A104 Couples Therapy with Intimacy Avoiders

Intimacy can be a conundrum for clients who've emerged from painful childhoods or dysfunctional families. Yet authentic connection-intimacy-is our natural state, the one we most crave, despite our wounds and defenses. This course focuses on the fundamentals of Relational Recovery Therapy, a clinical approach developed to help restore intimacy in relationships. You'll learn the 7 key therapeutic skills central to the approach-including empowering the woman, confronting male grandiosity, creating the preconditions for intimacy, and amplifying progress-and 5 key relationship skills-including relational esteem, listening relationally, and contracting. Drawing from research on boys' and girls' development, we'll examine approaches to help couples move beyond "psychological patriarchy" to authentic passion. You'll learn specific treatment techniques and skills to empower men and women to bring their full selves into the relationship.

Meet The Instructor

Terrence Real, bestselling author of I Don't Want to Talk about It and How Can I Get Through to You?, is a senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge in Massachusetts and director of the Gender Relations Program at the Meadows Institute in Wickenburg, Arizona. He's practiced and taught family therapy for more than 20 years. He's given workshops nationwide on relational recovery therapy, depression, male psychology, addictions recovery, and spirituality and is a former faculty member of the Smith College School for Social Work.

Course Contents

Session 1: Overview • Why so many women are unhappy and men are not. • Understanding grandiosity and shame • How to help women stand up constructively • How to help men come down from grandiosity

Session 2: The Couples Dance • Identifying the couple's "deal" • The art of telling the truth • Bringing the deal back to family of origin • Bringing the deal into the future • Offering a New Deal

Session 3: Intimacy • The preconditions for intimacy ddiction • Acting Out and Psychiatric Disorders

Session 4: A New Vision of Love • Relational empowerment • Speaking to be known • Listening to understand

Session 5: Changing the Deal • Relational empowerment--phase 2 • Moving from understanding into repair - brokering a new deal • Celebrating the healing new choreography

Session 6: Final Treatment Stages • Building a relational subculture • Further steps for training/dissemination/ support for ourselves

Learning Objectives

1. Define therapeutic leverage and describe how to use it in initial sessions.
2. Distinguish between empowering the woman and reconnecting the man.
3. Describe how to create a therapeutic contract focused on transforming the couple's dance.
4. Define 5 critical relationship skills
5. Describe 5 guidelines for therapeutic truth telling
6. Describe the goals of the final stage of treatment