Transforming Resistance 3-Hour Webinar Series Monthly CURRICULUM (one topic per month)

CIRRICULUM (one topic per month)

  1. Introduction
    1. Introductory principles
    2. The training process, problems in learning
    3. Developing your unique style, making flexible & deliberate choices
    4. Therapist stance
    5. The person of the therapist: improving emotional capacity, focus, presence, persistence
    6. Anxiety regulating versus anxiety provoking approaches
    7. Experiential Dynamic Therapies (EDTs):  ISTDP, AEDP and psychodynamic theory
    8. Triangle of conflict: the body knows what the mind defends
    9. Triangle of person: activation of the attachment system and linkages
    10. Mechanisms of transformation
  2. Moment to Moment Tracking, Theory
    1. The importance of a clinical map
    2. Problems & goals
    3. Understanding the triangle of conflict and its relationship to the triangle person
    4. Focusing on the front of the system
    5. Distinguishing anxiety from defense
  3. Moment to moment tracking, Technique
    1.   Maintaining an internal, experiential focus
    2.   Keeping patient motivation high
    3. Avoiding therapist agenda/ polarization/ misalliance
    4. Technical principles for precise moment-to-moment tracking
  4. Understanding resistance and defenses
    1. Understanding the function of resistance and defenses
    2. Defenses against feeling versus defenses against connection
    3. Syntonic versus dystonic defenses
    4. Defensive exclusion
    5. Clearing the path
  5. Defense clarification
    1. Defense recognition
    2.   Validation
    3.   Cost
    4. Function 
    5. Fork in the road; transformance, the healthy alternative
  6. Defense restructuring
    1. Affirmative/implicit versus explicit defense work
    2. Defense relinquishing techniques, traffic cop
    3. 3 systems of resistance
  7. Understanding anxiety
    1. Anxiety physiology and pathways
    2. Anxiety thresholds, window of tolerance
    3. Healthy versus unhealthy anxiety
    4. Understanding dysregulation
  8. Anxiety regulation
    1. Anxiety regulation techniques
    2. Increasing anxiety tolerance
    3. Building emotional capacity
  9. Understanding affect facilitation
    1. Components of affect, the ladder of the emotion
    2. Maintaining an experiential focus
    3. Conflicted feelings versus mixed, complex feelings
    4. The role of guilt, shame and fear
  10. Emotional breakthroughs & unlockings
    1. Leading versus following
    2. Right brain focus
    3. Linkages to the past
    4. Working with feelings toward the therapist (transference and real)
    5. Metaprocessing
    6. Emotional breakthroughs
    7. Portrayals
    8. Accessing unconscious material
    9. Undoing defensive exclusion: becoming whole by welcoming back disavowed aspects of self
    10. Importance of insight and consolidation: rewriting the narrative