Treating Couples: Surmounting Challenges

Course Overview

Couples therapy presents complexity unlike any other form of therapy, and today's therapists treating couples need to address increasingly difficult situations. Effective couples therapy requires clinicians to understand and address many relational challenges in an intimate context that can sometimes invite defensiveness and repetition of problematic patterns. In addition, the persistent stress of our socio-political-cultural contexts has been a strain on couples and therapists alike. 

This course will focus on doing effective relational work in the midst of specific challenges, including working with couples in significant conflict; helping couples with marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQIA identities maintain stable and cohesive relationships; healing from infidelity; addressing the needs of gay male couples; as well as working with neurodiversity and different attachment needs in couples treatment. We will also discuss the therapeutic position of a couples therapist using concepts from Emotionally Focused Therapy, the Developmental Model, and other integrative models.  

We continue the popular series format this year to delve deeper each week and allow ample time for audience questions. Clinicians will gain key strategies to help advance their treatment skills and improve their effectiveness with couples. 

Who Should Attend

• Primary Care Physicians
• Psychologists 
• Social Workers
• Counselors
• Family Therapists
• Other

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to: 

• Review how neurotype impacts clinical practice with neurodiverse couples.
• Organize a coherent treatment plan when one partner continues obsessing after infidelity, recognizing what obsessing accomplishes and what it does not.
• Articulate key interventions that help clients to regulate key emotional responses and reduce reactivity.
• Conduct an assessment of the couples’ relational health using two frames related to systemic trauma.
• Identify specific norms for treating male couples compared to other populations, and address intersectionality issues that may arise.