Full Schedule

David Whyte will look at daily practices that cultivate a sense of real physical presence, real conversation and most transformatively, real invitations to the world and to others; invitations to a life that from the outside looks creative and zestful, but springs from a deep form of resting into our bodies and our way of living.

Making real invitations, and asking increasingly beautiful questions of life - of others and of ourselves - is one of the foundational ways we can practice and shape a more beautiful mind. It is interesting to think that we might be able to practice shaping our imaginations, our perceptions and our minds, just as we practice a musical instrument, and that there are ways of improving ourselves that are pleasurable and rewarding in and of themselves, without necessarily having puritanical goals.

The creative life is no source of immunity from the difficulties of existence, but a creative, invitational life is one that has as much rest, joy, intellectual and physical enthusiasm and surprise as it does grief, stress and angst.

This workshop will describe the assessment and treatment process of a sex positive and integrated approach to compulsive sexual behavior disorder. Case illustrations and discussion will be used throughout the workshop. We will also discuss recent research on the relationship between CSBD and religiosity, moral incongruence, attachment styles and emotion dysregulation and how to incorporate those issues into treatment.

This workshop is designed to provide an overview of National ethical standards. In today's world, healthcare professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors are facing ethical dilemmas in a high technology and social media world. Additionally, this seminar will review self‐disclosures in the age of the internet, privacy, security, clinical supervision, and ethical reasoning. An overview of the moral concepts of goodness, right, and obligation, and the ways in which they operate in society, religion, and law. These concepts are further enhanced during workshop discussions and group work.

Therapists often feel challenged working with couples in the aftermath of infidelity. The relationship is in crisis, emotions are intense, and PTSD symptoms can surface and become unrelenting. You are required to quickly organize a lot of complex information into a coherent treatment plan. How do you do this with confidence?

Ellyn will describe the three stages of infidelity treatment, show how to uncover the meaning of infidelity, describe when and why obsessing is valuable and when it is not and demonstrate via video how to move partners past the crisis stage into deeper work.

Talking is the most dangerous thing most of us do, and listening is the most infrequent. Safe Conversations Dialogue is talking without judgment, listening without criticism and connecting beyond difference.

Generative Psychotherapy sees a client’s negative states—depression, anxiety, addictions, negative habits-- as not-yet-valued attempts to satisfy core needs. The premise is that each core human experience—anger, vulnerability, not-knowing, playfulness--has equivalent potential to be positive or negative, depending on its human connections. Thus, a child’s anger becomes a negative symptom when met with hostile rejection, but a resource when engaged with skillful compassion.

This workshop will explore ways that this understanding can transform negative problems into positive resources. A general framework will be presented, illuminated by multiple techniques, mini-demos, case examples, and a guided process. A major emphasis will be on the underlying nonverbal presence needed to make all this work.

The demonstration of a family hypnotic session offers a clear idea of the powerful and subtle resistances a family members may develop in the course of their therapeutic treatment as well as of the many different solutions a therapist may adopt to overcome these resistances.
Bodily communication, minimal cues and ideomotor responses can activate emotions in the family and make them available to produce change
Indirect as well as direct forms of hypnosis to be used in the family interview will be presented and special attention will be dedicated to the criteria to follow in order to combine properly direct and indirect hypnotic communication in the different phases of the therapeutic process.

The tragic death of my beloved wife of 58 years provides a basis for an examination of treatment implications for individuals who experience traumatic bereavement.

As with any approach, couple therapy must have a clear vision toward which the couple can navigate. We may call this the therapeutic goal or therapeutic narrative. The clarity by which the therapist holds this vision and expects the couple to meet this goal largely determines therapeutic success. We might ask the couple before us, “Why are you a couple?” “What’s the point of your relationship?” “Who or what do you both serve?” Most partners will say, “We love each other,” or, “We have children,” or, “We have similar things in common.” This workshop focuses on what predicts long term success in adult romantic relationships. We will discuss how purpose and shared vision sets the stage for meaningful, long-lasting relationships, and how a lack of purpose, shared meaning, and shared principles of governance (guardrails that protect partners from each other) is a predictor of accumulated, psychobiological threat and eventual dissolution. Here we examine couple capacity to co-regulate distress states as essential to threat reduction as well as confront the couple attitude when it comes to what sustains relationships over the long run. Love is not enough to ensure relationship endurance given the ever-present, survival-based nature of the human primate.

The End of Mental Illness discards an outdated, stigmatizing paradigm and replaces it with a modern brain-based, whole-person program rooted in science and hope. Based on the world’s largest functional brain imaging database, Dr. Amen believes we should stop talking about mental illnesses, and call them what they really are – brain health issues that steal your mind that can be helped when we heal your brain.

Half of North American adults suffer from chronic illness a fact Western medicine views largely in terms of individual predispositions and habits. Western medicine imposes two separations, neither tenable scientifically. First, it separates mind from the body, largely assuming that most chronic illnesses have nothing to do with people's emotional and psychological experiences. And yet, a large and irrefutable body of research has clearly shown that physiologic and behavioural functioning of human beings can be understood only if we integrate our body functions with those of the mind: functions such as awareness, emotions, our interpretations of and responses to events, and our relationships with other people. Second, Western practice views people's health as sep arate from the social environment, ignoring social determinants of health such as class, gender, economic status, and race. Such factors, in reality, are more important influences on health and longevity than individual predispositions and personal factors such as genes, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and so on.

This talk shows how a society dedicated to material pursuits rather than genuine human needs and spiritual values stresses its members, undermines healthy child development and dooms many to chronic illness, from diabetes to heart disease, from autoimmune conditions to cancer.

Join in a conversation hour with David Whyte, discussing topics from the Plenary Address: The Invitational Identity: The Art and Practice of Shaping a More Beautiful Mind.

Hope predicts better outcomes in psychotherapy, whether measured from the perspective of clients or their therapists. Hope is also a universal human experience and a component of mental health more generally. Research and scholarship on hope are blossoming in the fields of ecology, economics, medicine, nursing, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, and theology. Yet what IS hope? In his forthcoming book on the subject, Bill Miller describes eight different kinds and ways of hoping. It can be probability, possibility, desire, optimism, trust, meaning, perseverance, or that elusive hope against hope. When working with clients in need of hope, here are eight different sources to explore.

Research indicates that the relative efficacy pf psychotherapy has not improved over the past three decades, and moreover the quality to the therapeutic alliance is three times as important in predicting treatment outcomes than the specific treatment modality. Against this background, Dr. Meichenbaum discusses the HYPE and exaggerated claims in the field of psychotherapy, A Consumer Checklist will be presented that helps both therapists and patients become more critical consumers of psychotherapeutic approaches.

This clinical demonstration will feature the 7 necessary conditions for sustainable therapeutic change: (1) a state of positive well-being; (2) a positive resonant goal; (3) resources; (4) welcoming obstacles; (5) integration of the parts into a creative whole; (6) commitment to practical action, and (7) commitment to daily practices. The practical ways to develop and integrate these complementary dimensions will be highlighted.

Cloe Madanes will present the highlights of what she learned during her career, starting as teacher of family therapy to teacher of life coaching. She will present several case studies to illustrate some of the important values and principles of our profession as therapists.