Strategies With Couples
Couples therapy often requires unique skills and finesse in order to maintain the therapist’s neutrality between each member of the couple, while still being able to challenge the couple and promote change. This workshop is designed to expand your skills with couples, and increase your repertoire of intervention tools. We will address some of the most frequent conflicts with couples: problems with intimacy, parenting, jealousy, in-laws, finances, and other common areas about which couples argue. Strategies to handle these conflicts will be explored, along with ways to reveal underlying issues. When couples can divest themselves of superficial fighting and address the deeper relational dynamics, real change can begin. This workshop will help you assist couples in examining their core issues, and move them toward mutual respect and understanding.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Identify problems in couples therapy; both from patient and therapist perspectives.
2. Provide therapeutic tools to manage frequent problems encountered in couples therapy.
3. Learn to surpass surface conflict, focusing on deep relational issues that lead to change.
4. Help engender greater empathy, respect, and understanding between members of a couple.

Affairs: Helping Couples Heal
Affairs represent a significant stressor in a couple's relationship. When affairs are discovered, it creates a schism, which may lead to an irreparable breach of trust, depression in one or both members of the couple, and possibly violence. Affairs are one of the most commonly cited reasons why couples dissolve their relationships. Such circumstances may also lead to a contentious and acrimonious divorce, resulting in children who must suffer the aftermath for years to come. Some marriages and relationships can be repaired, and perhaps grow stronger through the process of healing from the affair. Helping couples cope with affairs and discover the underlying dynamic that lead to the affair is an integral part of couples therapy. This workshop is designed to assist clinicians in working with couples that have been impacted by affairs.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Learn how to diffuse the immediacy of the conflict.
2. Facilitate exploration of the factors that led to the affair and the subsequent feelings of betrayal, depression etc.
3. Create manageable steps for the couple working through an affair.
4. Assist couples who are desirous of staying together in fostering a stronger relationship to help prevent future affairs.

Be a Tech-Smart Therapist: Providing Internet Safety for Our Youth
Internet crimes against children are one of the fastest growing fields of law enforcement in the new century. This workshop will explore technology risks and benefits in order to better assess for abuse, but also to strategize for age-based population interventions and communications using technology. As we are faced with the truth about technology, we will share methods for internet safety and cyber-violence prevention of children in our lives at home and practice being “Cyber Smart”. You can be a “Cyber Savvy” adult.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Provide tools for internet safety
2. Offer interventions and referrals for parents and children who live in the land of technology
3. Familiarize participants with easy “tech tricks” to keep young clients engaged in therapy.

Mental Health of our Expanding Waistlines: Addressing Social Determinants of Childhood Obesity
Is our environment making our children sick? How is the mental health of our community related to our growing children? What can we do as mental health professionals to address this public health crisis?

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Acknowledge the role of mental health practitioners in the scope of public health
2. Increase cultural humility in our work and practice
3. Learn skills to give community-minded diagnoses
4. Build our resources for community-based mental health treatment

Brains, Trains, and Grown Ups: Living Life through our Attachments
Ride this workshop and travel the developmental brainwaves from infancy to adulthood. This 3-hour course will focus on attachment-both in theory and practice. We will explore the diagnostic implications of early attachment and identify how our attachments affect our behaviors and relationships through the course of our development. Finally, we will use our relational therapy skills to address issues that arise as a result of our attachments.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Identify different kinds of attachments based on theory and practice
2. Map behaviors related to early relationships
3. Chart diagnostic possibilities as a result of changing attachments
4. Explore adult experiences based on early attachments

Effective Parenting Strategies
Many parents want to provide their children with the discipline, structure and autonomy to grow, but lack the knowledge or skills required. For example, too many parents rely on “time-outs” and punishments by taking away a favored toy or privilege. These strategies lose their efficacy over time, especially when applied intermittently. Some parents resort to inappropriate measures, modeled by their own parents years ago, when they have run out of options. There is a wealth of other parenting strategies that are beneficial for parents to know. This class is designed to review the wide variety of tools available to promote effective parenting. Handouts will also be provided, which can be given to parents. This workshop is designed to expand your resources as a therapist, when treating client populations in need of parenting skills training.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Increase the therapist’s knowledge base and resources for teaching parenting skills.
2. Help parents to distinguish between inappropriate and effective discipline measures.
3. Help parents to practice and implement useful, authoritative parenting strategies.

