Schedule

Law and Ethics – What Goes Around : Part 1

Steve Frankel, PhD, JD

Hilton – California Ballroom B

Description:

“What goes around….” is focused on recent and emerging developments in law and ethics that will impact clinicians of all disciplines. Starting with changes to child abuse reporting obligations, the workshop covers changes for custody evaluators, record-keeping and maintenance, emerging issues and risks regarding telehealth practice, updates on duties to inform and warn when violent behavior may occur, modifications of laws concerning “retirement” of professionals, receiving subpoenas, testifying in court, risk management for supervisors, suicide risk management, and “selected slippery slopes.”

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify at least three areas of practice for which legal/ethical changes have developed in the past 5-10 years.
2. State the most effective strategy for maintaining clinical records of patient/client care.
3. Identify two significant problems for clinicians who wish to provide telehealth services.
4. State two major cautions for clinicians who receive subpoenas for patient/client records.
5. State the differences between three classes of witnesses in courts.
6. Identify two “slippery slopes” of concern to clinician risk management.

The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst : Part 1

Robert Sapolsky, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom B

Description:

As it’s been said, all species are unique — but some are simply more unique than others. In that regard, humans are utterly unique in the range of ways in which they can harm each other, or be compassionate and protective of each other. This workshop will review the biology — considering everything from the events in the nervous system one second before a behavior occurs to the millions of years of evolutionary pressures that have shaped us as a species — of humans at their most pro- and most anti-social.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the extent to which pro- and anti-social human behaviors are context dependent.
2. Explain why it is thus particularly challenging to understand the biological underpinnings of such behaviors.
3. Describe how reaching this understanding requires a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating everything from neuroscience to evolutionary biology.

Using Clinical Hypnosis to Enhance Treatment: Make Your (Inevitable) Suggestions Count : Part 1

Michael Yapko, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom A

Description:

Building on the pragmatic foundation you have already developed as a clinician, you can readily appreciate that suggestion is an inevitable part of any treatment modality. The study of clinical hypnosis encourages a deeper understanding of how you already use suggestive language in your therapy approaches as well as ways to broaden your range of skills in suggesting therapeutic possibilities. Immersion in the practice of clinical hypnosis fosters sensitivity to the unique and subjective aspects of human experience and offers ways to enlist these potentials as positive allies in treatment. In this respect, hypnosis may well be regarded as the original applied “Positive Psychology,” for anyone who practices hypnosis recognizes that people have many more resources than they realize. Hypnosis allows innate resources we all have to be far more accessible, greatly empowering individuals in the process.
This one day pre-conference introductory level workshop will provide a solid conceptual and practical framework for understanding the dynamic and fascinating field of hypnosis. The emphasis will be on starting to develop some of the core skills for designing and delivering hypnotically based interventions in ways that are consistent with your chosen style of practice. Thus, this workshop will include “hands-on” experiences as well as the opportunity to observe and deconstruct a recorded clinical hypnosis demonstration session.
People learn best through experience, and hypnosis is a vehicle of focused, experiential learning. Research on the effectiveness of hypnosis highlights the fact that hypnosis enhances treatment outcomes. It is a domain of professional practice that encompasses effective and empowering approaches to psychotherapy (such as skill building, resource accessing and reframing) and behavioral medicine (such as pain management and promoting health and healing). What a privilege to work with people in this way!

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify the suggestions inherent in conducting psychotherapy regardless of which specific model of (verbal) psychotherapy under consideration.
2. Identify and offer multiple examples of specific forms (structures) of suggestion.
3. List and describe at least three different models or conceptual frameworks for understanding hypnosis.
4. List and define the so-called “classical hypnotic phenomena” that can be elicited in hypnosis (such as analgesia, time distortion, etc.).
5. Describe the potential applications of hypnosis in a variety of contexts, including psychotherapy and behavioral medicine.
6. List and describe specific ways people respond differently to suggestions given in hypnosis to those given outside of
hypnosis.

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: A Therapists’ Guide to the Brain : Part 1

Daniel Amen, MD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom A

Description:

The brain is the organ of learning, loving and behaving. It is the organ where psychotherapists do their work. Yet, most therapists get limited training in understanding and treating the brain. In this workshops, therapists will learn different brain systems, what they do, what happens when things go wrong and how to help them, including targeted psychotherapies based on brain system challenges. The work is based on over 135,000 brain SPECT scans over 26 years.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the functions of 5 different brain systems.
2. Describe treatment strategies for 5 different brain systems.
3. List the problems that occur in 5 different brain systems.
4. Describe specific psychotherapy strategies for 5 different brain systems.

Buffet Lunch

Law and Ethics : Part 2

Steve Frankel

Hilton – California Ballroom B

Description:

Continuing Law and Ethics

The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst : Part 2

Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom B

Description:

Continuing the Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst

Using Clinical Hypnosis to Enhance Treatment: Make Your (Inevitable) Suggestions Count : Part 2

Michael Yapko, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom A

Description:

Continuing Using Clinical Hypnosis

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: A Therapists Guide to the Brain : Part 2

Daniel G. Amen, MD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom A

Description:

Continuing Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

Dinner Break

SOLACE: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question

David Whyte

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Keynote 01 and dialogue with Jeffrey Zeig, Ph.D.
Each one of us grows into a steadily unfolding story where the horizon gets broader and more mysterious, the understanding of loss and mortality more keen, the sense of time more fleeting and the understanding of our own mistakes and omissions more apparent. In the midst of this deepening we have to make a life that makes sense: there is no other life than the one that involves this constant beckoning, this invitation to the fiercer aspects of existence.
Join poet David Whyte in exploring the discipline of finding and asking the questions that help us re-imagine ourselves, our world and our part in it, questions that work to reshape our identities, helping us to become larger, more generous and more courageous; equal to the increasingly fierce invitations extended to us as we grow and mature.

Educational Objectives:

1. List three criteria of a Beautiful Question.
2. Describe at least two methods to help clients ask themselves a Beautiful Question.
3. Describe at least two objections/blocks that people have to creating Beautiful Question.

Convocation

ACC North – 200

This session is not for credit.

Stress and Health: Lessons from a Wild Primate

Robert Sapolsky, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 02
How does psychological stress adversely impact our health, and why do some individuals cope better with stress than others? Most research in this area has focused on, at one extreme lab rats or, at the other, college freshmen volunteering in psych experiments. For more than 30 years, the speaker has focused on the relationships between stress, social status, social affiliation and health in populations of wild primates in their natural habitat in the Serengeti of East Africa, finding striking parallels between the lives of baboons and of Westernized humans.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the predominant role of psychosocial stress in the lives of savanna baboons.
2. Demonstrate understanding of the health consequences of such stress for these primates.
3. Explain the roots of individual differences in vulnerability to stress-related disease in these baboons and what that reveals about stress and the human psyche.

Healing from Infidelity: A Step-By-Step Guide for Therapists

Michele Weiner-Davis, LCSW

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of emotions when helping couples heal from infidelity. Using many video clips, this workshop will provide a comprehensive plan for dealing with different phases of recovery, from the crisis of discovery through forgiveness. Learn how to effectively coach both betrayed and unfaithful partners to undertake specific tasks in order to navigate the complex, zigzag road to recovery.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe one method for knowing whether or not to discuss the details of the affair.
2. List three healing actions the betrayed and unfaithful spouse should undertake.
3. Describe one way shame can stand in the way of a sincere apology.

New, Brief, Respectful and Effective Approaches to Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Bill O’Hanlon, MS

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

This workshop will detail a philosophy and methods of working briefly and effectively with people who have been traumatized. An array of new methods has shown that previous conceptions and methods of working with trauma are unnecessarily long-term and re-traumatizing. These new approaches, rather than being based on the past and deterministic models, are oriented towards the present and future and a sense of possibilities. You will leave equipped with a different understanding of how to treat trauma and four specific methods you can use right away in your work. Participants will be equipped with new tools and ideas to work briefly, effectively and respectfully with even severe and long-standing traumas. Learn how some people turn posttraumatic stress into post-traumatic stress and the research that shows how they accomplish that. In addition to learning new models and methods, come prepared to be entertained. Bill is a lively speaker whose humor and engagement with the audience makes his presentations fun and enlivening.

Educational Objectives:

1. List four rapid methods for resolving trauma.
2. Utilize three methods of creating hopeful futures for trauma survivors.

Safe Conversations: From the Clinic to the Public to IMAGO

Harville Hendrix, PhD and Helen LaKelley Hunt, PhD

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

The benefits of therapy tend to be confined to the clinic and to targeted clients with specific complaints. This workshop describes the process and outcome of distributing–face to face and through social media–the core therapeutic processes to the general public. Participants will experience the structure and process of a Safe Conversation, a relational psychoeducational process, the strategies and tactics of cultural healing and invited to join in developing a relational culture.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the four transformative processes that can be distributed to the general public.
2. Demonstrate the process of a Safe Conversation.
3. Describe and illustrate a relational competency.

How Psychotherapy Lost Its Magic (and What It Can Do To Get It Back)

Scott Miller, PhD

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Over the last 40 years, thousands of research studies and how-to books on psychotherapy have been published. Presently, hundreds of treatment approaches exist, each claiming to contain ingredients essential to therapeutic success. Despite the steady parade of the “new and improved,” the overall effectiveness of psychotherapy has not changed a single percentage point.
Not one point—no improvement in effectiveness, whatsoever. Meanwhile, practitioners are facing an economic environment never before seen in history. The cost of training is up, incomes are down, and fewer people are seeking psychotherapy as a remedy to their problems. What’s more, the majority of people who could benefit, choose never set foot in a therapist’s office.
How did this happen? How did psychotherapy lose its ability to attract and enchant? More importantly, what can therapists do to get it back? In this workshop, therapists will be pushed to move beyond the narrow narratives characterizing modern clinical practice, reconnecting psychotherapy with practical strategies from its deepest roots in magic, healing, and religion.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe empirical studies documenting: (a) the lack of improvement in the effectiveness of psychotherapy; and (b) the dearth of evidence for specific therapeutic ingredients.
2. Describe research documenting the chief, process related predictor of treatment outcome: client engagement.
3. Demonstrate and teach three practical strategies from traditional healing arts that can be incorporated into any treatment approach to maximize engagement and impact.

