mutually aggressive couples, and those with significant underlying psychological conditions. The result is a stimulating array of approaches, old and new, that can be utilized to help appropriate clients. The goal of this course will be to address a selected number of these approaches while stimulating thoughtful discussion of the underlying conceptual and therapeutic issues.

Teaching methods will include lecture, small group discussion and practice sessions, observation of filmed interviews, handouts, power point presentation, and exercises designed to help participants understand the dynamics of their own anger experiences.

Brad Sachs

When No One Understands: Courage, Creativity and Compassion in the Treatment of Adolescent Anguish
July 28 - August 1, 2008

Adolescence is a profound juncture in the family's development that entails every member beginning to strike a new balance between continuity and change, equilibrium and evolution, separateness and attachment. This balancing act requires each generation to find ways to grieve for what is being lost in order to cultivate what will be gained.

The adolescent must grieve for the death of her childhood in preparation for making the transformation into young adulthood. The parents must grieve for the death of their influence over and relevance to their teen in preparation for discovering or reclaiming sources of meaning and purpose in their lives other than parenthood.

When parents and/or adolescents are unable to recognize and resolve the depths of this unavoidable grief, anguish is the inevitable result, anguish that can express itself in numerous ways, in either generation. Symptoms of thought, mood and anxiety disorders, psychosomatic illness, chemical dependencies, eating disorders, promiscuity, under- and over-achievement, and relational instability can all be understood as manifestations of an essential family mourning process that has been hindered or gone awry.

This course will utilize a multi-modal approach including lecture, discussion, structured exercises, case presentation, role-play, and the presentation of music, poetry, and video and film clips to conceptualize a humanistic approach to the treatment of adolescents and their families. It will reveal, rather than conceal, the complexity of this dramatic developmental passage such that clinicians can better strategize and intervene with courage, creativity and compassion when adolescent anguish brings teens and their parents into treatment.

Throughout the week, participant-therapists' personal history and counter-transferential responses will be explored so as to assist in deepening their clinical empathy, understanding and maneuverability.

The workshop will be of value to clinicians at all levels of expertise, and attendees will be encouraged to share their most challenging cases for the purposes of group discussion and support.

Amy Weintraub

LifeForce Yoga: Empower Your Clients to Manage Their Moods
August 4-8, 2008

Using the laboratory of their bodies and their minds to work with their moods, Yogis gave us a prescription for maintaining optimal mental health. We'll explore this nearly 5000-year-old prescription, learning aspects of Yoga often ignored in a regular Yoga class, such as body sensing, sound, breath, imagery, meditation, and affirmations that arise from the client's authentic experience of self. And we'll practice ways you can introduce Yogic techniques in the treatment room-neither mat nor touch necessary! You'll learn Yogic strategies to help clients focus, relax, and have greater access to feeling states. These practices can provide an alternative or adjunct treatment for clients who are not responding to medication or have received only so much relief from cognitive restructuring strategies.

Every day, in the process of learning Yogic techniques to help clients manage their moods and increase self-efficacy, you will be practicing tools for self-care. Discover for yourself the physiological changes occurring in the body during Yoga practice that produce the immediate "feel good" affect, and experience the shift in your own outlook as we practice simple exercises that can change your life and the lives of your clients.

This workshop is designed for all level of Yoga practitioners, including beginners. Every day will include easy and accessible movement, yogic breathing, and meditation or guided relaxation. Along with didactic components and practice, the format will include emotional process from a Yogic perspective in dyads and small groups. Yoga mats will be provided. Bring your own props.

Ofer Zur

Ethics with Soul: Applying Therapeutic Boundaries with Care and Integrity
June 30 - July 4, 2008

Using popular film clips, clinical vignettes and discussions, we will explore the flexible and ethical applications of therapeutic boundaries such as touch, self-disclosure, gift exchange, bartering, home visits, going on a walk with a client, adventure therapy and social or professional dual relationships. Social dual relationships are often unavoidable and can be clinically helpful in many small communities. Similarly, professional dual relationships are unavoidable in training institutions, universities, colleges and professional associations.