Law and Ethics
A thorough understanding of current laws and ethical standards pertaining to psychotherapy is critical for therapists. This course, complete with an engaging PowerPoint presentation, will present a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of issues such as privilege and confidentiality, danger to self or others, treatment of minors, mandated responsibilities and other legal issues related to MFT and LCSW practice. Recent changes in the law will be highlighted.

At the completion of this course participants will be able to:
1. Recognize when they have legal and ethical responsibilities
2. Understand how to carry out those legal and ethical responsibilities
3. Maintain a standard of care against charges of criminal, civil, and ethical wrongdoing
4. Know when and how to properly consult to better uphold legal and ethical responsibilities

This course satisfies the requirements for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences mandatory Continuing Education course in Law and Ethics.

Helping Children Deal With Grief
Most people do not know how to comfort a grieving adult, let alone a grieving child. Yet many children are confronted with a death before they have the skills to cope adaptively. During childhood many children lose a beloved pet or grandparent; some even suffer the loss of their mother, father, or other primary caretaker. Children grieve in uniquely different ways compared to adults. Some families complicate the issue by hiding grief responses from children, thinking they are too young to understand. Unprocessed childhood grief can negatively shape psychological development. Childhood grief can be delayed, surfacing during episodes of change, or during the identity struggles of adolescence. Children who have been unable to grieve can be drawn to substances in a maladaptive attempt to drown unmanageable emotions. Some children may also remain frozen in the developmental period during which they lost a parent. Children who lose their parents before adulthood are often profoundly impacted by the loss, throughout their whole life. Modeling healthy grieving processes and promoting resilience can help prevent pathological reactions and instill a child with the ability to cope well with future losses. This workshop will provide strategies for reaching grieving children.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Review symptoms of grief in children.
2. Discuss the impact of unprocessed grief on children and later in adulthood.
3. Identify treatment issues for children who have suffered loss of a loved one.
4. Provide therapists with effective strategies for helping children grieve.

Avoiding Valium: Practical Techniques for Managing Vicarious Trauma
How often have you come home from work and not been asked how your day went? We have been trained to hear stories that most people can choose to change the channel as things seem to get uncomfortable. In this workshop, participants will take the steps to identify the traumatic nature of our roles as mental health providers. We will be sharing tools to address the vicarious trauma we experience through walking with our clients’ life crises. Lastly we will explore methods of self-care so we may continue to be great therapists.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Identify the spectrum and indicators of vicarious trauma
2. Plan strategies for debriefing and managing counter-transference issues as they arise
3. Practice self-care techniques to prevent burn-out

Psychotherapy With Twins
Twin births are on the rise with the ever-increasing number of technologically-assisted pregnancies. Multiples carry increased risks for a variety of physical and emotional difficulties. Mothers of multiples have a higher incidence of depression than parents of single born children. Also, the strain on the family system is significant and presents different challenges than does traditional single child parenting. Twins in primary school, middle school and adolescence have unique struggles concerning peer relationships and their twin relationship. The complexity of the twin relationship can lead to extreme competitiveness or enmeshment. Twins seeking therapy as adults often present with symptoms unique to being a twin. Lingering issues regarding identity, assertiveness, social skills, and communication patterns are often intertwined with their twin relationship. Individuation is not only an issue for the family, but the twin as well.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Explore twin development across their lifespans.
2. Identify treatment issues specific to twins.
3. Identify strategies to help twins adapt socially in the world.
4. Review resources for parents of multiples.
5. Review ways for parents of multiples to cope, thus reducing anxiety and depression.

Treating Compulsive Overeaters
Up to one-third of the U.S. population is overweight, yet DSM-IV-TR simply lists compulsive overeating as a subcategory of Eating Disorder NOS. Overeating seems to be overlooked and under-treated in many clinical circles, however it is literally a growing problem in our society. There are a variety of factors that contribute to compulsive overeating: both behavioral and emotional. Sharing some common factors with addiction, patterns of overeating are deeply engrained and patients often are highly resistant to change. Also present are biological factors that can fuel further overeating and complicate recovery. This workshop is designed to promote a multi-modal format for treating compulsive overeating. Knowledge of medical and psychiatric resources will be combined with treatment solutions for the behavioral and emotional components of overeating.

Objectives of this workshop are to:
1. Identify symptoms of compulsive overeating.
2. Review behavioral patterns that reinforce overeating and explore other causal factors.
3. Discuss behavioral strategies to promote change.
4. Highlight a variety of coping strategies to effectively manage compulsive overeating.
5. Address medical and psychiatric resources that can support treatment.