From Fragmentation to Fluidity

Robert Dilts

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

For too long, and in many ways unintentionally, we’ve tried to organize our world from disjointed mental constructs. This fragmented perspective of the world has led to more and more personal imbalance, social violence and increasing environmental degradation. In this workshop, we will examine how to engage heartfull, embodied intelligence to transform disconnected, fear-based and limited thinking and behaviors into nourishing and respectful life choices. You will explore processes that enrich your capacity to coach others into greater states of wholeness and presence through the body, the voice, movement and receptive listening.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate the capacity for more subtle and receptive listening.
2. Demonstrate learning of creating states of greater presence in oneself and others.
3. Apply shifting more readily from a fragmented perspective to a fluid and harmonious state.

Couples Therapy for Treating PTSD

John Gottman, PhD / Julie Gottman, PhD / William Bumberry, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Couples therapy is made much more complex when one or both partners suffers from PTSD. This workshop will demonstrate with films and lecture how to apply Gottman Method Couple Therapy to the treatment of PTSD. Films include cases of both childhood and military trauma.

Educational Objectives:

1. List how PTSD affects each level of the Sound Relationship House.
2. Describe three Gottman Method interventions that are effective when PTSD surfaces in a session.
3. Describe two ways the partner of someone with PTSD can help support them at home when PTSD symptoms arise.

Cultivating Emotional Balance

Paul Ekman, PhD and Eve Ekman, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

This training builds specific scientifically and contemplative informed skills of emotional regulation, professional empathy, mindfulness of everyday thoughts/emotions/ moods, selfcompassion, and identifying meaning and purpose in work and life. This training will teach participants emotional awareness through mindful engagement with their emotions from the triggers to emotions, to the embodied and psychological sensations of emotion and results of emotional expression and behavior. The training is highly experiential and will involve basic education on relevant scientific research of emotion, stress, mindfulness practices, group discussion, and skill building group exercises. In addition to developing emotional awareness this training addresses root causes of professional and personal stress. This workshop builds skills to facilitate the regulation of emotions before they become “over aroused” and create stress and burnout. This training will help participants cultivate sustainable empathy and reconnect to meaning in their work through healthy connection and communication.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe triggers for professional burnout. List three methods of emotional regulation.
2. Describe the empirical validation of studies on emotional regulation.

What Did Milton H. Erickson Learn with Aldous Huxley? How to be Creative Every Day!

Ernest Rossi, PhD / Kathryn Rossi, PhD / Richard Hill, MA, MED, MBMSC

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

MHE’s 1965 paper “A Special Inquiry with Aldous Huxley into the Nature and Character of Various States of Consciousness” will be used so everyone can experience their personal version of Deep Reflection, the Double Dissociation Double Bind and the Quantum Qualia of their private consciousness and cognition for facilitating gene expression and brain plasticity to optimize their own growing edges.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the 4-Stage of the Creative Cycle.
2. List the 4 Stages of the 90-120 Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC).
3. Explain the Connection between the 4-Stage Creative Cycle and the 4-Stage BRAC.

Lunch Break

Deconstructing Minuchin: A Tribute

Jeffrey Zeig, PhD / Sue Johnson, EdD

ACC North – 200

Description:

An investigation of the principles and practices of Salvador Minuchin and exemplified by clips from family therapy sessions. Discussion by Jeffrey K. Zeig, PhD, and Sue Johnson, EdD.

Educational Objectives:

1. Given a patient/family, create both verbal and spatial metaphors.
2. Describe joining and enactment in structural family therapy.

Shaping Corrective Emotional Experiences in Couple and Family Therapy

Sue Johnson, EdD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

This workshop will outline the pre-requisites and the necessary and sufficient conditions to create the potent change events that predict success at termination and follow-up in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). These change events where partners re-engage and soften emotionally, also have been shown to change the level of attachment security in partners; a change that has significant mental health implications. In these moments of change partners heal their relationships and shape relationships that heal. The workshop will consist of conceptual content, the viewing of videos of sessions, experiential exercises and discussion.

Educational Objectives:

1. Outline the experiential theory of change in EFT and link it to attachment science.
2. Describe the terrain of change events and how they impact client’s reality – self and system.
3. Demonstrate the key interventions that shape change in EFT.

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

Peter Levine, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Traditionally, therapies have attempted to change perceptions of the world by means of reason and insight, with conditioning and behavior modification, or with drugs and medications. The trauma response is a set of defensive bodily reactions that people initially mobilize in order to protect themselves, both from threat, and then later, against feeling the crushing totality of their horror, helplessness and pain. However, as time goes on, this avoidance keeps them frozen and stuck in the past, unable to be fully present, in the here and now, and unable to go forward in life. Fixed in the defensive trauma response, the shame, defeat and humiliation, associated with the original event replays itself over and over again in the body. Dr. Levine explores the implications of Body-oriented psychotherapy and recent findings in the neurosciences, on how the brain and body deals with emotional information.

Educational Objectives:

1. Differentiate between top-down and bottom-up processing.
2. Utilize procedural (body) memory in resolving trauma.
3. Create new interoceptive experiences as a way of transforming traumatic experiences.

Psychotherapy as a Form of Applied Evolution Science: ACT as an Example

Steven Hayes, PhD

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 6-10

Description:

In this workshop I show how to approach psychotherapy using only methods that are tied to the key concepts in evolution science: variation and selective retention in context at the right dimension and level. I will mostly use methods drawn from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), one of the most broadly applicable methods of evidence-based intervention known, but because my larger goal is to show that psychotherapy is a form of applied evolution science, we will also create intervention techniques de novo using evolutionary concepts.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the six core concepts of evolution science.
2. Be able to link one common concept or issue in psychotherapy to each of the core concepts of evolution science.
3. Be able to describe at least one methods to foster variation, selection, and retention in psychotherapy.

The Discriminating Therapist: Teaching Discrimination Strategies Through Hypnosis as a Foundation for Good Decision Making

Michael Yapko, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Therapy has typically focused on explaining why people have their problems and why they sometimes make the poor choices they make. This workshop focuses on HOW, not why, people unintentionally make choices that negatively impact their emotional well-being and quality of life. We will identify obstacles to making the key discriminations that can give rise to better decision making, especially global cognitive style and a past orientation. We will explore the role hypnosis can play in encouraging the development of effective discrimination strategies that can lead clients to choose “this,” not “that.”

Educational Objectives:

1. Assess cognitive style’s effect on symptomatic experience. Describe the role of global cognitions in client problems.
2. Explain how a therapist’s cognitive style may hinder treatment results.

Transforming Symptoms and Other Negative Experiences

Stephen Gilligan, PhD

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 1-5

Description:

A central currency in the therapeutic exchange is negative experiences–depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, etc. This practical and positive approach assumes that each core human experience has equivalent potential to be positive or negative, depending on the human relationship to it; and thus focuses on how problems may be transformed to resources by skillful human connection. This process operates at two levels: (1) developing a generative state (in the therapist, client, and relationship field) and then (2) using specific methods of transforming negative experiences and behaviors. Multiple techniques and examples for will be given, along with an exercise and demonstration.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate three methods for transforming a negative experience into a positive resource.
2. Demonstrate three techniques for reducing negative attitudes towards typical problems.
3. Identify 3 ways to translate a negative goal to a positive goal.

Myth As A Transformative Agent in Self and Society

Jean Houston, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Mythic structures illumine and fortify personal and cultural change. In using the significant myths that inform cultures and persons, there are potent means developed by Dr. Houston of applying mythic and symbolic material towards the shifting needs and challenges of our time. Houston will explore and demonstrate some of these.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how to use myth as the backdrop upon which to weave work in human and cultural development.
2. Demonstrate exploration of great mythic stories which have proved effective in development.
3. Discuss the dynamics of the changing of the myth in times of transition.

ADHD: The 7 Clinical Types

Daniel Amen, MD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Based on the brain scans and clinical histories of over 20,000 patients with ADHD, this workshop will help clinicians properly diagnose ADHD and subtype it into 7 different types. They will also learn the clinical symptoms, brain imaging patterns and treatments for each type.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the 5 hallmark criteria for diagnosing ADHD.
2. List the 7 types discussed in this workshop.
3. List the treatments for each type.

Treatment of Patients with PTSD and Co-Occuring Psychiatric Disorders: A Constructive Narrative Perspective

Donald Meichenbaum, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Ways to implement the core tasks of psychotherapy with patients who evidence PTSD and comorbid disorders of prolong and complicated grief, Substance Abuse Disorders and Borderline Personality Disorders. A case conceptualization model of risk and protective factors and incorporates a constructive narrator perspective will be presented.

Educational Objectives:

1. How to employ a case conceptualization model that informs assessment and treatment decision making.
2. How to implement the core tasks of psychotherapy with patients with co-occurring disorders.
3. How to tailor interventions to the emotional and psychological needs of patients.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Personality Disorders

Judith Beck, PhD

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

This workshop deals with the challenges of treating clients with personality disorders; clients who, for example, fail to engage in treatment, miss sessions, feel hopeless and stuck, become angry in session, engage in self-harm, use substances, blame others, avoid homework, experience continual crises, and so on. The workshop will focus on conceptualization, the therapeutic alliance, treatment planning, and the use of a variety of strategies from many different psychotherapeutic modalities within the context of the cognitive model to help clients change their thinking at both an intellectual and an emotional level to bring about enduring changes in cognition, mood, behavior, and general functioning.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe personality disorder patients according to a developmental cognitive model.
2. Describe a cognitive behavioral formulation for several personality disorders.
3. Analyze, improve and utilize the therapeutic alliance in treatment.

The Science of Couples and Family Therapy

John Gottman, PhD / Julie Gottman, PhD / William Bumberry, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

It’s been 50 years since the revolutionary inception of General Systems Theory that started couples and family therapy. Yet the central concepts were never made precise, or measurable and the theory never became scientific. In this workshop we show how we can now complete this theory and produce effective and powerful couples and family therapy methods.

Educational Objectives:

1. Accurately define homeostasis in couples’s relationships and know how to achieve it.
2. Describe the role of physiological arousal and calm during conflict interactions and know how to increase vagal tone.
3. List the power of turning toward bids in the seven emotional command systems.

Brainstorm and The Yes Brain: Cultivating Resilience in Adolescents from the Inside Out

Dan Siegel, MD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

In this presentation we will explore the nature of the changes in the teenage brain and how they set the stage for changes in adolescent mental, physical, and interpersonal well-being. We will explore the increased risk-taking and statistically demonstrated heightened chances of harm during this period of life. But these negative aspects of adolescence are only one side of the coin of this period of life. Seen from an inside view, adolescence is an essential part of our development and our evolution. This “inside out approach” to the second dozen years of life gives us an exciting new perspective on the essence of adolescence: Emotional intensity, social engagement, novelty-seeking, and creative explorations are not aspects of an “immature” stage of development but actually can be seen as a necessary set of characteristics that are essential for both the individual’s development and for the health and adaptation of our species. Further, these features of the teenage brain set the stage for changes that not only shape our life as adolescents, but can surprisingly be seen as essential to thriving in adulthood. How we approach adolescence as a period and adolescents as individuals can make all the difference in how these important years are navigated well.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe 4 fundamental aspects of the essence of adolescence.
2. Identify the difference between impulsivity and hyper rational thinking.
3. List the 2 major components of the remodeling process in the teenage brain.

