Special
Workshops on
Relationship
Enhancement®
and Filial
Methods
The 2016 Relationship
Enhancement®
and Filial Therapy
Conference
April 8-9, 2016 in Bethesda,
MD
Co-Sponsored
by
National Institute of Relationship
Enhancement® (NIRE) and Association for
Filial and Relationship
Enhancement® Methods
(AFREM)
CE
Workshops
For the 2016 Relationship
Enhancement® and Filial Therapy
Conference, NIRE and AFREM are co-sponsoring two workshops
on Friday April 8 and two workshops on Saturday April
9.
Friday will include two play
related workshops: “Maintaining the Alliance: Using Parent Consults in
Child-Centered Play Therapy to Teach Empathy to
Parents” and “Not Limited to the
Playroom: Helping Parents Use Filial Limit
Setting to Improve Discipline at
Home.”
Saturday will include two RE Therapy
related workshops: “Ethical Challenges
in Working with Infidelity Issues in Marriage/Couple
Therapy” and “The Experiential Format and the
Use of Becoming in Relationship
Enhancement® Therapy.”
Each workshop qualifies
for 3 CE credits.
Organized Friday Night Dutch Treat
Dinner
This year’s traditional
“Dutch Treat” dinner will be held on Friday
night April 8. This well attended event always proves to be
a fun time to connect and relax with friends and colleagues
around the dinner table. Please join us if you
can! Details below. And please RSVP so we can
properly plan with the restaurant.
Registration
Registration information may be
found below.
AFREM Special Workshops
Registration Form
Friday
Workshops
Maintaining the Alliance: Using Parent Consults in
Child-Centered Play Therapy to Teach Empathy to
Parents
Presenter: Ian Masson, M.S.
Discussants: Louise Guerney, Ph.D.,
RPT-S, William Nordling, Ph.D., RPT-S
Friday, April 8, 9:00 a.m. - 12:15
p.m. 3 CE credits
Parents are a critically important
part of their child’s life and as such can do much to
support their progress in therapy. Supporting parents in
developing new ways of interacting with their child as their
child makes changes during the therapeutic process can
maximize therapeutic gains. Within the context of
Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) the parent consult
session can provide a significant opportunity to build
parent skills that will allow the child to capitalize on the
progress they have made during play therapy sessions. As
empathy is one of the core therapist skills in CCPT,
teaching parents how to empathically respond to their
children can create a therapeutic environment for children
across settings. Teaching empathy as a foundational response
of parents to children will also deepen a child’s
sense of trust in the parent and serve to develop a warm
relationship between parent and child. The workshop will
focus on utilizing the parent consult session of CCPT as a
means of teaching empathic responding to parents within the
context of the therapist-parent alliance. Panel and
participant discussion will be included.
Learning
Objectives: Attendees completing this workshop
will be able to:
- Effectively structure parent
consult sessions within the context of
CCPT.
- Apply the core skill of deep
empathy to parent consults in order to address parental
concerns and maintain the therapist-parent
alliance.
- Explain the benefits and address
challenges of empathic responding in a parent consultation
session.
-
Utilize "teachable
moments" in parent discussions of home behavioral
challenges to help them apply empathic responding at
home.
Ian Masson,
M.S., is a resident in counseling at Chrysalis Counseling
Centers in Culpeper, VA. Ian received his certification in
Child-Centered Play Therapy through NIRE and primarily works
with children. Ian also oversees the Intensive Therapeutic
Parenting Program at Chrysalis, a service that seeks to
develop child-centered parenting skills through use of Dr.
Louise Guerney's Parenting: A Skills Training
Manual.
Louise Guerney, Ph.D., is
co-creator with Bernard Guerney, Ph.D. of Filial Family
Therapy. She also is author of Parenting: A Skills Training
Manual (published by
IDEALS/NIRE), a nationally recognized and widely used
parenting program and, together with Virginia Ryan,
of Group Filial
Therapy (Jessica
Kingsley, 2013).
