Training
2024 Workshops
November 1, 2024: 10 AM – 2PM EDT (Zoom, 4 CEs)
Utilizing Hypnosis in the Treatment of Narcissistic Wounds in Psychotherapy: A Relational Approach
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Workshop description:
The dimension of narcissism influences a wide-range of character presentations and treatment issues occurring in psychotherapy in our modern age. Although clinical and public attention is often focused on the categorically-derived DSM-V diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, narcissistic wounds stemming from attachment failures are a more frequent occurrence in the development of the self. These arrests in the full formation of the self and their subsequent re-appearance in later relationship interactions are often referenced in a wide range of treatments.
In this workshop, we will consider how Kohut’s self psychology and current innovations in attachment theory can help us understand narcissistic wounds and treatment issues across the dimension of narcissism. Further, we will focus on the role that hypnosis can play in a relationally attuned therapeutic relationship towards facilitating attachment repair in patients with developmental arrests associated with narcissistic wounds (e.g. false-self identify formation, affect dysregulation, boundary difficulties, etc.). Through a mixture of didactic and experiential training, participants will develop increased competency in (1) understanding how the therapeutic relationship in general, and clinical hypnosis from an attachment frame in particular, can be utilized to re-build developmental structure and re-engage reflective functioning in this population of patients and (2) utilizing specific applications of clinical hypnosis towards this aim.
November 15 – 17, 2024 (Zoom, 20 CEs)
Attachment-Focused Hypnosis in Psychotherapy: Relational Strategies for the Developmental Repair of Trauma and Chronic Pain
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Workshop description:
This workshop presents two complementary relational hypnotherapeutic approaches that can be incorporated into existing psychotherapy for patients with a range of clinical presentations, including trauma, pain, and anxiety. In its utilization of shared attention, tone of voice, pacing, language, and imagery, clinical hypnosis as a state, relationship, and technique offers psychotherapists a relational and experiential means for utilizing the therapeutic relationship to heal arrested internal, structural, and developmental functioning in their patients. In the first portion of this workshop, participants will learn how hypnosis can facilitate attachment repair in patients with developmental arrests. The relational and psychological functions of attunement, representation, and mentalization are essential components of a secure attachment experience. The presenter will review the literature and describe how hypnosis can be applied in working with each of these areas of attachment to engage relatedness, develop internal working models, harness implicit relational knowing, and cultivate reflective functioning. In the second portion of this workshop, we will examine how hypnosis can be strategically utilized to evoke the three components of the therapeutic relationship: transference, the contemporary (‘real’) relationship, and the therapeutic alliance. We will review hypnotic strategies from each of these three components with the goal of differentiating when and how to elicit effect, create containment, and utilize rapport from the relationship to guide the treatment process. Participants will learn how hypnosis can serve as an ‘in-between’ state in which elements of this relational matrix can be utilized to great effect in advancing treatment process and outcome.