Approaches to Depression: Biological, Psychological, Social, and Spiritual

Daniel Amen, MD / Michael Yapko, PhD

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is the most common mood disorder on earth and earlier this year was ranked as the number one cause of suffering and disability worldwide by the World Health Organization (WHO). Depression is a complex, multi-faceted disorder and many different theories have been formulated to describe its etiology and course. In this joint presentation, Drs. Amen and Yapko will compare and contrast their viewpoints about depression, addressing such topics as the merits of neuroimaging in depression, causes and types of depression, antidepressant medications, the role of diet and use of diet supplements in treatment, and why not all psychotherapies are equally effective in promoting recovery.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the multi-dimensional nature of depression and explain why single-dimension treatments are less likely to succeed.
2. Summarize at least three key components of effective treatment.
3. Summarize Functional imaging findings in depression.

The Neurobiology and Psychosocial Correlates of Trauma and Resilience

Donald Meichenbaum, PhD / Bessel van der Kolk, MD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

In the aftermath of traumatic and victimizing experiences, most individuals are impacted, but 75% evidence resilience while 25% “get stuck” and develop PTSD and co-occurring disorders. This presentation will discuss what distinguishes these two groups and considers the implications for treatment.

Educational Objectives:

1. Distinguish the neuro-biological and psycho-social consequences of trauma and resilience and the implications for treatment.
2. Discuss practical ways to bolster resilience in six domains (physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and spiritual).

Transpersonal/Interpersonal Approaches

Jean Houston, PhD / Erving Polster, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

There is a professionally familiar dichotomy between the experience of an actual person to person relationship, on the one hand, and the transpersonal expansion. The latter is often given a special place in the therapeutic repertoire but, in actuality, they are overlapping experiences, Drs. Houston and Polster will each tell how these perspectives enter into their work, with an accompanying discussion.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the components of each where they may normally be indistinguishable.
2. Discuss important implications for meaningfulness.

Using Stories to Create Change in Psychotherapy

Bill O’Hanlon, MS

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Bill O’Hanlon will demonstrate the gentle power of using stories to create change in therapy through two clinical demonstrations. Come witness the fun and evocative way stories can invite people into change. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 01 featuring Cloe Madanes, LIC, HDL

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe a relevant story for the presenting issue.
2. Utilize stories in changework.

Behavioral Experiments: Action-Based Learning

Christine Padesky, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Behavioral experiments require action-based learning and are frequently used both in and out of session in cognitive behavior therapy. Observe a live demonstration of how to set up a behavioral experiment. Once the client has completed the experiment, Padesky demonstrates how to debrief the outcomes of this experiment using the four stages of Socratic Dialogue. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 02 featuring William Miller, PhD

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify three important steps in setting up a good behavioral experiment.
2. List two benefits of using Socratic dialogue to debrief the outcomes of experiments.

Couples Conflicts

Harville Hendrix, PhD / Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD / Otto Kernberg, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

This presentation will propose a diagnostic assessment of the couple, specifying their conflicts at the level of their sexual life, their integration of expectations regarding daily living together, and potential discrepancies regarding their value systems, including their overall social integration. On this basis, a diagnostic assessment of unconscious reactivation in both partners of unresolved conflicts in their relation with their parental couples may determine the strategy of therapeutic interventions.

Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will learn how to assess severity and concrete characteristics of a couple’s dominant conflicts.
2. Participants will be able to construct specific therapeutic interventions based on the psychodynamic understanding of a couple’s dominant relational conflicts.

Evidence-Based Practice: Specific Methods and/or Therapeutic Relationship?

Scott Miller, PhD / William Miller, PhD

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

A great debate continues to rage as to whether the efficacy of psychotherapy is attributable to specific procedures in “evidence-based” treatment methods or general factors inherent in any therapeutic interaction. Around the world, governments, professional organizations, and funders are establishing lists of “approved” approaches. However, research comparing different approaches typically finds modest or no differences. Meanwhile, significant concerns persist:
(1) high dropout/discontinuation rates;
(2) an overall lack of improvement in treatment outcomes over the last 40 years; and
(3) failure to detect and address clients at risk for deterioration and lack of progress.
What are the limits of the paradigm currently guiding psychotherapy research and practice? In this discussion, Drs. Scott and William Miller will address these concerns, exploring a synthesis of technical and relational aspects of psychotherapy, and the possibility of a different paradigm for guiding the field.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss your understanding of why overall outcomes of psychotherapy have not improved in 50 years.
2. Compare the key arguments behind the two poles of the debate between “particular methods” versus “therapeutic relationship.”
3. Describe how you would determine funding priorities for psychotherapy services if you were forming government policy.

Generative Change

Robert Dilts / Steven Hayes, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Generative processes are those that promote innovation, evolution and growth. To “generate” means to create something new. Thus, the core focus in of generative change is creativity: How do you create a successful and meaningful work life? How do you create great personal relationships? How do you develop a great relationship with yourself—your body, your past, your future, your wounds and your gifts? These are the basic challenges in leading an extraordinary life, and the processes of generative change offer a way to succeed at them.

Educational Objectives:

1. Define the process of generative change and how it differs from corrective change.
2. Describe the importance of transforming obstacles as key to generative change.
3. Explain the role of different levels of change in the process of generative change.

Treatment of a Suicidal Patient with a Long History of Victimization: A Constructive Narrative Treatment Approach

Donald Meichenbaum, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Missy has attempted suicide seven times and has a long history of victimization and Borderline Personality Disorder. How to conduct a “strength-based” treatment approach will be demonstrated. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 03 featuring Bill O’Hanlon, MS

Educational Objectives:

1. Ways to bolster resilience in “high-risk” patients with co-occurring disorders.
2. How to assess for suicidal risk and provide interventions.

Creative Transformation in Generative Psychotherapy

Stephen Gilligan, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

This demonstration will show how activating a client’s creative process is the key factor in generative psychotherapy. This process follows four steps: 1) Identifying a goal (A positive change or transforming a negative pattern), 2) Developing a generative state, 3) Utilizing the generative state to creatively achieve the goal, and 4) Guiding the session changes into real life achievement. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 04 featuring Sue Johnson, EdD

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate how symptoms can become solutions under proper conditions.
2. Demonstrate 3 ways to practically activate a client’s creative change potential.

Lunch Break

The Body Keeps Score

Bessel van der Kolk, MD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.

Educational Objectives:

1. Examine and explain how traumatized people process information.
2. Describe how sensorimotor processing can alleviate traumatic re-experiencing.
3. Describe the range of adaptations to trauma early in the life cycle.

Introduction to Team-CBT: Is High-Speed Treatment Really Possible?

David Burns, MD

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

TEAM-CBT is a new psychotherapy treatment model that has evolved from research on how psychotherapy actually works. TEAM corrects many of the shortcomings in traditional CBT and often leads to extraordinarily rapid recovery. Dr. Burns will illustrate key TEAM-CBT techniques with video excerpts from an actual therapy session with a woman who experienced severe depression, anxiety, guilt and rage following decades of horrific domestic abuse.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the differences between Outcome Resistance and Process Resistance.
2. Explain how Paradoxical Agenda Setting can open the door to rapid and lasting recovery.

Multicultural Counseling / Therapy: Challenges to Western European Notions of Healing

Derald Wing Sue, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Traditional mental health practices have often been criticized by people of color, LGBTQ individuals and other socially marginalized groups as being “handmaidens of the status quo,” “transmitters of societies values,” and “instruments of oppression.” Rather than heal, enlighten and liberate, counseling and therapy may actually mistreat and harm socially devalued group members. These detrimental practices and biased western assumptions have often been used to explain the underutilization patterns and premature termination rates of clients of color. This workshop will discuss four major barriers to effective multicultural counseling/therapy (MCT): (a) culture-bound values, (b) class-bound values, (c) linguistic bias, and (d) clinical micro aggressions. It will challenge traditional therapeutic taboos in mental health practice and outline culturally-appropriate intervention strategies in working with an increasingly diverse population.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the four major barriers to effective multicultural counseling and therapy.
2. Outline at least three culture-bound values that may prove detrimental to producing a therapeutic alliance.
3. Define micro aggressions and describe how they make their appearance in the clinical encounter.
4. Provide three examples of culturally appropriate intervention strategies in working with diverse populations.

Cognitive vs. Experiential Emphases

Stephen Gilligan, PhD / Donald Meichenbaum, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

This exchange will focus on the classic question of whether good therapy should focus more on cognitive or experiential changes. The merits of each, and the possibility of a “both/and” partnership, are considered.

Educational Objectives:

1. Compare and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of both cognitive and experiential approaches.
2. Identify methods for integrating the two styles.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Buddhism/Mindfulness: Similarities and Differences

Jack Kornfield, PhD / Christine Padesky, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

On the surface, CBT and mindfulness can look quite different. Are they? Kornfield and Padesky explore similarities and differences in the purposes, practices and philosophies of CBT and Buddhism/Mindfulness. They also discuss when therapists might employ either approach in therapy or recommend clients pursue one and/or the other for self-improvement or mood management.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify two similarities between CBT and Buddhism/Mindfulness.
2. Distinguish two differences between CBT and Buddhism/Mindfulness.
3. Describe client features that suggest possible benefit from CBT and/or Buddhism/Mindfulness practice.

Applying Multicultural Frameworks for Inclusive Psychotherapy Practices

Patricia Arredondo, EdD

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Educational Objectives:

The Therapeutic Conversation: A Reunion of Minds

Erving Polster, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Personal disturbance is accompanied by feelings of disconnection within one’s self and with others. Reconnection is accomplished when the therapist guides the patient into a fertile conversational stream – a moment to moment impetus toward personal resolution. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 05 featuring Peter Levine, PhD

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe important statements that have been overlooked by patients.
2. Describe the feeling of relationship between therapist and patient.

Evocative Psychotherapy

Jeffrey Zeig, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Experiential components central to brief, strategic approaches to psychotherapy. We will compare and contrast Ericksonian and psychodynamic perspectives. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 06 featuring Otto Kernberg, MD

Educational Objectives:

1. Define an evocative approach to psychotherapy.
2. Contrast Ericksonian and psychodynamic approaches and list three differences in perspectives.

