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Course Information
Attachment, Relational Transformation, and the Psychology of the Therapist (WAL-26)
Attachment research has revolutionized our understanding of human development, the internal world, and the consequences of development gone awry. Above all, the research demonstrates that we become who we are in the context of first relationships in which the influences that shape us are implicit and nonverbal. It also documents how it is that the psychology of the attachment figure becomes, in effect, the psychology of the developing child -- security in the parent begetting security in the child, insecurity begetting insecurity, and trauma begetting trauma. And just as surely as the parent's psychology shapes parenting, the psychology of the therapist shapes therapy. Because psychotherapy within an attachment framework is a process of transformation through relationship -- and because relationships take two -- attending to our own evolving psychology is always key.
Corrective relational experience, work with enactments of transference-countertransference, the therapist's self-reveleation, the therapist's own growth and change as a catalyst for growth and change in the patient -- these and more are aspects of psychotherapy as relational transformation. Within this framework, it is always who we are and who we become -- not our techniques or theories -- that determines our effectiveness in creating relationships with our patients that are genuinely therapeutic.
In his acclaimed book, David Wallin spelled out the implications of integrating attachment research with neuroscience, relational psychoanalysis, mindfulness, and a focus on the body to help clinicians become more effective facilitators of growth and healing. Now in his latest workshop, he deepens the focus on work within the relationship as the primary therapeutic intervention, highlighting the importance of multiple self-states and dissociation in patient and therapist alike. Illustrating his approach with vivid case material and video examples, Wallin illuminates a way of being a therapist in which we aim to know ourselves as a part of the process of trying to know our patients. Working in this way, our professional path cal also be a personal journey of discovery that has the potential to deepen and enliven the experience not only of the patient but of the therapist as well.
Presenter
David Wallin, PhD
David J. Wallin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist
in private practice in Mill Valley and Albany, CA. A graduate of Harvard who received his doctorate from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, he has been practicing, teaching, and writing about psychotherapy for more than three decades. His most recent book,
Attachment in Psychotherapy, is presently being translated into eleven languages. He is also coauthor (with Stephen Goldbart) of
Mapping the Terrain of the Heart: Passion, Tenderness, and the Capacity to Love. Dr. Wallin is a lively and engaging speaker who combines a scholarly perspective with unusual candor about his own experience as a therapist. He has lectured on attachment and psychotherapy in Europe, Canada, and throughout the United States. For further information, you may visit his website at:
www.attachmentinpsychotherapy.com
Attendees Will Learn To:
- Utilize the findings of attachment research to enhance your efforts to be of help to your patients.
- Identify your attachment patterns as influences, both for better and worse, on your own ways of being a therapist.
- Apply the conceptual framework of multiple selves to work with the discontinuities and dissociations in your own experience and that of your patients.
- Utilize rather than avoid the conflictual enactments -- "collisions of subjectivity" -- which therapists are too often motivated to ignore.
- Integrate the empathy your patients need from you to feel safe and the authenticity they need from you to feel genuinely met.
- Utilize your embodied presence -- anchoring yourself in your own moment-to-moment bodily experience in order to sense what's most important in your patient's experience.
Who Should Attend:
Psychologists, Psychiatrists, MFTs, LCSWs, Counselors
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