Careers in Family & Couples Therapy Panel with Kate Threlfall, Ph.D., Alex Klein, Psy.D., Keith Bones, Psy.D., and Aaron Gonzales, MA, LMFT

Join us for a panel of family therapists in various employment settings. In this workshop, a panel of family therapists will discuss their career paths in family and couples therapy. Hear how practicing clinicians launched their practice, got involved in teaching and publishing, worked in hospital settings, and other creative activities in the field of couples and family therapy.

Please contact Celestine Snell, M.A, AFTNC Student Rep at csnell@alliant.edu or Elaina Vielbaum, Psy.D, AFTNC Student Rep at evielbaum@wi.edu for any questions.

Come join Deb Dana, LCSW, for a weekend workshop!

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living, powerfully shaping experiences of safety and influencing the capacity for connection. How we move through the world—turning toward, backing away, sometimes attaching and other times isolating—is guided by this system. We now understand how in response to traumatic experiences, autonomic pathways of connection are replaced with patterns of protection and the drive to survive operates in opposition to the need for connection. With the development of Polyvagal Theory, therapists have a guide to the neurophysiological processes of mobilization, collapse, and social engagement and can reliably help clients reshape their autonomic responses and rewrite the stories that are carried in their autonomic pathways. With an updated map of the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviors and beliefs, we can lead our clients out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety that sets the stage for connection and is necessary for successful treatment.

A Polyvagal Theory guided approach to therapy begins with helping clients map their autonomic profiles and track their moment-to-moment movement along the autonomic hierarchy. With this foundation, the essential clinical questions address how to help clients interrupt habitual response patterns and find safety in a state of engagement. Working from a foundation of Polyvagal Theory, therapists have a guide to becoming a regulated and co-regulating resource, practical ways to effectively help clients identify and interrupt their familiar response patterns, and strategies to shape their autonomic nervous systems toward safety and connection.

Come join Deb Dana, LCSW, for a weekend workshop!

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living, powerfully shaping experiences of safety and influencing the capacity for connection. How we move through the world—turning toward, backing away, sometimes attaching and other times isolating—is guided by this system. We now understand how in response to traumatic experiences, autonomic pathways of connection are replaced with patterns of protection and the drive to survive operates in opposition to the need for connection. With the development of Polyvagal Theory, therapists have a guide to the neurophysiological processes of mobilization, collapse, and social engagement and can reliably help clients reshape their autonomic responses and rewrite the stories that are carried in their autonomic pathways. With an updated map of the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviors and beliefs, we can lead our clients out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety that sets the stage for connection and is necessary for successful treatment.

A Polyvagal Theory guided approach to therapy begins with helping clients map their autonomic profiles and track their moment-to-moment movement along the autonomic hierarchy. With this foundation, the essential clinical questions address how to help clients interrupt habitual response patterns and find safety in a state of engagement. Working from a foundation of Polyvagal Theory, therapists have a guide to becoming a regulated and co-regulating resource, practical ways to effectively help clients identify and interrupt their familiar response patterns, and strategies to shape their autonomic nervous systems toward safety and connection.

This will be a training in which you will be able to learn an evidence-based modality that can be used with families. Multidimensional Family Therapy can be used with diverse families and can create lasting change. Training will include case vignette discussions, as well as Q&A with an MDFT-trained therapist.

This presentation explores what happens as societal context, power, and emotion converge in couple therapy. Video clips illustrate how to apply Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy (SERT), an approach that centers relational justice as an important component of ethical, socioculturally attuned practice and challenges cultural discourse that privileges individuality at the expense of relationships. Developed through over 15 years of process research focused on what works to create transformative, third-order change, SERT interrupts societal-based inequities and enables partners to realize their expectations for mutually supportive, health affirming relationships based on the Circle of Care––mutual vulnerability, attunement, influence, and relational responsibility. Participants will learn key clinical strategies for each of the three phases of the SERT clinical sequence, with an emphasis on mapping the socio-contextual nature of emotion, working with the connections between power and sociocultural vulnerability, and implications for clinical decision-making in couple therapy.

Couple therapy is difficult for many reasons. Therapists must deal with two clients, often at war with each other, with differing psychologies, histories, agendas, and levels of commitment to therapy. Additionally, there are many schools of thought on how best to do couple therapy and relatively little guidance concerning how to choose among them. In this lecture, Professor Arthur Nielsen will describe his own development as a couple therapist that led to the integrative approach described in his two textbooks on couple therapy:
• A Roadmap for Couple Therapy: An Integration of Systemic, Psychodynamic, and Behavioral Approaches (2016), and
• Integrative couple therapy in action: A practical guide for handling common relationship problems and crises (2022).
Using a case history, Dr. Nielsen will describe the core research-tested interventions used by the three main approaches to couple therapy (systemic, psychodynamic, and behavioral/educational) and show how to sequence and integrate them depending on the problems that couples present. The lecture/workshop should be valuable to both beginners and advanced practitioners of couple therapy, especially as will address issues of sequencing and choice between the myriad possible interventions now available.