Integrating Theory and Practice: Advanced Psychodynamic Techniques
This seminar is designed to help clinicians identify how early childhood attachment experiences and/or failures are directly connected to the development of one’s beliefs, values, motivation and assumptions about the self in the world and self in relationship to others. Regardless of one’s therapeutic orientation or level of experience, conceptualizing how parts of the person connect or do not connect to form an integrated, cohered self is an acquired skill that deepens and improves over time.
Participants will review techniques including moment-to-moment tracking, forecasting, mirroring and listening to the subtle nuance of language to help uncover hidden feelings that lie beneath the surface of the therapeutic exchange. Through tracking these process dynamics, participants will be shown how to stay aligned with the client’s experience in the present, thus creating a more secure therapeutic holding environment.
The structure of this course will be a combination of lecture, group discussion, pre-recorded videotaped session vignettes as well as practicing techniques of “what to say next”. Through these examples, participants will be shown how minor disappointments can trigger feelings of shame, micro-dissociative ruptures and possible negative transferential responses on the part of our clients. We will discuss and practice how to catch and repair minor ruptures that occur throughout the treatment process, thus preserving and strengthening the therapeutic relationship.
6 CEs available.