Most graduate school courses and risk management or ethics workshops instill fear and trepidation in psychotherapists with their clear injunction against touch beyond a handshake, and their rigid ban on gift exchange, bartering or dual relationships. In contrast to this rigid, inhuman approach, there is a growing body of research and literature, which shows that appropriate boundary crossing enhances therapeutic alliance and clinical outcome. Yet risk management protocols, driven by insurance companies and malpractice attorneys, seem to dominate our profession. This course will help practitioners differentiate between helpful boundary crossing and harming boundary violation and will encourage flexible and ethical approaches to boundaries, which are likely to increase our effectiveness without increasing risk to ourselves or our clients. The aim of the course is to free therapists to practice with integrity and soulfulness rather than with fear and trepidation.

This course will teach psychotherapists to:

1. Discern the differences between boundary violations, boundary crossings and dual relationships.
2. Review the ethical and clinical complexities of boundaries.
3. Clarify the stance of the Code of Ethics on boundary crossing.
4. Utilize ethical decision-making and risk-benefit analysis.
5. Provide clear guidelines for employment of ethical boundaries in therapy.

Salman Akhtar

The Circle of Hope: Understanding and Managing Major Emotions in Dynamic Psychotherapy
August 20-24, 2007

With each successful outcome of the need-appeal-gratification cycle of infancy and childhood, a layer of 'basic trust' is laid down. As further experience accrues, this leads to a confident expectation that one will survive hardships and that the outer world will continue to provide gratification of instinctual wishes and developmental needs. Hope, then, becomes a fountainhead of life. This is indeed salutary. However, some experience with hopelessness is also essential for growth. Excessive optimism can be pathological and a defense against rage. Such rage often manifests itself in the clinical setting where some frustration is built in. When an individual has been exposed to chronic frustrations in childhood however, there is a tendency towards hating others. While pleasurable in a perverse way, this is never entirely free of guilt and remorse. It also diminishes the view of one's self as a good person and causes shame. Psychotherapy, when it works well, and sometimes even the lived experience of life, leads to the emergence of sadness and mourning about such intrapsychic developments. If fixation upon a masochistically idealized mourning can be avoided, the capacity for genuine love (in which affectionate and sensual feelings are deeply synthesized) arises. And, loving others and receiving love from them consolidates the experience of hope. This is, in a nutshell, the 'circle of hope'. Illustrations from clinical work, movies, poetry, and literature, as well as from daily life experiences will be provided to highlight such dynamic ebb and flow. Guidelines for working with excessive or inoptimal presence of these emotions in the clinical setting will also be discussed.

Kenneth Cloke

Into the Heart of Conflict: Resolving Chronic Interpersonal, Organizational, and Political Disputes
July 2-6, 2007

Every conflict we experience is an opportunity to exercise empathy and honesty, strengthen our communication skills, become more open-minded and open-hearted, and increase our ability to find wisdom, clarity, balance, and inner peace under difficult conditions. Each conflict therefore leads us not only to settlement and resolution, but potentially also to transformation and transcendence. How to find and follow this path, and discover the practical techniques and dangerous questions that guide us toward these ends is the substance of this course.

This workshop will present techniques for entering into the heart of conflict, encouraging open-hearted communication, reaching forgiveness and reconciliation. It will explore ways of increasing empathy in the midst of rage, togetherness in the midst of separation, and celebration in the midst of failure. It will assist participants in using conflict to revitalize their personal and work lives and locate the transformational and transcendent power of conflict. It will explore the frontiers and limits of conflict resolution, including internal frontiers of spirituality, and external frontiers of family and organizational systems, and the chronic sources of social and political conflict. It will support participants in finding ways of using conflict as a catalyst for personal, family, organizational and social change.

Edward Hallowell

ADHD Across the Life Span:
A Strength-Based Model of Diagnosis and Treatment
July 16-20, 2007

From childhood through adulthood, ADHD can present both difficult dilemmas as well as unique opportunities for change, growth, and success. Dr. Hallowell defines the goal of diagnosis and treatment as the transforming of ADHD from a chronic liability into an overall asset in life. The purpose of this seminar is to show participants how to do precisely that, as well as to present all the exciting new information we have learned about ADHD in the past decade.

In 25 years of working with people of all ages who have ADHD, Dr. Hallowell has learned that a strength-based approach to diagnosis and treatment leads to the best outcomes. This means from the very first moment the clinician meets the patient or client, he or she looks for talents, skills, and strengths and builds a treatment plan geared to promote those first and foremost. This approach mobilizes hope, excitement, and a cascade of positive energy which drives the treatment to much greater success than is observed in other kinds of treatment.

