Expired Healing Intergenerational Wounds: An Integrative Approach

Old wounds and resentments from the family of origin can negatively impact adults in their current relationships with parents, spouse, or children. This workshop will explore ways to facilitate healing and dialogue in distressed relationships between adults and their families of origin, especially parents.

Utilizing a resilience-based view and an integrative relational-neurobiological approach, Dr. Fishbane addresses family legacies and loyalties, resentment and blame, cutoffs, differentiation, boundaries, guilt, forgiveness, and repair. Cultural and gender-based beliefs that affect intergenerational relationships will inform the discussion. The neurobiology underlying emotional reactivity will be explored, along with interventions to facilitate emotional intelligence and compassion between the generations. Dr. Fishbane will combine theory with case illustrations to facilitate intergenerational repair, promoting positive interactions and legacies into the future.

Learning Objectives:

• To identify problematic reactive interactional patterns between adults and their families of origin, and ways to intervene to facilitate change in the intergenerational family
• To help clients “grow up” their views of and current relationships with parents, seeing parents as real people on their own life journey
• To help clients become more relationally empowered in their intergenerational relationships, increasing emotion regulation, compassion, connection, and generosity in the family

Presenter:

Mona Fishbane, PhD (www.monafishbane.com), clinical psychologist in New Jersey, is former Director of Couple Therapy Training, Chicago Center for Family Health. Fishbane lectures nationally and internationally; she has published numerous articles on couple therapy, intergenerational relationships, and interpersonal neurobiology. Fishbane received the 2017 Family Psychologist of the Year Award from The American Psychological Association (Society for Couple & Family Psychology); and the 2023 Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Award from AFTA (American Family Therapy Academy). Fishbane’s book, Loving with the Brain in Mind: Neurobiology & Couple Therapy (2013), is part of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.

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