MFT Therapy DVD Continuing Training for Therapists and Students
Bill Doherty does workshops around the country on couples therapy. The following topical presentations were recorded over a two day workshop and offer you invaluable training and perspective from over 30 years of working with couples, conducting research, and training and supervising therapists.
Course info and descriptions are below.
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Buy the Marriage Therapy Continuing Education DVD's now. Price is the same whether or not you wish to use the CE credits.
If you are eligible and interested in joining the marriage friendly movement, Bill is offering therapists on the Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists a 25% discount.
S/H is $4.95 for 1-3 DVD's, $5.95 for 4 or 5 DVD's. Descriptions below or simply Buy Now.
| Course Title | CE's |
Price |
|---|---|---|
| Working with Couples on the Brink | 2.5 |
$99 |
| Bad and Good Couples Therapy | 1.5 |
$60 |
| Priority Setting in Couples Therapy: The Family FIRO Model | 1 |
$40 |
| Working with Remarried Couples in Stepfamilies | 2 |
$80 |
| How Experienced Therapists Undermine Marriage | 1 |
$40 |
The most critical life decision most therapists deal with in their everyday practice is helping couples decide whether to dissolve a marriage or try to save it. Nevertheless few of us have had specific training in assisting an ambivalent couple on the brink of divorce. In this workshop, you’ll learn a step-by-step protocol for offering clients a “consultation for decision making.” We’ll explore how to help the partner wanting to leave to examine the decision with integrity, while helping the other partner to both maximize the possibility that the marriage will remain intact and, if necessary, prepare for changes if the divorce happens. The protocol provides time for reflective decision making and challenges each partner’s idea that the other “will never change.” We’ll pay particular attention to helping you become crystal clear about your own values regarding marriage and divorce, whatever they might be, and how they impact your work with couples on the brink of divorce. A videotaped session will demonstrate the skills.
Most training workshops focus only about what to do make therapy effective. But we all know that mistakes are common in therapy, and perhaps particularly in marriage couples therapy, which Jay Haley once said is the most difficult of all types of therapy to do well. This workshop will identify the most common screw-ups therapists make in couples therapy, and demonstrate ways to avoid them and do good work. There will be something for both beginning and experienced therapists, who tend to make different mistakes. Movie clips, some of them hilarious, will demonstrate bad therapy with couples, and a video of a fascinating real case will demonstrate a practical protocol for working with couples when divorce is on the table. The workshop will describe how therapists’ values about commitment influence our work with couples, for better and worse, and how we mess up so frequently—and how can do better.
Priority setting with multiproblem couples and families is one of the trickiest parts of being a therapist. Start with the wrong issue and you get bogged down and may not know why. Using an adaptation of Schutz’s FIRO model for group development, this workshop will give you a way to set priorities when working with complex couples. The priority sequence—inclusions issues before control issues, and control issues before intimacy issues—is one that many experienced therapists use implicitly, but there advantages of doing it explicitly and using therapy models based on their strengths in one of these three core issues. You will find this workshop highly practical for all of your work with couples and families.
Remarried couples in stepfamilies may get the worst treatment of any family form because many couples therapists don’t have special ways to work with them. For example, you can’t help most remarried couples without dealing with coparenting in a major way. And you have to know how biological parents and stepparents need to work together in different roles. This workshop takes the unique approach of combining clinical assessment and treatment issues with the perennial moral issues of commitment, loyalty, and fairness in stepfamilies. You will learn a model for setting treatment priorities with stepfamilies and a model for effective work with parents and stepparents. A video of interviews with children in stepfamilies adds the important voices of children to the extraordinarily complex dynamics of stepfamily life.
How Therapists Undermine Marriage
It’s a little-discussed problem in our field: some therapists, even those who are technically skilled, undermine marital commitment. They do it by pathologizing couples relationships, by taking the side of the spouse who is learning “out” of the marriage, and by using slogans (such as “I’m not here to save marriages—I’m hear to help people”) that take an individualistic approach that moves couples towards divorces that may not be necessary. Few therapists are actively anti-commitment, but nevertheless they do harm by thinking that their approach is value free and “neutral” when it is primarily individualistic. This workshop will help you examine your own values and practices and help you reflect on how you can keep from inadvertently undermining couples who are struggling to hold on to their marriage.