CHANGING SELF-DESTRUCTIVE HABITS: PATHWAYS TO SOLUTIONS WITH COUPLES AND FAMILIES: A THREE-DAY INTENSIVE

In today’s highly toxic digital era of extremes, economic upheaval, and high stress, we are seeing increasingly more adolescents, adults, couples, and families presenting with multiple self-destructive behaviors like self-injury, eating disorders, substance abuse, problem gambling, excessive use of violent video-games, and Internet and cyber-sex abuse. Eventually, self-destructive clients will experience severe consequences in their intimate and family relationships and in other important areas of their lives. However, since these self-destructive habits are emotionally and physically rewarding and serve many functions for adolescents and adults, they will protect their choice habits at all costs, making it quite difficult for us to engage and retain them in treatment.

In this three-day intensive, participants will learn the major therapeutic tools and strategies of the Collaborative Strengths-Based Brief Family Therapy model, which can be applied to individuals, couples, and families. Participants will have the opportunity to observe and serve as a consultation team for live couple and family demonstration interviews conducted by the training hosts, ample time to present their own difficult and stuck self-destructive client cases for consultation, and engage in stimulating and fun skill-building exercises. Finally, the training hosts will provide user-friendly handouts and articles to further augment their learning experiences. As a result of attending this “hands-on” intensive training, participants will come away with a plethora of therapeutic tools and strategies they can put to immediate use with their toughest self-destructive clients and their intimate couple partners and/or families. The learning objectives are as follows:

• Use research-informed effective strategies for engaging and retaining in treatment self-destructive adolescents and adults in treatment
• Use important findings from self-change and quitting styles research to match what we do therapeutically with clients’ unique preferences and needs
• Determine with adolescents and adults the unique meanings of their self-destructive habits and the multiple functions they serve in their couple and family relationships and life stories in general
• Craft and select useful questions that tap client expertise, help establish well-formed treatment goals, and co-create with the clients compelling future realities
• Use mindfulness mediation and related practices to help our self-destructive clients find inner peace and happiness
• Guidelines for transforming self-destructive habits into constructive virtuous habits
• Construct, select, and tailor-fit therapeutic experiments and rituals with the unique needs, characteristics, and goals of the clients
• Guidelines for working with dual self-destructive habit couples and families where multiple members are engaging in self-destructive behaviors
• Strategies for working with trauma, the threat of suicide, and violent behavior
• Use one-person couple and family therapy in clinical situations where the self-destructive client is reluctant to participate in couple or family therapy
• Use effective and research-based couple and family relapse prevention tools and strategies
• Engage and actively collaborate with key resource people from the self-destructive client’s social network and involved helping professionals from larger systems

This three-day intensive is offered twice a year. The autumn intensive is held in Chicago and the summer intensive will be conducted in Barcelona or in another splendid location in Spain with English translation provided. The dates for the Chicago and intensive in Spain will be posted soon. Upon special request, we can bring this three-day training to your organization or practice-setting as well.