William Nordling, Ph.D., RPT-S, is
Academic Dean and Chair of the Department of Psychology at
the Institute for Psychological Sciences. He is former
Executive Director of NIRE and continues as a senior member
of NIRE’s training faculty. He is co-author (with
Jeffrey and Nancy Cochran) of Child-Centered Play
Therapy: A Practical Guide to Developing Therapeutic
Relationships with Children (Wiley,
2010).
Not Limited
to the Playroom: Helping Parents Use Filial Limit-Setting to
Improve Discipline at Home
Mary Ortwein, M.S.,
LMFT
Discussants: Louise
Guerney, Ph.D., Julie Dodson, M.A., Arpita Eusebius,
M.A.
Friday, April 8, 2:00 - 5:15 p.m. 3
CE credits
The life events, stresses, family
patterns, and symptoms that bring children to therapy often
complicate parent discipline at home. Parents often err
toward too much or too little, until parent-child power
struggles can dominate the relationship. Limits during
Filial Play sessions function to create safety for children
in the playroom, so they can do the therapeutic or
developmental work they need to do. Helping parents extend
the Filial standards of clear, consistent, necessary, and
enforced limits to ordinary discipline at home can extend
the safety of the playroom to real life and help families
recover balance.
How do you help parents generalize
play session limits to everyday situations at home? How do
you integrate Filial limit-setting with empathy,
structuring, parent messages, and imposition of consequences
in real life? This workshop will explore these questions,
using classic and contemporary Filial videos, panel and
participant discussion, and role play practice to enable
participants to move parents toward generalization of Filial
limit-setting skills to their daily lives at
home.
Learning
Objectives: Attendees completing this workshop will be able
to:
-
Use parent experiences of
limit-setting during Filial sessions to identify guidelines
for limit-setting and enforcement at home
-
Use “teachable moments”
in parent discussions of home discipline situations to help
them apply Filial successes at home
-
Use relevant learning from Louise
Guerney’s Parenting Skills with
Filial clients to enable them to use structuring and parent
messages as well as limit-setting and consequences to foster
desirable behavior in children at home
Mary Ortwein, MS., LMFT is the
founder of IDEALS for Families and Communities (IFC), a
mental health non-profit in Frankfort, Kentucky, which
specializes in providing quality mental health services for
the working poor and for those in shelters. Co-author with
Bernard Guerney, Jr. of the Mastering
the Mysteries of Love series of Relationship
Enhancement materials and author of the Filial parent
workbook, Mastering the Magic of Play, Mary is
an experienced Relationship Enhancement therapist,
supervisor, and trainer. She recently completed a
Master's of Pastoral Theology at St. Meinrad
Seminary.
Julie Dodson, M.A., is a Marriage and
Family Therapy Associate and a Staff Therapist at IDEALS for
Families and Communities where she provides therapy to
children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. Julie
is certified in both Child-Centered Play Therapy and Filial
Therapy. She also is a counselor at Avenues for Women, where
she serves mainly women providing counseling for pregnancy
options, relationships, resiliency, and trauma resolution.
Julie earned a Masters in Mental Health Counseling from
Asbury Theological Seminary in
2012.
Arpita Eusebius, M.A., is a Marriage
and Family Therapy Associate in Frankfort, KY, and a Staff
Therapist at IDEALS for Families and Communities where she
works with individuals of all age groups, couples and
families. Arpita is certified in both Child-Centered Play
Therapy and Filial Therapy. She also provides counseling
services to two high schools and one middle school in
Lexington, Kentucky. Arpita earned a Masters in Mental
Health Counseling from Asbury Theological Seminary in
2013.
Dinner, Friday Night, April 8, 6:30 p.m.
Dutch Treat.
Following the Friday afternoon
workshop, those who are interested will go out together as a
group for dinner for fun, relaxation and an opportunity to
connect with friends and colleagues. If you are interested
in joining the group for dinner: Please be certain
to sign up on the Registration Form. Advance payment is not
necessary, but we do need to be able to give an accurate
count to the restaurant.
