Upcoming Seminars

Please select the blue "View & Purchase" button below next to the event you wish to attend.

Course Information

Attachment in Psychotherapy: Relational Transformation and the Psychology of the Therapist

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-revelation, 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 can become -- rather than 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 can 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.
This program is for 6CE

There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.

 

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
 

Target Audience:

Psychologists, Social Workers, Counselors/Marriage and Family Therapists, Creative Arts Therapists (Intermediate Level)

 

Course Objectives:

• Utilize the attachment relationship as a crucible of therapeutic change.
• Identify and “decode” your own attachment patterns rather than be defined or
dominated by them.
• Recognize the collusions and collisions that arise where your attachment patterns
intersect with those of the patient.
• Use enactments of transference-countertransference to access the nonverbal subtext
of the therapeutic conversation.
• Recognize the legacy of trauma and shame that provokes the therapist’s
“compulsion to heal”—and the problem of trying too hard to be “good.”
• Integrate the empathy your patients need from you to feel safe and the authenticity
they need from you to feel genuinely met.

 

Agenda

8:30 – 9:00 a.m. Registration and check-in

9:00 – 10:30 What Attachment Research Teaches Us About Therapy

How We Co-Create a Secure Base and Safe Haven

How We Recognize Patterns of Attachment

How We Work with Unspoken and Unspeakable

Experience: The Evoked, Enacted, and Embodied

How We Move From Embeddedness to Mindfulness,

Mentalizing, and Self-Agency

Attachment Relationship as a Dynamic System:

Changing our Patients Through Changing Ourselves

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 – 12:15 Why Focus on the Therapist?

The Myth of the “All-Good” Therapist

The Therapist’s Attachment History as a Source of Insight,

Inspiration, and Change

Attachment Patterns, Dissociation, and the Therapist’s Family

of Multiple Selves

Trauma and Shame in the Making of the Therapist

Identifying the Therapist’s Attachment Patterns

12:15 – 1:15 p.m. Lunch (on your own)

1:15 – 2:45 Attachment Patterns and Multiple Self-States in Psychotherapy

Therapists in Secure, Dismissing, Preoccupied, and

Unresolved States of Mind

The Unitary Self as an Adaptive Fiction

Getting to Know the Patient’s–and Our Own–Multiple Selves

2:45 – 3:00 Break

3:00 – 4:30 Working with Enactments: Mindfulness, Mentalizing, and

the Need for the Therapist’s Self-Revelation

Enactments as Obstacles, Enactments as Opportunities: From

Collusion and Collision to Collaboration

Activating Mindful and Reflective States to Loosen the Grip

of Enactments

How Intersubjective Relating Fosters Integration: Making

Room for Two

Collusions: (False) Harmony at the Expense of Therapeutic

Progress

Collisions of Subjectivity: The Rewards of Being Real

The Complexities of Self-Revelation:

The Patient’s Safety and the Therapist’s

Emotional Authenticity

 

Attend in person or online
LIVE Webinar
9am-4:30pm EDT 7am-2:30pm MDT
8am-3:30pm CDT 6am-1:30pm PDT