It’s good for a therapist to be an accepting, empathic listener, but getting stuck in the “nice” gear can restrict your ability to ask challenging questions, set limits, provide reality checks, or speak important truths. This workshop will teach you how to expand your clinical repertoire beyond nice. We’ll address the discomfort, fears, and desire to be liked

Even as skilled, veteran therapists, we can find ourselves clumsily blundering through certain awkward clinical situations---a client gets angry at us, flatly rejects our brilliant interventions, or questions our competence. With couples, one partner may hog all the air time or refuse to consider the possibility that he or she may need to change, too.

Self-destructive behaviors are often a puzzle. Why does someone mutilate herself or become addicted to a substance he knows is harmful? This workshop explains these behaviors---and gives you the tools to resolve them---by viewing them as part of a larger cycle. We’ll learn that such behavior often starts in response to sexual,

You know you’re facing resistance when your client shrugs or mumbles “I don’t know” to most of your questions, responds with “Yes, but . . .” to your suggestions, and seems terminally bored. Meanwhile, therapy seems to be at a dead end and you feel insecure, incompetent, frustrated, even angry. In this practical and enlightening workshop, we’ll discuss

Therapists often avoid treating clients with eating disorders because standard treatments like eating management and food diaries have a high failure rate. One reason for the ineffectiveness of such approaches is that many focus primarily, or solely, on overcoming the behavior---a dynamic that can lead to a power struggle that obscures underlying issues.

We often think about forgiveness as “letting go”---of pain, anger, and bitterness. In this workshop, you’ll learn that it’s just as much about “putting back,” specifically, in the form of restoring love and trustworthiness. That’s the basis of Restoration Therapy, which pays particular attention to frameworks of love, trust, justice, and power in helping relationships heal.

Despite average or above average intelligence, kids and adolescents on the autism spectrum, including Asperger’s Syndrome, genuinely struggle with social cues, “getting” social norms in conversation, and generally figuring out how to be part of the ordinary social flow. This workshop will present practical strategies that’ll help these children with the concrete skills they

Whether it’s a food addiction, gambling, illegal drug abuse, or alcohol, the likelihood of developing an addiction and the possibilities for recovery are evident in brain activity. The sciences of brain imagery and neurobiological research are providing a new understanding about the vulnerability to addiction and relapse. Brain science also is pointing

Although medications are often prescribed to treat depression, there’s a range of empirically tested psychotherapeutic techniques that are at least as effective, and sometimes more so, than medications by themselves. In addition, these strategies can teach new skills about how to cope with ongoing problems, and challenge and change self-defeating behaviors

Narcissists---notoriously arrogant, condescending, lacking empathy, emotionally detached---often seem incapable of genuine relationship with anyone, therapists included. So how can we summon compassion for narcissists and engage them in treatment when they’re more likely to attack than cooperate with us? In this workshop, we’ll explore a method