Interweaving advanced material with introductory information, aimed both at professionals and non-professionals, this seminar will explore the entire world of attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder in its human dimensions as well as its clinical and scientific. The seminar will provide a solid, practical basis in the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD in all ages.

Sue Johnson

Transforming Love and Attachment in Couple Relationships: Emotionally Focused Therapy
August 13-17, 2007

Couple therapy is entering a new era as a scientific discipline. We now know the key factors in marital satisfaction and distress, we can achieve significant and lasting change in distressed relationships, explain how this change occurs, and successfully apply couple interventions to "individual" problems such as depression and chronic illness. One of the pillars of this revolution is the new understanding of adult love articulated in recent literature and research on attachment theory. Attachment offers us a model of effective dependency that provides the couple therapist with a general map and direction in therapy as well as a guide to key emotions and needs and the defining moments in a couple's interaction. Attachment also views partners as the hidden regulators of an individual's emotional and physical health, offering a model that allows couple interventions to be used as a powerful resource in promoting health and resilience.

EFT integrates experiential and systemic interventions to expand both key emotional responses and cycles of interaction. EFT is empirically validated and demonstrates excellent outcomes - 86% to 90% significant improvement in relationship distress after a brief intervention. Research suggests that results are generally stable even in the face of significant life stress. This approach has been used with a variety of couples, including those facing anxiety disorders such as post traumatic stress. EFT for couples appears to translate well across culture and class, focusing as it does on the universals of key emotions and attachment needs and fears. EFT views adult love as a wired in and adaptive attachment response. The process of treatment is set out in three stages: de-escalation, restructuring interactions towards secure attachment and consolidation. The focus in each session is on process, especially the processing of emotions and key interactional moves or patterns as they occur in the present. The therapist is a relationship consultant who offers a safe platform where each partner can distil, expand and transform experience and find new ways to connect with the other. Interventions are systematized (Johnson, 2004) and key moments of change have been studied and outlined. EFT is consonant with recent research on marital distress, the nature of emotion and the nature of adult love. This model is now taught across North America, Asia, Europe and Australia and is at the cutting edge of couple interventions.

Edgar Schein

The Essence of Change: Brainwashing, Culture Evolution and Organizational Therapy
July 9-13, 2007

This week we will try to make sense of the whole range of learning and change phenomena that occur in individuals, groups and organizations. By reviewing and updating the various research areas I have been involved with over the last 50 years we will analyze: drastic individual change (coercive persuasion), career development, human resource planning, process consultation, group dynamics, organizational culture and the impact of subculture dynamics on critical problem areas such as "safety culture" in the nuclear and health care industry. The concepts will be illustrated by many stories based on my experiences as a researcher and consultant.

Through this analysis we will build a theory of change dynamics focusing on: the elaboration of Lewin's unfreezing, changing, and refreezing model, the role of disconfirmation in initiating change, the management of survival anxiety in relation to learning anxiety, and the creation of psychological safety as the key to adult learning. Particular emphasis will be given to managed culture change, the conceptual issue of how to define health at the organizational/systemic level, what "therapy" for an organization consists of, and what we mean by the increasingly common term "safety culture".

This program is designed both for beginners who want to explore various aspects of the theory and practice of organizational learning, change, and development, and for more advanced researchers and practitioners who want to explore a conceptual integration of individual and systemic perspectives. The program is primarily lectures, discussion, and daily small dialogue groups.