The Significance of Attachment Science for Psychotherapy

Sue Johnson, EdD / Dan Siegel, MD

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

We will debate the Promise of attachment science as a guide to the practice of individual couple and family therapy in the 21st century including what this science tells us about how to understand mental health issues and the most direct pathways to positive change, health and resilience.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss the core insights of attachment science and the key principles laid out by this science for effective intervention.
2. Specific topics will be addressed such as the nature of the therapeutic alliance and the main tasks of therapy.

Present-Centered and Strategic Therapies: Commonalities and Differences

Cloe Madanes, HDL, LIC / Erving Polster, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Strategic therapy and present centered therapy have often received attention as discretely different phenomena. Cloe Madanes will present her views of strategic therapy and its relevance for present centered therapy. Erving Polster will do the same, showing the disparity and commonality of the two. Their individual views will animate a conversation with each other.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the power of in vivo action.
2. Discuss how to be enabled to build on a recognizable personal momentum in the patient.

Masculine/Feminine: Then and Now

Esther Perel, MA, LMFT / Marilyn Yalom, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Tennyson, in a nineteenth-century poem, expressed the firm belief in the difference between men and women.
Man for the field and woman for the heart:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey.
During the twentieth century, this doctrine of separate spheres was steadily eroded so that by now, in the Western world, woman are expected to use their brains as well as their hearts and men are encouraged to assume some of the roles previously allotted exclusively to women. This dialogue between Esther Perel and Marilyn Yalom will explore the challenges that men and women now face in assuming traits and roles of the opposite gender. Are we edging towards a more androgynous definition of gender and a multiplicity of gender identities? What are the lingering gaps in gender inequality? Is there a “crisis of masculinity”?

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe three new challenges around men’s identity and sexuality.
2. Demonstrate two ways that men’s ability to question the male status quo holds the seeds for changing the condition for women.

The Foreground-Background Process

Robert Dilts

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Based on the meticulous work of Ivan Pavlov, the Foreground-Background process involves using the “foreground” and “background” of perception with respect to a problem situation and a resource experience to create a quick and seemingly “magical” change. Usually, what is foregrounded in the experience of a problem or resource is quite different. The background of the two experiences, however, often shares many features which can be used to create bridge to resourceful experiences, leading to a transformation of the problem experience that is gentle, unconscious and effortless. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 07 featuring Michael Yapko, PhD

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the relationship between perceptual foreground and background.
2. Demonstrate how common background perceptions can be used to transfer needed resources into a problematic experience.

Placing the Burden of Effective Psychotherapy on the Patient

Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

In a 1964/2008 paper MHE documented how “hypnosis was used for the specific purpose of placing the burden of responsibility for therapeutic results upon the patient himself after he reached a definite conclusion that therapy would not help and that a last resort would be a hypnotic ‘miracle’.” I will first demonstrate how to gently shift this “burden of responsibility for therapeutic results” in a brief, easy-to-learn group process with the entire audience. Time permitting, anyone who feels they have failed during this group process may volunteer for a therapeutic experience with me in front of the entire audience. Clinical Demonstration with Discussant 08 featuring Jean Houston, PhD

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how to “Shift the Responsibility for Effective Psychotherapy Onto the Client.
2. List the 4-Stage Creative Cycle for “Shifting the Responsibility for Therapy” Onto the Client.

Author’s Book Signing Reception

ACC North – 100 (Exhibit Hall)

Mozart and the Art of Listening

Rob Kapilow

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 04
At the heart of psychotherapy is the idea that listening to someone is an inherently healing act. Can an understanding of the grammar of music help us better understand the grammar of how patients communicate? Can Mozart help transform how we listen? Join NPR and PBS commentator Rob Kapilow [or conductor/composer/author–whichever you think is better] for a unique exploration inside the language of music to see if it can help us learn to listen like Mozart.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss the differences between hearing and listening.
2. Describe ways in which understanding musical narratives can provide new models for understanding patient narratives.
3. Discuss the grammar of musical storytelling and its relationship to patient storytelling.

Solving Problems in the Therapeutic Alliance

Judith Beck, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

When clients have negative, dysfunctional beliefs about themselves and others, they may bring these beliefs to the therapy session. They may believe that you’ll demean them, criticize them, or hurt them in some way. As a result, problems may arise in treatment. When they do, a cognitive conceptualization can guide you so you’ll know what to do.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe beliefs about others that interfere with therapy.
2. State maladaptive coping strategies clients use.

Sharing an Early Life Challenge and Unmet Childhood Need

Harville Hendrix, PhD and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Chronic frustrations in adult significant relationships that are attended with intense negative emotions are rooted in unmet childhood needs. Identifying these needs helps partners become empathic with each other and also understand their own obsessive behavior. This demonstration will show clinicians how to identify early caretaker patterns, the unmet needs that result from them, the defense patterns used to cope with them and a process that will help address these needs as they show up in everyday life.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe core caretaker patterns and the needs they generate.
2. Facilitate the Safe Conversation dialogue process.

Training Psychotherapists

Donald Meichenbaum / Scott Miller / Jeffrey Zeig

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 01. Psychotherapists can be trained through didactic, research-based, and experiential approaches. These approaches will be compared and contrasted.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe each of the three models of training.
2. Given a supervisee, indicate how to use each of the models.

Multicultural Issues

Robert Dilts / Esther Perel / Derald Wing Sue

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 02. All therapists require an understanding of multicultural issues to be effective. Theoretical research findings will be discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. List three tenants of multicultural counseling.
2. Given the patient, indicate how you would approach the issue of multicultural sensitivity.

Conversation Hour 1

Bessel van der Kolk, MD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Attendees will learn about the fundamentals of trauma and the underlying neuroscience.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the common components of posttraumatic stress disorder.
2. Describe three elements of the basic neuroscience of trauma.

A Conversation Hour with Otto Kernberg

Otto Kernberg, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Educational Objectives:

Attachment Science: The Platform for Psychotherapy in the 21st

Sue Johnson, EdD

ACC North – 200

Description:

A coherent science on attachment now offers therapists a map for self and relational system that cogently outlines both dysfunction and health – and how to lead clients from one to the other. This presentation will outline the strengths of this integrating framework as a general and specific insession guide for individual, couple and family therapy, focusing on the map it offers for affect regulation, cognitive restructuring and behavior change.

Educational Objectives:

1. Outline the core features of attachment and the promise of attachment science for the future of psychotherapy.
2. Describe the relevance of these features for the process of change across modalities.
3. Link the attachment framework to specific interventions in individual, couple and family therapy.

Developing an Atlas of Emotion

Paul Ekman, PhD and Eve Ekman, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

The most popular questions about working with our emotions are: How do I become more aware? And then what do I do? The tricky thing about this answer is that ‘how’ of awareness is also the ‘what’ to do. Awareness is an ongoing everyday process, one that over time generates that most sought after goal: spark recognized before flame, a space for freedom to choose when we act and how we act. The skills to achieve awareness can be found from Western Psychological as well as Eastern Contemplative traditions, for the last 10 years the Dalai lama has been asking for a map of our emotions to develop this skill. In 2014 renowned emotion psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman and his daughter Dr. Eve Ekman, emotion awareness researcher and trainer, took the Dalai Lama up on on his request and with his support developed an “Atlas of Emotions”. This online Atlas provides language and concept to how we become emotional. The Drs. Ekman present their reflections on and future goals for this groundbreaking project.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe Characteristics of Emotions.
2. Identify Primary Families of Emotion.
3. Practice Mapping of Emotion Episodes.

Hypnosis as a Context of Empowerment

Michael Yapko, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Hypnosis is a vehicle for delivering ideas and/or promoting meaningful experiential learning. Hypnosis itself isn’t what cures people. Rather, it’s what happens during hypnosis that can make a positive difference, especially when applied to empower people to discover and use their innate resources. In this demonstration, the merits of hypnosis as a tool of therapeutic empowerment will be highlighted.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate the merits of hypnosis as a vehicle of associating people to their own innate resources.
2. Assess the qualities of hypnotic interaction that foster a greater sense of personal self-efficacy.

Treating Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk, MD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Demonstration of fundamental methods of working with trauma based in empirical principles and an underlying understanding of neuroscience.

Educational Objectives:

1. Differentiate a “bottom-up” from a “top-down” approach to PTSD.
2. Describe regions of the brain that are most activated by PTSD.

Family and Couples I

Harville Hendrix / Helen LaKelley Hunt / Cloe Madanes / Esther Perel

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 03. Systemic and communication-based approaches will be described. These approaches can be used with both families and couples.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the Imago model.
2. Describe the strategic approach.

Resistance

Judith Beck / Steven Hayes / William Miller

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 04. Clients generally understand what they need but fail to comply with their own directives and those of the therapist. Resistance will be analyzed from three different therapeutic models.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe resistance from each of the three models.
2. Given the patient, indicate three possible orientations to client resistance.

Why Some Psychotherapists Are More Effective

Donald Meichenbaum, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Research indicates the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions, but some psychotherapists constantly achieve better treatment outcomes and lasting changes. What do these “expert” therapists do and not do to achieve these positive results?

Educational Objectives:

1. Consider the nature of “expertise”, the role of deliberate practice, and the implications for nurturing expertise in psychotherapists.
2. Enumerate the core tasks of psychotherapy that characterize psychotherapists who consistently obtain better treatment outcomes.

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Manifestation, Dynamics and Impact

Derald Wing Sue, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Racial, gender, and LGBTQ micro aggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights to targets. They are often reflections of implicit bias that are outside the level of conscious awareness of wellintentioned individuals. Nevertheless, they have been found to cause lowered subjective well-being in the lives of marginalized group members and may lead to mental health problems. Research indicates that clinicians and supervisors are often perpetrators of micro aggressions.

Educational Objectives:

1. Define and describe the types of microaggressions.
2. Identify how micro aggressions lower subjective wellbeing and how they affect the mental health of marginalized groups in society.
3. Describe how micro aggressions make their appearance in the therapist-client encounter.
4. Name three strategies in diminishing the impact of microaggressions.

Female Friendship

Marilyn Yalom, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

The prominence of women as friends would have surprised people living in the distant past and would still surprise people in certain parts of the world, where only male friendship is prized. Yet, if you ask Americans today whether men or women have more friends, the answer is likely to be women. I shall examine the ingredients that seem basic to women’s friendships and suggest ways in which friendships between women (and between women and men) may be the saving grace in our present lives. I shall also examine the concept of friendship more generally as it has been understood in the western tradition since Aristotle. What are the benefits of friendship? Is it possible to live well without friends? What can women learn from male friendships and men learn from female friendships?

