Uncomfortably Stuck: Therapeutic Impasse and Unexplored Affect

As a system, psychotherapy is easy to learn and even easier to teach, but it takes a lifetime to perfect. The situations we term "impasse" include the periods we feel most aware of the limitations in our work, of our imperfect ability to facilitate the changes our clients seek. Our Conference this year is about the "us and them" of impasse. It's about a few of the ways this craft of ours can seem undoable, the cases in which we feel ineffective despite the seeming adequacy of the therapeutic contract. We recognize impasse when the patient seems to be saying the same things session after session with apparent understanding but no change, by our own sense of helplessness or by our own boredom or the sense that at least one of us is cheating the other. The affective climate of a therapeutic impasse can be friendly or unfriendly, thick or thin, rewarding or punishing; there's no easy clue or lab test for the early detection of an impasse. The moment a clinician recognizes the existence of an impasse and defines the therapeutic enterprise as stuck, stalled, or ineffective, is fraught with personal shame to which we respond with all the defenses we normally help our clients manage. After all, why would anyone hire us to fix the easy scripts? This conference is a chance to talk about what makes and keeps us stuck in our work. We'll present a series of contributions by and workshops with leading experts from our group, all of whom will discuss the path from failure to success. The goals of psychotherapy demand nothing less. You won't walk away knowing how to do everything perfectly and forever, but you may very well climb to another level of understanding and competence. Conference Objectives   Through participation in this program, you should be able to: 1.   Recognize impasse as important information emerging from the therapeutic process and a source of clues for change. 2. Identify the affects and scripts responsible for the impasse or triggered by it. 3. Implement therapeutic modalities that open accessory channels to awareness. 4. In couples work, utilize stagnation points to enhance intimacy and increase emotional congruence/intelligence.   Expected Outcome Course participants will understand the application of the psychology of affect and script to psychotherapeutic treatment. Professionals at all levels of training and skill will be able to master the therapeutic techniques presented in this conference. Primary to the outcome of this conference is enhancement of the competence needed to identify and resolve therapeutic impasse through the implementation of new strategies and collegial interaction. Who may attend Any mental health practitioner. Clinicians and graduate students currently enrolled in a training program are welcome. Those who do not have such training may write for special consideration.

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