Saturday 9 - Sunday 10 April, 2016

Amora Hotel, Wakefield St, Wellington 

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Preconference workshop: Thursday 7 and Friday 8 April, 9am-5pm, Level 1 Clinical Training: Gottman Method Couples Therapy: Bridging the Couple Chasm, presented by John and Julie Gottman

Couples enter the therapy office with pain and despair and look to the clinician to referee chronic conflicts, fix their partners, and rebuild burned bridges. Dr John Gottman?s 40 years of compelling research with over 3,000 couples offers a practical and highly effective approach to guiding couples across the chasm that divides them. In this workshop you will be provided with a research-based roadmap for helping couples (heterosexual and same sex) compassionately manage their conflicts, deepen their friendship and intimacy, and share their life purpose and dreams.

Apply Gottman Method Couples Therapy to help couples strengthen:

• The Friendship System ? the foundation for intimacy, passion, and good sex
• The Conflict System ? the basis for helping couples identify and address solvable problems, and understand and manage irresolvable differences
• The Shared Meaning System ? the existential foundation of the relationship that helps partners discover their shared purpose for building a life together

In this two day workshop clinicians learn:

• Research-based strategies and tools to help couples successfully manage conflict
• Skills to empower partners to dialogue about their worst gridlocked issues by uncovering their underlying dreams, history, and values
• Methods to help couples process fights and heal their hurts
• Techniques for partners to deepen their intimacy and minimize relapse
• New assessments and effective interventions to help understand couples?
  struggles 

Post conference workshop: Monday 11 April, 9am-5pm, True Strength: A Compassion-Focused Therapy Approach to Working with Anger, presented by Russell Kolts

This workshop will focus on how Compassion-Focused Therapy can be applied to the treatment of problematic anger. Participants will be introduced to an attachment and shame-based model of the maintenance of problematic anger. A Compassion-Focused Therapy approach will be introduced to help clients break the cycle that supports ongoing anger problems, learn compassionate strategies for working with difficult situations and emotions, and cultivate an adaptive, compassionate version of the self. Participants will be introduced to the True Strength group program, a 12-week manualized group therapy program applying CFT to the treatment of anger. (Follow this link for Russell?s TedTalk on compassion and anger)

Conference Keynote addresses

John Gottman: The Science of Trust & Betrayal: 

We are living through a global catastrophe of trust. We are experiencing this on every front today, including decreased trust in our economic system, in government, in banks, in Wall Street, in employers, and so on. Most tragic of all is a decreased trust people are experiencing in their closest relationships, particularly in marriage and love relationships in general. This presentation reviews "The Science of Trust" in the context of couple relationships, including the physiology and the mathematics of trust and betrayal. Recent research from John Gottman`s laboratory will be reviewed leading to a precise definition of trust. Dr Gottman will also talk about a new empirically-based theory of trust, how to create trust in love relationships, and how it is sometimes possible to heal from betrayal. This is based upon Dr Gottman?s latest book, The Science of Trust.  

Russell Kolts: Compassion and Diversity: Applying Compassion-Focused Therapy in Understanding and Working with Privilege and Oppression

In this address, Dr Kolts will present a Compassion-Focused Therapy model of oppression and privilege that is anchored in affective neuroscience and an understanding of how different emotions and motives organize the mind. We will explore how to apply CFT principles in understanding and working with issues of client diversity that can be applied not only to dimensions of diversity such as race, gender, and sexuality, but also to age, disability, and the stigma associated with mental illness, and other ways in which people differ.  Compassion and CFT gives us a non-shaming, non-blaming way of understanding the challenges faced by diverse populations in ways that pave the way for helping them (and all) clients apply compassionate strategies for working with life challenges and difficult emotions.

Jane Freeman-Brown: Getting Away with Murder? The legal and ethical implications when a client confesses to an undetected homicide

Ranka Margetic-Sosa: The cultural diversity of refugee people in N.Z.