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss female friendships from a historical perspective.
2. Examine the importance of friendship in mental health.
3. Discuss what men can learn from female friendships and what women can learn from male friendships.

Every Day Life in the Quantum Universe

Jean Houston, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

The discovery of the quantum nature of our universe is so major an event that its profound implications cannot be overstated. Quantum theory demands a radical re-visioning of the role of Consciousness as the underlying organizing principle of the universe. Working with these concepts, both spiritual and scientific, we have enabled students to be, to do and to create in ways that are suggestive of higher levels of human accomplishment. Similarly from the quantum perspective of the simultaneity of past, present and future we are able to change the story of minor past events until it become a realistic part of one’s memory.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe and demonstrate these capacities and concepts.

When Panic Attacks

David Burns, MD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Dr. Burns will present a six-minute video excerpt from a therapy session with a patient with ten years of failed therapy for extreme depression and terrifying panic attacks. The dramatic video illustrates an actual panic attack within the therapy session, as well as the patient’s sudden moment of recovery when Dr. Burns used a powerful CBT method called the Experimental Technique. Dr. Burns will describe other uses of this technique in the treatment of depression and anxiety.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the distorted thoughts that trigger panic attacks.
2. Describe how to challenge those thoughts using the Experimental Technique.

Moments of Transformation: Shaping Secure Attachment in EFT

Sue Johnson, EdD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

The session shown is of an unedited live consultation where the previous withdrawn male partner is now accessible and the therapist works with the inability of the female partner to trust, reach and engage with her mate. The session explicitly shows how the therapist works with blocks to the creation of key new responses and shapes bonding moments. This is a classic illustration of Stage 2 EFT in action and shows the moment to moment creation of secure connection. Therapist interventions will be outlined and discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe key change events in EFT.
2. Outline key interventions in these key events.

PTSD

Peter Levine / Bill O’Hanlon / Bessel van der Kolk

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 05. Every therapist needs a method to work with posttraumatic stress disorder. Fundamental techniques will be discussed. Neurological considerations will be offered.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the components of PTSD.
2. Given a patient, create a treatment plan for PTSD.

The Initial Interview

Otto Kernberg / William Miller / Michael Yapko

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 06. The structure of initial interview from three different approaches will be described and discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. List three considerations for an initial interview.
2. Describe orientations to an initial interview from three perspectives.

Conversation Hour 04

Stephen Gilligan, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Dr. Gilligan will briefly overview his general approach to the creative process of effective psychotherapy, and then open the floor to conversation from participants.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss an overview of the 6-step model of Generative Psychotherapy.
2. Identify at least three techniques of Generative Psychotherapy.

Conversation Hour 05

John Gottman, PhD / Julie Gottman, PhD / William Bumberry, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Conversation Hour 05

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe why not all relationship conflict is the same, and why some conflicts require the therapist to be an existential psychologist.
2. Describe why it is so vital for therapists to measure physiology in couples’ therapy.
3. Describe what Gottman sound relationship house theory and Gottman method couples therapy offers in the following domains:
(1) friendship and intimacy, (2) conflict management, (3) shared meaning, (4) trust, and (5) commitment.

Memory Rescue

Daniel Amen, MD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Memory problems are very common in clinical practice. In this speech, Dr. Amen will lay out a completely new way to look at memory and 11 ways to reverse memory problems and cognitive decline. The program he will lay out is based on 26 years of clinical brain imaging practice.

Educational Objectives:

1. List 11 causes of memory loss.
2. Describe one strategy to reversing each of the 11 causes of memory loss.
3. Assess 11 risk factors of memory loss.

Evolution of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Origin, Where We Have Been, Where Are We Now, and What is In the Future?

Donald Meichenbaum, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

The presentation will trace the evolution of cognitive behavior therapy, showing the “untold story” and critically evaluate its present status. It will also consider the future intervention of computer technology.

Educational Objectives:

1. Trace the origins of cognitive behavior therapy and its changing conception.
2. Critically evaluate the relative effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy.
3. Consider future forms of intervention using computer technology.

Mental Health and the World We Seek

Tipper Gore, MA

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 05
The mental health community continues working to expand our understanding of the brain and to improve both the quality of, and the access to treatment. It is also important to build enduring connections with other communities. The speech will discuss the role of those working with mental health in the critical challenges and opportunities facing our interdependent world. Making mental health a priority not only benefits people with mental illness, but also society at large.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss mental health’s role in the forces shaping globalization and societies around the world.
2. Discuss pros and cons of technological applications for mental health care.
3. Describe the role of mental heath in addressing society’s economic challenges.

Lunch Break

The Clinical Application of Mindfulness and Compassion

Jack Kornfield, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

This demonstration will combine Buddhist psychology, and Eastern approaches of Mindfulness and compassion with Western clinical tools.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate understanding of how Buddhist psychological tools are helpful to the clients who present themselves.

The Role of Myth and Re-Creating Self

Jean Houston, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Clinical Demonstration 08

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how myth is instrumental in advancing client goals.
2. List empirical considerations in the use of myth.

Mind/Body Issues

Robert Dilts / Stephen Gilligan / Daniel Siegel

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 07. The mind creates both neurological and somatopsychic patterns. Current concepts of mind-body interaction will be discussed in described.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe three advances in mind-body medicine.
2. Given the patient, describe how to use biologically-based understandings to provide assistance.

The Role of the Therapist

Donald Meichenbaum / Christine Padesky / Michele Weiner-Davis

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 08. The position that the therapist takes in the consulting room affects the outcome of treatment. Perspectives on effective therapist roles will be described.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe three ways in which the therapist’s role alters treatment.
2. Describe a cognitive behavioral versus solution focused approach to therapist roles.

Strategies in Therapy and Coaching

Cloe Madanes, HDL, LIC

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Madanes will answer questions from the participants with an emphasis on what are the characteristics of Strategic Intervention.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how to plan a strategy.
2. Explain why and how to give a directive.

In Depth Thinking on the Role of Psychotherapy Today

Esther Perel, MA, LMFT

ACC North – 200

Description:

Speeches with Discussant featuring Harriet Lerner, PhD. In her new Audible original audio series: Where Should We Begin, Esther Perel invites the listener into the raw intimate space of real anonymous couples who are participating in unscripted counseling sessions. In opening the closed doors of psychotherapy, she stands to redefine not only the boundaries of therapy, but also the communal nature of healing. The project raises some timely questions: If one of therapy’s aims is to create a space for meaningful, challenging and authentic conversations between partners, can it broaden its aim and address relationships in today’s complex world in general. Can it serve to strengthen and improve human connection in society at large? What does therapy offer that differs from coaching? Where do thought leaders and psychotherapists intersect?

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how to take therapeutic wisdom into the public space while preserving its integrity.
2. Demonstrate how technology can help foster relational intelligence and communal support for couples.

Rediscovering Hypnosis Again for the First Time: The Utilization of Attentional Processes in Enhancing Treatment Outcomes

Michael Yapko, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

As advances are made in better understanding the power of focus in shaping one’s subjective perceptions and even physiology, the field of hypnosis has played an especially important role in this ongoing process of discovery. Despite too many clinicians’ terribly misinformed dismissal of hypnosis as little more than a gimmick, in fact hypnosis has evolved a strong scientific basis for its insights into neuroscience, cognition, suggestive language and information processing, placebo and nocebo responses, the therapeutic alliance, and more. Some of these insights and their clinical implications will be discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. List and refute common misconceptions about hypnosis that may hinder optimal treatment outcomes.
2. Assess the benefits of employing hypnosis as a complement to other established treatments.
3. List and discuss the personal, interpersonal and situational variables that affect an individual’s level of hypnotic responsiveness.

Motivational Interviewing and the Clinical Science of Carl Rogers

William Miller, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

The clinical method of motivational interviewing (MI) evolved from the person-centered approach of Carl Rogers, maintaining his pioneering commitment to the scientific study of therapeutic processes and outcomes. The original developer of MI will summarize the development of this method, its linkage to Rogers, and research on its therapeutic processes, outcomes, and training.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe several parallels between motivational interviewing and the person-centered approach of Carl Rogers.
2. Differentiate relational and technical components of motivational interviewing.
3. Explain how studies of MI are relevant to general therapeutic relationship factors in psychotherapy.

Hexadancing: A Demonstration of the Liberating Impact of Process-Focused Evidence-Based Therapy

Steven Hayes, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Psychological flexibility is one of the most studied and supported set of mediational processes in clinical intervention science. In this demonstration I will explain and then demonstrate how a focus on evidence-based flexibility processes in therapy can free clinicians from the linear march of protocol-based approaches, and foster instead a vital dance of creative facilitation of change, played out in the moment to moment context of an empowering therapeutic relationship that is nevertheless thoroughly evidence-based.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the six psychological flexibility processes.
2. Be able to state at least one means of targeting each of the psychological flexibility processes.

Learn to Read Brain Scans: 50 Cases in 60 minutes

Daniel Amen, MD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Based on the world’s largest database of brain SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans, Dr. Amen will teach attendees about brain SPECT imaging and then show 50 cases in 60 minutes, including cases of depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, addiction, and dementia.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how to understand what SPECT scans measure in the brain.
2. Demonstrate understanding of how to look at the SPECT images.

Sex and Intimacy

Sue Johnson / Otto Kernberg / Peter Levine

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 09. Sex can create intimacy and intimacy can facilitate sexual expression. The intersection between sex and intimacy will be discussed in described from three different perspectives.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe three ways of discussing sexual intimacy with clients.
2. Given a couple, describe a treatment plan that addresses sexual intimacy.

Homework Assignments

Judith Beck / Harville Hendrix / Helen LaKelly Hunt / Bill O’Hanlon

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 10. Therapy happens in life, not just in the consulting room. Assignments facilitate treatment goals.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe an effective process for creating client homework.
2. Given the presenting problem describe three different methods for affecting treatment through homework.

Conversation Hour 07

Robert Dilts

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Third generation NLP is generative, systemic and focused on high level issues such as identity and purpose. It emphasizes whole system change and can be applied to organizations and cultures as well as to individuals, families and teams. It expands upon the previous generations of NLP to include tools and skills for supporting multiple levels of change. This conversation will focus on how these methods can enhance therapy and coaching.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the three generations of NLP.
2. Clarify the significance of different “NeuroLogical Levels” of change.

A Conversation Hour with Maria Gomori

Maria Gomori, MSW, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

The Use of Self of the Therapist is the most important part of the therapeutic relationship.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss how to create a context of vulnerability for the meeting of the therapist’s Self with the client’s Self.

