Working With Couples: Getting Better Outcomes By Working Deeper

Couples therapy consists of dozens of clinical decisions every hour—hundreds of decisions over the course of each case. Here’s a practical training that will build the skills you need to make these decisions, and to continue fine-tuning your work as you discover each couple’s unique clinical challenges.

Most couples enter therapy with a specific vision of their problems. They may describe themselves as having “anger problems,” “sexual incompatibility” or “trust issues”. A skillful therapist will explore how the clients’ framing of their situation is keeping them stuck–and how they might change that. While looking at the most common topics in couples therapy, Dr. Klein will show you how to identify the powerful client narratives that keep couples stuck in their dysfunctional patterns.

Couples typically want to talk about content—who’s doing or saying the wrong thing regarding money, parenting, sex, or whatever. In contrast, the most effective therapy addresses couples’ processes—and when couples learn that perspective and face who they are, they can frequently address their content problems themselves. That’s effective therapy.

In an action-packed two-and-a-half hours, you’ll learn how to:

• Establish a therapeutic contract (and how to use it if you get stuck later in the therapy);
• Build communication skills (and see why many couples DON’T have a “communication problem”);
• Teach conflict management skills (and end those deadly “fight of the week” sessions);
• Use narratives & reframing to change couples’ self-limiting stories about who they are; and
• Deal with infidelity (and discover why you might want to tell some couples that they’re not ready to reconcile when they think they are).

In this intermediate-level training you’ll learn how to teach couples the skills they need in order to grow and change—and help them overcome their resistance to that very growing and changing. You’ll be a more effective couples therapist, with better clinical outcomes—while enjoying this challenging, fascinating work more.

Dr. Klein will include frequent references to actual couples’ cases, and occasional brief role-plays applying various interventions. There will be plenty of time for questions, including discussions of participants’ cases. And as Marty’s world-wide audiences know, you’ll laugh while you learn—guaranteed!