Resolving Therapeutic Impasses

Friday, September 29, 2017
The Brattleboro Retreat
8:30 AM - 4:00 PM 
Brattleboro, Vermont 

Jeremy D. Safran, PhD

Click here to register

Course Description:

In spite of solid evidence that psychotherapy is effective, approximately 30% of people receiving psychotherapy do not benefit, around 25% drop out of treatment and up to 8% experience a worsening of their problems.  In addition, the evidence suggests that therapists tend to overestimate their own success rates with patients. What can we do to help more of our patients benefit from our work?

A good therapeutic alliance has been shown to predict effective therapy. This one-day workshop provides a systematic framework for understanding factors contributing to problems in the alliance and therapeutic impasses and how to resolve them. Video-taped material will be employed to illustrate different types of alliance ruptures, as well as essential principles and evidence based intervention strategies relevant to addressing and resolving therapeutic impasses when they occur. Participants will also learn about the use of self-disclosure and meta-communication ("mindfulness in action"), how to harness and work constructively with intense, conflictual, and often threatening feelings that emerge for patients as well as therapists, and how the therapist's own capacity to regulate their own affective experience can work constructively to help patients develop their own capacity for self-regulation. 
 
Learning objectives
At the end of this conference, participants will be able to:

  1. Identify  common types of therapeutic impasses.
  2. Make use of their own internal experience as a source of clinical information through attention and reflection.
  3. Utilize at least two strategies for working constructively with both hostile and withdrawn patients.
  4. Recognize patient anger, despair and bitterness as opportunities to work therapeutically rather than behave reactively. 
  5. Self-assess, reflect, and regulate countertransference feelings.

Jeremy D.Safran, PhD, has spent over 30 years developing  “second generation” alliance research that investigates factors promoting the development of a strong alliance, as well as principles relevant to repairing strains or ruptures in the alliance and therapeutic impasses when they occur. He was the recipient of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research Distinguished Research Career Award in 2016. Dr Safran  is the author of Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance: A Relational Treatment Guide (2000), Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Therapies (2012); Interpersonal Process in Cognitive Therapy (1996); Emotion, Psychotherapy and Change (1987), and numerous journal articles and book chapters on relational processes in psychotherapy.