Buddhist Psychology: The Heart and Essence

Jack Kornfield, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

In this session we will explore the wise and loving perspectives of Buddhist Psychology. These transformative teachings and practices can awaken in clients and therapists alike an inner capacity for wakefulness, joy, dignity, and compassion— Buddha-nature. Combining practical and clinical examples, teaching stories, and innate wisdom we will consider the heart of healing, love, consciousness and the nature of mind.

Educational Objectives:

1. Learn to apply mindfulness trainings for body, feelings, thoughts and relationship.
2. Explore how you might integrate Buddhist psychology’s core principles of mental health, well-being and shift of identity into traditional western clinical approaches.
3. Learn to employ the skillful means of directed intention to facilitate short and long term development.

Psychotherapy’s Missing Link: Why Don’t the Majority of People Who Could Benefit from Seeing a Therapist Go?

Scott Miller, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Psychotherapy is remarkably effective. Fifty years of research provides overwhelming empirical support for the practice. At the same time, study after study shows that the majority of people who could benefit from seeing a therapist never go. Put more bluntly, they would never even consider going. Of those who start, between 25 and 50% unilaterally discontinue prior to experiencing any benefit from the service. Stigma, ignorance, denial, and lack of motivation are the most common reasons cited by professionals for people either not seeking help or dropping out of treatment. Research provides another explanation.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify three reasons why people either do not start or drop out of treatment.
2. Identify the top reason the majority of people never go to see a therapist.
3. Describe how to bridge a cultural difference between beliefs of those who do not seek service and the therapeutic paradigms currently dominating clinical practice.

In an Unspoken Voice: A Clinical Example

Peter Levine, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Together, we will explore the implications of Bodyoriented psychotherapy and recent findings in the neurosciences, on how the brain and body deals with emotional information, while also providing an understanding of effective therapeutic action. This training is geared for psychotherapists of all types, as well as for physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, bodyworkers, and educators.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the application of interoceptive awareness.
2. Demonstrate the tracking of a client’s inner experience.

Going off the Deep End: Rediscovering Our Magickal Roots in Healing and Psychotherapy

Scott Miller, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

The role of magick in physical and psychological healing is staging a comeback. Recently, the world’s two most populous countries have called upon folk healers, herbalists, and spiritual guides to address the pressing mental health needs of their citizenry. However the methods are believed to work—whether by the operation of spirits, the rebalancing of disharmonious energies, or other unknown powers—each approach shares a common denominator: the conviction that forces outside awareness, inaccessible to reason or direct observation, influence or even control life. Crucially, those viewed by the public as possessing the power to connect with such forces, are regarded as healers. It’s time for Western therapists to rediscover their magickal roots. This demonstration will identify and show possibilities for healing far beyond what the current and popular schools of thought defining psychotherapy would ever allow.

Educational Objectives:

1. Six structural components of magick will be identified, defined, and illustrated.
2. Participants will learn to enhance drama and therapeutic impact via careful observation of ideomotor response, using symbols to initiate transderivational search, and capitalizing on chance, change-producing moments.

Depression

Erving Polster / Michele Weiner-Davis / Michael Yapko

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 11. Depression is one of the most common problems brought to psychotherapists. Treatment options and biological substrates will be discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe three techniques for working with depression.
2. Describe modern neurobiological perspectives on depression.

Family and Couples II

John Gottman / Julie Gottman / Sue Johnson / Harriet Lerner

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 12. The family is a context in which treatment can be facilitated. Marriage has the capability of healing clients from old wounds.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe fundamentals of the Gottman/Johnson/Lerner approaches to couples and families.
2. Describe three characteristics of an effective consultation session with a couple.

Conversation Hour 09

Judith Beck, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Dr. Beck will be available to discuss clinical issues in (1) CBT for Personality Disorders (2) The Therapeutic Relationship in CBT, and/or 3) Other CBT related issues.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss how Dr. Beck’s work in one or more of these areas can be applied to your clients.

Conversation Hour 10

William Miller, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

Dr. Miller will discuss clinical issues in (1) the practice of motivational interviewing, (2) treating addiction, and/or (3) the integration of spirituality and psychotherapy.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss how Dr. Miller’s work in one or more of these areas can be applied in your own practice or workplace.

Would You Look for Something You Did Not Know Was Lost?

Christine Padesky, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

How can a metaphor motivate one client so powerfully and fall flat with the next? As therapists, we are usually not aware of the things we do that reduce opportunities for client engagement and discovery. How can we fix something that is out of our awareness? Padesky shares central ideas from her forthcoming book on guided discovery including three common signposts of missed opportunities and three responsive strategies for promoting client engagement and discovery.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify 3 signs of missed opportunities for client discovery.
2. Describe two ways to increase client engagement in active discovery processes.
3. Compare and link the roles of informational vs. synthesizing questions in discovery.

Transference Developments in Severe Personality Disorders

Otto Kernberg, MD

ACC North – 200

Description:

This presentation will differentiate the clinical characteristics and therapeutic management of several types of severely regressive transferences: typical split transferences of borderline patients, the fragmentation of affective experiences of schizoid personalities the intolerance of triangulation, and the narcissistic transferences. Clinical illustration will exemplify these differential transferences and their clinical management.

Educational Objectives:

1. Diagnose unexpected transference developments.
2. Analyze and reconstruct fragmented affective experiences.
3. Describe developments in the “intersubjective field”.

Positive Psychology, Positive Interventions and Positive Education

Martin Seligman, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 06
Seligman will review cutting edge research, techniques, and applications in Positive Psychology, Positive Psychotherapy, and Positive Education.

Educational Objectives:

1. Define PERMA.
2. List three Interventions.
3. Describe applications in education, the military and corporations.

Dance Party

Hilton – California Ballroom

Sexuality and Intimacy with Couples

Esther Perel, MA, LMFT

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Through podcasts and experiential exercises we will demonstrate clinical work around sexuality and intimacy with couples.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify common blocks to eroticism including the fear of abandonment or entrapment, as well as how our emotional history shapes our erotic blueprint.
2. Describe three strategies to help couples cultivate eroticism and bring a greater sense of aliveness to their relationship.

Motivational Interviewing

William Miller, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Dr. Miller will demonstrate and discuss the clinical method of motivational interviewing with one or two volunteers from the audience. This will not be a role-play but a “real-play” in which the speaker(s) will talk about some change they want to make but have not made yet.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how ambivalence about change is addressed in motivational interviewing.
2. Compare motivational interviewing with a prescriptive advice-giving approach as might occur in cognitive behavior therapy.

Humor in Therapy

Stephen Gilligan / Cloe Madanes / Bill O’Hanlon

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 13. Humor can convey deep meaning; it is one way of gift wrapping conceptual realizations for clients.

Educational Objectives:

1. Indicate ethical considerations for using humor in therapy.
2. Indicate three benefits and three limitations for using humor in therapy.

Art vs Science

Jean Houston / Scott Miller / Dan Siegel

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 14. Psychotherapy is an amalgamation of science and art. All we’ve can be created that amalgamates the art of effective therapeutic communication and empirically validated orientations.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe outcome informed treatment.
2. Describe the empirical basis of affective neurobiology at applied to psychotherapy.

Conversation Hour 11

David Burns, MD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Dr. Burns will describe his personal evolution from biological psychiatry during his psychiatric residency to cognitive behavior therapy, and then to the new TEAM-CBT, which he has recently developed. TEAM-CBT aims for extremely high-speed treatment using innovative cognitive and motivational (resistance-busting) techniques. He will invite questions from audience participants.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe why Dr. Burns gave up a tenure track position in biological psychiatry to help develop CBT in the 1970s.
2. Describe the four components of TEAM-CBT.

The Sex-Starved Marriage

Michele Weiner-Davis, LCSW

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

One out of every three couples struggles with mismatched sexual desire—a formula for marital disaster. When one spouse is sexually dissatisfied and the other is oblivious, unconcerned, or uncaring, sex isn’t the only casualty; a sense of emotional connection can also disappear. Helping couples bridge the desire gap can be challenging when one spouse appears unmotivated or lacks empathy. This speech presents a collaborative model for partners to work together to turn around the decline in their sex lives and reignite their emotional connection.

Educational Objectives:

1. Explain how to end the vicious cycle of refusing sex which leads to anger, less desire and more refusal.
2. Demonstrate coaching both partners about specific ways to alter their approach to increase their partner’s empathy and willingness to change.

How Quantum Perspectives Could Facilitate the Evolution of Psychotherapy

Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

An Introduction to the facts and fallacies of how the Quantum World View could facilitate the Evolution of Psychotherapy by integrating the best insights of the arts, humanities and sciences to support people, cultures and nations to become the best they can be.

Educational Objectives:

1. Explain how the quantum microscope could help people express themselves and solve their own problems.
2. Compare your usual self understanding with how the Quantum Qualia of Awareness may improve it.
3. Describe how you could expand your understanding of the quantum perspectives of Consciousness and Cosmos.

The Fiction of Memory

Elizabeth Loftus, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

For several decades, I have been manufacturing memories in unsuspecting minds. People can be led to believe that they did things that would have been rather implausible. They can be led to falsely believe that they had experiences that would have been emotional or traumatic had they actually happened. False memories, like true ones, also have consequences for people, affecting later thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. Can we tell true memories from false ones? In several studies, I created false memories in the minds of people, and then compared them to true memories. Once planted, the false memories look very much like true memories—in terms of behavioral characteristics, emotionality and neural signatures. If false memories can be so readily planted in the mind, do we need to think about “regulating” this mind technology? And what do these pseudo memories say about the nature of memory itself?

Educational Objectives:

1. Explain recent scientific research on the malleability of human memory.
2. Describe the science of memory distortion to psychotherapy, legal issues, and other policy matters.

Structural Interview

Otto Kernberg, MD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

A videotaped structural interview will be shown, and the technique of structural interviewing explored in that context. The participants should be able to recognize the methods of evaluating social functioning, identity formation and reality testing highlighted by this interviewing technique, and assessment of the presence and severity of personality disorders facilitated by this diagnostic method.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate structural interviewing.
2. Assess severity of personality disorders by means of this method.

Illuminating the Nature of Consciousness and Time with the Wheel of Awareness Practice

Daniel Siegel, MD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

In this clinical demonstration, participants will be offered an immersion in the Wheel of Awareness Practice and a summary of a 10,000 person study in which workshop participants from around the globe from a range of backgrounds provided reflections on the practice and how it enabled them to experience a contrast between mental activities, like feelings, thoughts, and memories, and the subjective experience of knowing within pure awareness itself. This demonstration will enable both experiential and conceptual learning to build on these research findings in exploring the nature of time at the Newtonian/Classical and Quantum physics levels, its relationships to consciousness, and their combined relevance for our understanding of mind, the practice of psychotherapy and the cultivation of personal and global well-being.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate how to offer the Wheel of Awareness to their clients as a way to integrate consciousness.
2. Define the Newtonian or Classical physics view of energy and the Arrow of Time and how these contrast to the Quantum level of reality and the Arrow-Free experience of pure awareness.

