Workshop

Deconstructing Impasses: A Road Map for Couples Therapy

Description

One of the greatest challenges couples therapists face is how to help couples move beyond their reactive cycles so they can deal with their concerns and dilemmas in a reflective manner. In this workshop, Michele Scheinkman will present the vulnerability cycle as a concept that helps therapists understand couples entrenched impasses, and as a major anchor of the therapeutic process. She will demonstrate how to create a “holding environment” to help couples contain their anxiety and escalation; she will then describe a collaborative multi-level approach to orient the therapist on how to move through the therapeutic process step by step exploring potential interactional, organizational, intrapsychic, and intergenerational layers of the problem.

Major focus will be on how to help couples move from defensiveness to expressions of vulnerability and yearning, and from rigid impasses to an ability to dialogue, negotiate and make choices. Video clips will demonstrate how the vulnerability cycle can be a useful tool for the therapist working with complex situations of jealousy, intimacy and infidelity.
 
Faculty: Michele Scheinkman, L.C.S.W., is a faculty member at The Ackerman Institute for the Family. She also maintains a private practice in New York City. Former Director of Training at the Chicago Center for Family Health and Lecturer at the University of Chicago, she was a consultant at the multicultural Roberto Clemente Center and gives workshops in the USA, Europe and Latin America. Her most recent articles, Disarming Jealousy in Couples Relationships: A Multidimensional Approach (2010) co-authored with Denise Werneck, The Multi-level Approach: A Road Map to Couples Therapy (2008), Beyond the Trauma of Betrayal: Reconsidering Affairs in Couples Therapy (2005), and The Vulnerability Cycle: Working With Impasses In Couples Therapy (2004) co-authored with Mona Fishbane, were published in Family Process.
 
Date: Friday, February 24, 2012 
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Tuition: $128
CE Credits: 5