Richard Schwartz

Internal Family Systems Workshop
July 23-27, 2007

The Internal Family Systems Model is a method of therapy which fosters transformation, gently, quickly, and effectively. It views multiplicity of mind as our natural state and our "parts" as sub personalities that may be healed and transformed by bringing the Self into its rightful role as leader of the internal system. The Self, a core of valuable leadership qualities, is our true nature - compassionate and loving. Although IFS has been most widely used as a treatment for trauma, it is a flexible model that provides abundant opportunities for application. IFS advances treatment in several areas: First, by showing respect and appreciation for the client's protective parts, it reduces resistance and backlash. Second, it helps clients fully unburden the extreme beliefs and emotions they accrued from their traumas. Third, affect is regulated in a simple and effective way so that clients are not overwhelmed during sessions. Fourth, because it is the client's Self that is leading in the healing, transference is reduced and clients do much of the work on their own, between sessions. Fifth, IFS gives therapists practical ways to understand and work with their countertransference so they can remain in the open-hearted state of Self leadership with clients. Sixth, it frees therapists from the role of trying to police clients symptoms like suicide, eating disorders, addictions, and self-mutilation. Seventh, therapists are free to be themselves, without having to be clever or controlling, and come to enjoy partnering in the fascinating and sacred process that naturally unfolds as clients heal themselves.

This workshop is designed for therapists who had little exposure to IFS as well as those who know the basics of IFS, but have trouble when clients resist, have particularly difficult parts, or when it comes to using the model with couples or larger systems. We will begin with an overview of IFS and then move onto the deeper exploration of issues that arise during treatment. This course will also provide the opportunity to participants to identify and work with the parts of themselves that interfere in their relationships with clients. The workshop will be a balance of lectures, demonstrations and experiential exercises.

Matthew Selekman

Self-Harming and Suicidal Adolescents: A Collaborative, Strengths-Based Therapy Approach
July 23-27, 2007

Adolescent self-harming behavior is on the rise and one of the most challenging presenting problems therapists, healthcare, and school professionals will face today. Therapists are often intimidated by their cutting and burning behaviors and the army of helping professionals often already involved with these adolescents and their families. Many of these youth have experienced multiple treatment failures, feel emotionally disconnected from family and peers, and come from families where there may be difficulties with marital or post-divorce conflicts, invalidating family interactions, gender power imbalance issues, or family secrets. Some of these youth may have problems with mood management, powerful self-defeating thoughts, and experience difficulties with self-soothing. Many of these adolescents regularly switch symptoms from self-harming to substance abuse, bulimic, and sexually acting out behaviors. In extreme and chronic self-harming situations, some of these adolescents may begin to have suicidal thoughts and want to permanently put a stop to their emotional pain. Simply altering outmoded family beliefs and disrupting entrenched and destructive family interactions may not be enough to facilitate the connection-building process and create a sense of place in the adolescent's key relationships with parents, siblings, extended family members, and peers. Since these youth and their families situations tend to be quite complex, they require a flexible, ecologically-based approach that targets interventions at the adolescent, family, peer group, school, and other larger systems levels.

The Institute format will combine information-rich didactic presentation, extensive use of videotape examples of major therapeutic strategies and techniques, and skill-building exercises.

Martha Straus

All the Rage: Helping Adolescent Girls in Crisis
July 30-August 3, 2007

Millions of adolescent girls are in a crisis of rage and despair. Some try to disappear through starvation, others carve indecipherable symbols onto their arms or run away from home, still others bully and get bullied, hide weeping in their rooms, or attempt suicide. How can therapists become more effective with this volatile population? This highly practical workshop, based in a developmental-relational model of intervention, explores concrete strategies and methods for helping girls in crisis. Participants will learn how to read the subtext of provocative, self-destructive, and confusing behaviors, and what questions to ask to help rally support for the girls from their family and relationship networks. We'll examine the limitations of old standards of care such as self-harm contracts and confidentiality rules, and discuss how to interview and intervene in the most stressful cases including: relational aggression, eating disorders, self-injury, suicidal gestures, and oppositional and defiant acting out. Attendees will also find out about the ten principles of effective practice, and become knowledgeable about a variety of strategies that work, including harm reduction, inviting resistance, and developing a protective circle of adults. By the end of the week, participants will know what it takes to stay hopeful even in the most anguishing cases, and how to sustain connections that will help struggling adolescent girls become competent and independent young women.

Bessel van der Kolk

Frontiers of Trauma Treatment
July 16-20, 2007

The majority of people who seek psychiatric care have histories of trauma, chaos, or neglect. In the past two decades there has been not only an explosion of knowledge about how experience shapes the central nervous system and the formation of the self, but also about what constitutes effective intervention. Advances in the neurosciences, attachment research and in information processing show how brain function is shaped by experience and that life itself can continually transform perception and biology. Overwhelming experiences alter the capacity for self-regulation and memory processing due to changes in subcortical, i.e., "unconscious", levels of the brain. The memory imprints of the trauma(s) are held in bodily states and physical action patterns, which causes the entire human organism to automatically react to current experiences as a replay of the past. While insight and understanding are useful to deal with confusion and secrecy, it rarely is enough to deal with the unspeakable, intolerable and unacceptable nature of traumatic experience.