The Patient Therapist Relationship

Harville Hendrix / Helen LaKelly Hunt / Bill O’Hanlon / Christine Padesky

Marriott – Platinum 1-5

Description:

Topical Panel 15. Research has shown that the component responsible for effective treatment is the therapeutic relationship. Empirically-based dynamics will be described and discussed.

Educational Objectives:

1. Indicate the core conditions of the therapeutic relationship that guide psychotherapy.
2. Given the patient, describe how to establish an effective therapeutic relationship.

The Goals of the Therapist

Esther Perel / Bessel van der Kolk / Jeff Zeig

Marriott – Platinum 6-10

Description:

Topical Panel 16. The process of contracting for change in the initial session will be described and discussed. Methods of targeting goals will be compared and contrasted.

Educational Objectives:

1. Given the patient, describe three different ways of establishing goals.
2. Describe how goals can be empirically informed.

The Hope Circuit

Martin Seligman, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

I will review the past, present, and future of Learned Helplessness, Preparedness, Learned Optimism, Prospective Psychology and Positive Psychology.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss the past, present, and future of Learned Helplessness, Preparedness, Learned Optimism, Prospective Psychology, and Positive Psychology.

Conversation Hour 13

Erving Polster, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

An opportunity to engage Dr. Polster in open ended conversation about any aspect of his 70 years of experience as a psychotherapist and as witness to huge therapeutic movements.

Educational Objectives:

1. Increase discernment of and explain the interface between ordinary human communication and professional engagement.
2. Describe one positive implication of a historical therapeutic advance and one negative potential that must be addressed.

Contributions to the Practice of Strategic Therapy

Cloe Madanes, LIC, HDL

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Madanes will present 18 strategies that she developed for working with the whole age range and the whole range of problems presented to therapy. These interventions are in the tradition of Strategic Therapy in that the therapist plans a strategy that involves the social context of the individual and the therapist is directive, guiding clients towards the solutions for their challenges.

Educational Objectives:

1. List 3 strategies for working with families.
2. Name 3 strategies for working with couples.
3. Explain the importance of the apology.

The Challenge of Apologizing and the Complexity of Forgiveness

Harriet Lerner, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Lerner will present the 4 best ways to ruin an apology, explain what drives the entrenched nonapologizer, and share the key ingredient necessary to heal disconnections when “I’m sorry” is not enough. She will also address the excruciating pain of the hurt party who has received a bad apology or none at all, and explain how our predominant notions of forgiveness hurt those we aim to help.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the top four ways to ruin an apology.
2. Explain what drives the entrenched non-apologizer.
3. Explain how the hurt party can get through to a defensive wrongdoer.

New Breakthroughs in Cognitive Therapy: Applications to the Severely Mentally Ill

Aaron Beck, MD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 07 including an interview by Dr. Judith Beck.
According to a recent survey, Cognitive Therapy is now the leading form of psychotherapy throughout the world. Its application to the numerous psychological disorders, as well as medical problems, has been well documented. In recent years, Cognitive Therapy has been successfully applied to the most intractable and chronic disorders, such as severe mental illness. Strategies and techniques in treating schizophrenia will be described.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate a new understanding of cognitive therapy (CBT) and its applications.
2. Describe the application of CBT to severe mental illness.

Lunch Break

My Journey from Creating Evil to Inspiring Heroism

Philip Zimbardo, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 08
My lifelong interest in the nature of evil became focused on understanding its origins; in individual dispositions, social situations, and also at systemic levels. The Stanford Prison Experiment revealed the power of situations to dominate personalities. Recently, my vision has been refocused on inspiring/training youth to become everyday heroes, within our Heroic Imagination Project.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the processes by which good people can turn evil.
2. Describe how experimental research can shed new light on fundamental aspect of human nature.
3. Explain why it is possible to create a new generation of youth superheroes, who can be inspired with social psychological training to become everyday heroes-in-training.

The Satir Approach: Essence and Essentials

Maria Gomori, MSW, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

The Satir Model is focused on the whole human being, bringing about transformational change within the individual, family and social systems. The therapeutic process is experiential, systemic, positively directional, and change oriented. We are all part of a universal system: the Life Force that provides energy for growth.
A model for growth, focused on potential, and challenging the awareness of human beings on the expression of Self and the crucial need to value self and to feel validated, Self-Esteem is the cornerstone of Satir work.
Changing consciousness from competition to empowering, from self-pity to congruence.
The process requires the therapist have a high level of therapeutic competence, demonstrate congruence, and provide safety and guidance.
I will demonstrate, and we will practice, “The Iceberg,” one of Satir’s vehicles for change, a powerful process of internal transformation.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate and practice a change process
2. Demonstrate learning of how I use this process with individuals, couples, families and myself
3. Discuss the concept of self-validation

Mind Over Mood: Practical Applications for Therapists

Christine Padesky, PhD

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 1-5

Description:

Many therapists turn to self-help manuals for ideas of how to teach skills that can boost client progress. But how do these ideas get tailored to fit the needs of an individual client? Through case examples and guided participant exercises, Padesky demonstrates how therapists can make therapy more effective by selectively matching skills taught to particular client moods and using mood measures to track progress. She shows therapists how to strategically assign chapters from the 2nd Edition of Mind over Mood (Greenberger and Padesky, 2016) which includes more than 60 worksheets that help clients learn mood-management skills drawn from CBT, mindfulness, positive psychology, acceptance therapies, and happiness research.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify the two skills with the strongest evidence supporting their helpfulness for depression.
2. Explain why thought records are not a primary intervention for anxiety disorders.
3. Name one type of client problem that is likely to benefit from acceptance methods.

The State of Affairs: A Clinical Approach to Infidelity

Esther Perel, MA, LMFT

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Sexual infidelity is generally regarded as a grave symptom of a troubled relationship. Consequently, the revelation of an affair often triggers a crisis that threatens the entire foundation of trust and connection in a couple. Conventional practices mandate that therapists should insist upon full disclosure, never keep secrets, and view all infidelity as a highly traumatic event. However, when it comes to affairs, there is no one size fits all. This presentation locates infidelity within the broader social context of modern marriage, the digital culture, sexuality, and monogamy. Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss. Hence, this model presents how to work from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal for one and growth and expansion for the other. We will explore the unique pain points of romantic betrayal, and the meanings and motives that underlie illicit loves and desires.

Educational Objectives:

1. List a 3 part definition of infidelity- secrecy, emotional involvement and sexual alchemy.
2. Demonstrate 3 specific interventions to help couples work through the crisis, the meaning making and the new vision phase.
3. Create a safe therapeutic environment to work with the cost and benefits of secrets and to manage confidentiality, cost and benefits of secrecy and transparency and the management of confidentiality.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Narcissistic Personality Disorders

Otto Kernberg, MD

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 6-10

Description:

This workshop will describe the various clinical syndromes reflecting narcissistic personality disorders,
and the corresponding prognostic indicators for psychodynamic psychotherapy. The typical
transference developments of these patients will be outlined, and corresponding technical interventions
described. The relevance for the love life of these patients will be explored and treatment
implications described

Educational Objectives:

1. Diagnose the severity of narcissistic pathology and the therapeutic implications of the evaluation.
2. Describe the transference manifestations of the pathological grandiose self.
3. Diagnose and resolve the regressive countertransferences that unavoidably arise with these patients.

When Helping Doesn’t Help

David Burns, MD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 01 featuring Jeffrey Zeig, PhD. Although there’s been an overwhelming proliferation of new therapies for depression and anxiety, the controlled outcome studies have yielded disappointing results. Dr. Burns argues that this is because resistance has not been addressed, and describes a new approach called TEAM-CBT that solves this problem and promises superior outcomes.

Educational Objectives:

1. Explain why therapy so often fails despite the therapist’s sincerest efforts to help.
2. Describe the research and clinical experience that led to the development of TEAM-CBT.

The Primacy of Creativity in Effective Psychotherapy

Stephen Gilligan, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 02 featuring Jean Houston, PhD. Therapy is successful when clients are able to experientially realize positive life changes. While the identification and transformation of symptoms is important in this regard, the activation of the client’s creative capacity to change is even more important. This paper outlines 6 steps in this therapeutic process:: (1) opening a mindful field, (2) setting positive intentions, (3) developing and maintaining a creative state, (4) identifying a “storyboard” for achieving goals, (5) transforming negative experiences, and (6) everyday practices Methods and case examples will be given to illuminate this core process.

Educational Objectives:

1. Demonstrate how creating new experiential realities is the primary focus of therapy.
2. Identify 3 methods for developing a client’s creative state.
3. List three examples of how this creative state can be beneficially used.

Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past

Peter Levine, PhD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 03 featuring Bessel van der Kolk, MD. There is tremendous confusion in work with traumatic memories, often leaving clients and their therapists confused and insecure. In this lecture we will discuss the different types of memory (both explicit/conscious and implicit/unconscious) in resolving traumatic reactions, while avoiding the creation of “false memories.”

Educational Objectives:

1. List and comprehend the different types of memory systems.
2. Explain how to work with procedural (“body”) memories.
3. Demonstrate how to avoid the pitfalls of evoking spurious memories.

Beyond Therapy: Living and Telling in Community

Erving Polster, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 04 featuring Michael Yapko, PhD. Living is composed of a supreme flow of experiences. Therefore, people face a commanding challenge to their integrative powers. Telling helps them by revisiting this landscape, revealing the accessibly hidden markers of a lifetime. Dr. Polster will show how a sharply pointed attention to universal themes within a group process will light up our lives, giving shape to personal perspective. Techniques and precedents for conducting this process will be addressed.

Educational Objectives:

1. Analyze the expansion of therapy principles beyond quasi-medical purposes of the psychotherapy office to the application of these principles to the needs of everyday living.
2. Create congregations of people who meet for a communal exploration of life experiences.
3. Analyze options for designing group experiences.

