This course is designed for practitioners at an intermediate or advanced skill level. It will offer training and supervision to enhance their treatment of couples. Common issues involved in couples’ patterns of dysfunction often include detachment and/or emotional hyper-reactivity. Cognitive understanding of how dorsal vagal response plays a part in detachment is influenced by the work of Steven Porges (2009) and Deb Dana (2018) and will inform the diagnosis and treatment of couples. Treating emotional hyperactivity will also draw from the work of Porges and Dana to help couples to utilize their social engagement system to reduce excessive surges of sympathetic arousal that both accompany and trigger hyper-reactivity in the couple dynamic. This course will augment the existing knowledge and skills of participants with experiential practices designed to broaden their capacities of perception, reception and expression through the lens of seven channels of experience. We will focus on the explicit use of “I-statements” incorporating moment-to-moment tracking. (Mars, 2011, 2017) This course will offer didactic presentations about psychophysiology and affective neuroscience to show how the orbitofrontal, insula, limbic and anterior cingulate brain regions influence behavior in couple relating. (Craig, 2015 and Schore 2016, 2019) Mindful self-compassion practices and exercises (Neff and Germer, 2012) will be incorporated into the training sessions to enhance both intra-relational (self-talk) and inter-relational safety. Maps and schemas derived from Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) as applies to individuals (Fosha, 2021a, 2021b) are integrated into the methods of Transformative Couples Therapy (TCT). The formulation of a diagnosis or problem definition will be drawn from analyzing communication patterns between couple members. For example, we will note how each couple member’s use of defensive exclusion (Bowlby, 1982) interferes with empathy and collaborative communication (Beebe et al, 2016). Training will focus on helping couple members to expand their repertoires of communication with each other. Emphasizing positive gains is an essential aspect of TCT to both help couple members notice progress and integrate positive changes from session to session. This follows the beneficial guidance of moment-to-moment tracking and skillful use of metaprocessing changes (Iwakabe, & Conceicao, 2016, Fosha, 2021) in order to integrate them into new positive habits in the couple’s patterns. We will apply principles from Frederickson (2013) and others about the beneficial effects of positivity as a lens through which we can learn to perceive clinical interventions while viewing participants’ video-recorded sessions of couple treatment.
Over the course of the nine monthly group training and supervision sessions, the group members and I will collaboratively evaluate the therapy process and outcomes of treatment of the couples whose treatment we are witnessing. We will collectively offer suggested corrections along the way as a means to assist treatment implementation. As the course supervisor, I will teach integrated cognitive and science-based instruction and clinical skills from my TCT sessions that are drawn from edited and captioned recorded clinical video. During alternate meetings, members of the group will have opportunities to share their own clinical video. Discussion, role-play demonstrations, experiential exercises, feedback and interactive learning will be part of every two-hour group Core Training session.