Effective treatment of post-traumatic problems needs to include addressing the imprint of trauma on the physical experience of the self as helpless and in danger. Recovery needs to incorporate dealing with defensive efforts that helped ensure survival, incorporate physical experiences that contradict feelings and sensations associated with helplessness and disconnection, as well as an effective way of integrating fragmented memories of trauma. Experiencing physical mastery (as in yoga and specific body based techniques) often is necessary to initiate new ways of perceiving reality and promote new behavior patterns. Helping the organism to bring the traumatic experience to an end is the goal of treatment.

This course will present current research findings about how people's brains, minds and bodies are affected by traumatic experiences and, with the help of experiential work and videotapes, illustrate the principles of posttraumatic therapy. We will explore specific techniques that address affect regulation, the integration of dissociated aspects of experience, overcoming helplessness, and the re-integration of human connections.

David Wexler

MEN: Contemporary Theories and Creative Interventions for Male Depression, Aggression, and Relationship Issues
July 2-6, 2007

Traditional models of psychotherapy and couples' therapy have often fallen short in trying to reach men - and in recognizing patterns of both defenses and strengths that men bring with them into relationships. This workshop will focus on the contemporary and creative perspectives on male psychology and particularly on how to reach men and bring out their best qualities in relationships.

Interweaving popular film clips with some of the latest theory and research about men's psychology, Dr. Wexler will use these scenes to illuminate men's issues from a compassionate, self psychological perspective. Particular emphasis will be placed on the "broken mirror" phenomenon and research about the ways in which men experience women as being powerful and turn to women excessively for validation of the self. The presentation will also focus on learning about language and imagery that make sense to men and helping them frame positive changes as part of a "masculine" narrative.

• Understand the self psychological perspective of "good men behaving badly"
• Recognize and work with fundamental psychological needs of "mirroring" that affect men in their relationships with women
• Understand the latest research about male brain patterns and male psychology
• Identify the most contemporary perspectives on male-type depression and how this affects relationships
• Understand current research about the ways in which males process emotions and often act in dysfunctional ways to defend against dysphoric affect
• Develop a more informed and compassionate perspective about men's emotional struggles in relationships
• Learn specific strategies for helping men deal with emotions and communicate more effectively in intimate relationships

Chris Worley

A New Model of Organization Effectiveness
July 30-August 3, 2007

Most models of organization design and change are over 100 years old; they were born in an age where environments were stable or at least predictable. As a result, we've been designing organizations and change processes with not so implicit assumptions that organizations should be predictable, stable, and in equilibrium. Traditional organizations are characterized by rules, regulations and provisions that limit experimentation, by job descriptions that are rarely revised, by continuous improvement and six-sigma processes that try to control variation, by reward systems that recognize consistent performance, and by numerous checks and balances that ensure that the organization operates in the prescribed manner. Moreover, traditional approaches to change assume stability. The whole notion of "unfreezing" and refreezing implies that an organization exists is some form of equilibrium that needs to be disrupted and then re-established. The logics of alignment, stability, and unfreezing/refreezing were powerful because they supported traditional views of how to be effective. This is a very fragile house of cards when you assume the world is changing more and more rapidly.

The purpose of this workshop is to present and explore a different approach, what we call the Built to Change model. It assumes that organizations are changing all the time. It suggests that organizations need to think about managing dynamic relationships that account for both short and long-term performance and effectiveness. Achieving "critical configuration" and "dynamic alignment" implies that organizations must engage in processes of futuring instead of industry analysis, in processes of strategizing instead of competitive advantage, in processes of creating value instead of capabilities, and in processes of designing instead of searching for the right structure. The whole model challenges the deeply held assumptions of stability and the way they pervade our language and thinking.

Exploring these ideas and their implications are the subject of this workshop. Following an overview of the Built to Change Model, each day explores an aspect of the model, how our traditional logics and thinking are challenged by these new assumptions, and how organizations can move toward a more built to change philosophy.