Process-Based Therapy: The Future of Evidence-Based Care

Steven Hayes, PhD

Hilton – Pacific Ballroom

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 05 featuring David Burns, MD. Evidence-based care is still the future of mental and behavioral health intervention, but not in the form of protocols for syndromes which has finally collapsed of its own weight. This talk is about what is arising in its place. I argue that process-based therapy is the logical next step in the evolution of evidence-based care: evidence-based processes linked to evidence-based procedures that alleviate the problems and promote the prosperity of people. Using the work on psychological flexibility as a foil, I explore how process-based therapy can help dissolve some of the long standing differences between the various wings of psychotherapy, and liberate the practices of practitioners who value an evidence-based approach.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the traditional scientific approach to evidence-based therapy.
2. Describe what successful mediational studies demonstrate.
3. Define process-based therapy.

Interpersonal Neurobiology and the Art and Science of Psychotherapy

Dan Siegel, MD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 06 featuring Jack Kornfield, PhD. This presentation will discuss how synthesizing a range of disciplines that explore the nature of reality supports the dissolution of the barriers between spirituality and science and cultivates a common framework for the fields of mental health. By finding the consilience or common ground across many approaches the study life on earth, we can find a synergy of approaches in the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology that offers clinicians a way of defining the mind and offers a science-based strategy for cultivating mental health. Empirical findings are paralleled by the attachment studies that suggest that integrated relationships cultivate the growth of integration in the brain—a finding that may also serve as a possible hint as to how psychotherapeutic relationships underlying therapy of many strategies may support the growth of well-being. Integration—both within us (neural integration involving the functional and structural connections among differentiated areas) and between us (relational integration that honors differences and promotes compassionate linkages) appears to be the basis of optimal regulation, including our attention, emotion, thought, behavior, and relationships. In this view, integration may be the scientific basis of health and the fundamental aim for the healing art of psychotherapy.

Educational Objectives:

1. Define what the mind is from an interpersonal neurobiology perspective.
2. Explain how energy and information flow is regulated and forms the complex system of the mind.
3. Differentiate the concepts of consciousness, subjective experience, and information processing.

The Space Between: A New Way to Think About Couples Therapy

Harville Hendrix, PhD and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

With discussant Harriet Lerner, PhD. Reimagining couple hood as a partnership, rather than a competition, requires reimaging the “space
between,” rather than “the space within,” as the target of therapy. This relocation of the locus of change requires reimaging therapy as a process that facilitates connecting more than self-understanding. This lecture will propose “being” rather than “knowing” as the foundation of the therapeutic process and connection and wonder rather than insight and self-knowledge as the outcome.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss the distinction between “being” and “knowing”.
2. Compare the “space between” to the “space within”.
3. Cite the basic historic shifts in the structure and function of couple hood.

Completing General Systems Theory

John Gottman, PhD / William Bumberry, PhD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

Speeches with Discussant 08 featuring Jeffrey Zeig, PhD. It has been 50 years since General Systems Theory revolutionized psychotherapy. Yet it never became a real science, and the therapies it produced were either never evaluated or, when studied, produced only weak effects. We can now scientifically complete general systems theory and show that the new theory does result in highly effective couples and family therapy.

Educational Objectives:

1. List the new scientific definition of homeostasis in a couple’s relationship.
2. List the parameters and forces that create change in couples therapy.
3. Describe how systems theory can be extended to couples when as baby arrives.

Dinner Break

Was that Life? Well, then, Once Again!

Irvin Yalom, MD

ACC North – 200

Description:

Keynote 09
I shall present the development of my approach to psychotherapy beginning with interpersonally based group psychotherapy and then describing the genesis and development of an existential approach to psychotherapy. I shall discuss my various approaches to teaching including descriptions of research, writing textbooks and finally short stories and novels as a mode of teaching.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the therapeutic factors in group psychotherapy.
2. Define and describe the important factors inherent in a healing therapeutic relationship.
3. Describe the major factors inherent in an existential therapeutic approach.

Hypnotic and Neurobiological Approaches to Healing

Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD

Marriott – Marquis North

Description:

In this experiential workshop, we will learn the theory and practice of methods evolved out of Milton H Erickson’s innovative approaches to therapeutic hypnosis as presented in our new book: Richard Hill and Ernest Rossi (2017). A Practioner’s Guide to Mirroring Hands: A Client-Responsive Therapy that Facilitates Natural Problem Solving and Mind–Body Healing, with a Foreword by Jeffery Zeig. These easy-to-learn methods can facilitate Erickson’s natural problem solving and Mind-Body Healing that can supplement CBT, mindfulness, meditation, movement, and yoga.

Educational Objectives:

1. Name the most popular word in Milton H Erickson’s vocabulary for optimizing mind/body health and healing. (comfort)
2. Describe how you can recognize the 90-120-minute Basic Rest Activity Cycle. (minimal cues)
3. Name the 4-Stage Creative Cycle of Mind/Body Healing. (data, incubation, aha!, verification)

Evocative Approaches to Change

Jeffrey Zeig, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Patients change by virtue of the experiences that they live. Therapists can use advanced techniques including verbal and physical metaphors. Lecture, demonstration and practice.

Educational Objectives:

1. Given a patient, design an experiential approach.
2. Describe the function of metaphor in psychotherapy.

Transference Focused Psychotherapy

Otto Kernberg, MD

Marriott – Marquis Center and South

Description:

This workshop will present an overview of the theory of TFP, its relation to the structure of severe personality disorders, and its technique. the technique of TFP will be outlined as general strategy, particular technical instruments, and tactical approaches to complications and particular situations. Major consideration include transference, countertransference, technical neutrality and interpretation.

Educational Objectives:

1. Analyze indications and contraindications for TFP.
2. Demonstrate intervention from a position of technical neutrality.
3. Describe dealing interpretively with transference developments.

Strategic Therapy and Strategic Coaching

Cloe Madanes, LIC, HDL

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 6-10

Description:

Madanes will discuss how to incorporate life coaching strategies into your therapy practice and how to broaden your therapy practice to include spirituality, family justice, the apology and reparation. Some of the strategies will be illustrated with videos of actual interventions. There will be audience discussion.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe 3 life coaching strategies.
2. List the fundamental steps for the apology.
3. List the 4 steps of emotional and spiritual development.

An Invitation to Motivational Interviewing

William Miller, PhD

Hilton – Pacific AB

Description:

This workshop will be focused on the practice of motivational interviewing and will include an introduction to the spirit and method, experiential exercises, and both video and live demonstration.

Educational Objectives:

1. Explain the four therapeutic processes of motivational interviewing.
2. Differentiate client “change talk,” “sustain talk,” and “discord” and give examples of each type of statement.
3. Describe key elements of the underlying relational spirit of motivational interviewing.

Convergence of Therapist’s Personhood and Method

Erving Polster, PhD

Marriott – Platinum Ballroom 1-5

Description:

Concentration, curiosity, fascination and simplicity of observation are natural agents of personhood. Dr. Polster will show how these are interwoven with four cornerstones of methodology. These are: the tightening of therapeutic sequences, establishing good quality contact, eliciting relevant stories, and identifying parts of the self. Live therapeutic sessions will illustrate the principles.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the importance of small steps in therapy.
2. Describe the therapeutic flow of experience.
3. Elicit key stories about personal experiences and to highlight feelings and insights.

More Walk, Less Talk: Action-Packed Therapy

Christine Padesky, PhD

Marriott – Grand Ballroom

Description:

Is talking the best way to promote change and growth? We don’t tell toddlers how to walk or ask them how they feel about walking. We encourage trial and error experience. As a therapist in training, would lectures have been sufficient or did you need supervised practice? Talk therapy is not always the best therapy. Observe and practice several types of action that can be done in session to promote client learning. Experience how action-packed therapy can increase client engagement, discovery and change.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe two benefits of action-packed therapy.
2. Demonstrate one action approach that is likely to enhance client learning.
3. Plan and utilize three actions appropriate to use with current clients.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Weight Loss and Maintenance

Judith Beck, PhD

Hilton – Pacific CD

Description:

Most individuals have difficulty either losing weight or sustaining weight loss. A significant reason for this is that they never learned the cognitive and behavioral skills they need to be successful. In this interactive workshop, we will discuss how to help dieters make fundamental changes in their thinking so they can maintain fundamental and long lasting changes in their eating behavior. Skills include setting achievable goals; creating an accountability system; building selfefficacy; consistently using good eating habits; managing hunger, cravings, and the desire to eat for emotional reasons; solving eating-related problems; staying on track and getting back on track immediately when they make a mistake; and continually motivating themselves through their lifetime.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe how the cognitive model applies to weight loss.
2. List techniques to deal with hunger, craving and emotional eating.
3. Demonstrate strategies to motivate the reluctant or inconsistent client.

The Biology of Affect and Its Consequences

Antonio Damasio, MD

Hilton – California Ballroom

Description:

Keynote 10
Professor Damasio will review neural and psychological aspects of affect processing with an emphasis on the mechanisms of emotion and feeling. He will discuss the implication of the current science of affect for the understanding of psychotherapy.

Educational Objectives:

1. Understand the difference between emotions and feelings.
2. Realize that feelings are the conscious representations of life regulation.
3. Grasp the role of emotions and feelings in the processes of psychotherapy.

Closing Remarks

Jeffrey Zeig, PhD

Hilton – California Ballroom

This session is not for credit.

Experiential Approaches Combining Gestalt and Hypnosis

Erving Polster, PhD and Jeffrey Zeig

Marriott Elite Ballroom

Description:

Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have a first-hand experience of an alive therapeutic process. Such dynamic empowering experiences pave the way for dynamic understandings. Drs. Polster and Zeig will engage with each other and the participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work.

Educational Objectives:

1.Describe the synergy between Gestalt Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.
2. List two commonalities and two differences between Gestalt Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.
3. Describe the ten therapeutic patterns of Ericksonian influence communication.
4. Describe Ericksonian therapeutic rituals.
5. Name two positive effects of “tightening therapeutic sequences.”
6. Name two conceptual expansions resulting from the revision of the here and now orientation.

Lunch Break

Experiential Approaches Combining Gestalt and Hypnosis

Jeffrey Zeig and Erving Polster

Marriott Elite Ballroom

Description:

Gestalt therapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are experiential methods of change. In combination they can be synergistic. Psychotherapy is best when clients have a first-hand experience of an alive therapeutic process. Such dynamic empowering experiences pave the way for dynamic understandings. Drs. Polster and Zeig will engage with each other and the participants to examine commonalities and differences in their work.

Educational Objectives:

1. Describe the synergy between Gestalt Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.
2. List two commonalities and two differences between Gestalt Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.
3. Describe the ten therapeutic patterns of Ericksonian influence communication.
4. Describe Ericksonian therapeutic rituals.
5. Name two positive effects of “tightening therapeutic sequences.”
6. Name two conceptual expansions resulting from the revision of the here and now orientation.