Saturday
Workshops
Ethical Challenges in Working with
Infidelity Issues in Marriage/Couple
Therapy
Robert Scuka, Ph.D., M.S.W.,
LCSW-C
Saturday, April 9, 9:00 a.m. -
12:15 p.m. 3 CE Credits
Some estimates indicate that
infidelity may be involved in as many as 50% of cases
presenting for marriage therapy or couple counseling.
Infidelity also presents some of the most difficult clinical
challenges in couple therapy, including a variety of ethical
challenges. Those ethical challenges begin immediately at
the initiation of joint therapy regarding issues of
confidentiality, i.e., whether or not to grant
confidentiality to each member of the couple. Additional
challenges relate to how to balance individual sessions with
the couple’s joint work; how to balance the need to
address the infidelity issue with other potential issues in
the relationship; and how to apply an
existential-responsibility-for-choices-made framework
without crossing into a moralistic stance of judgment. The
workshop will also address steps to be taken by both the
involved partner and the hurt partner to facilitate healing
in the relationship. The Relationship Enhancement Therapy
model will serve as the clinical framework for exploring
these issues, but prior knowledge of RE Therapy is not
required. Attendees will be sent a copy of the
presenter’s recently published article “A
Clinician’s Guide to Help Couples Heal from the Trauma
of Infidelity,” which was published in 2015 in
the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy.
Participant discussion is strongly encouraged and will be an
important component of this workshop.
Learning Objectives: Attendees completing this
workshop will be able to:
-
Effectively apply their chosen stance
on confidentiality within the context of couple
therapy
-
Balance the use of individual therapy
sessions with joint couple sessions
-
Balance the need to address the
infidelity issue with other issues in the
relationship
-
Apply an
existential-responsibility-for-choices-made framework
without crossing the line into a moralistic stance of
judgment
-
Apply a balanced approach that
addresses the tasks and responsibilities of both partners to
facilitate a process of healing from
infidelity
Rob Scuka, Ph.D., is Executive
Director of the National Institute of Relationship
Enhancement® and author
of Relationship Enhancement Therapy: Healing through
Deep Empathy and Intimate Dialogue (Routledge,
2005), which contains three clinical vignettes on the use of
RE therapy with cases of infidelity.
The Experiential Format and the Use of
Becoming in Relationship
Enhancement® Therapy
Moderator: Robert Scuka, Ph.D.,
M.S.W., LCSW-C
Discussants: Bernard Guerney, Jr.,
Ph.D., Maryhelen Snyder, Ph.D., Mary Ortwein, M.S.,
LMFT
Saturday, April 9, 2:00 –
5:15 p.m. 3 CE Credits.
The Experiential Format within
Relationship Enhancement Therapy is a variation on the more
structured Time-Designated Format. In the latter, the RE
therapist typically takes several sessions to focus
exclusively on skills-training with the couple (or family)
in order to lay a foundation for the couple to enter into
dialogue mode to begin to address their
issues.
In the Experiential Format, the
therapist briefly introduces, demonstrates and/or models the
RE dialogue process in order to launch the couple into their
first dialogue sooner in the therapy process. This may also
involve the therapist making an extended use of the Becoming
mode of empathy in the first session with a couple, with a
view to the couple then being able to employ this special
mode of empathy with one another as their own dialogue
unfolds.
Becoming involves what also is
referred to as the Identification Mode of empathy, in
contrast to the more conventional “You” mode of
empathy, where the former involves the therapist (or couple)
using the first person pronoun “I” to represent
and re-enact the experience of the Expresser. The rationale
for using this more specialized form of empathy is that it
tends to create a deeper empathic representation of the
Expresser’s experience, which in turn tends to have a
deeper impact on the person receiving the empathy, often
prompting deepened self-understanding and further
self-disclosure.
This workshop will present three
different videos. All three will illustrate variations on
the Experiential Format, one with Dr. Guerney, a second with
Dr. Scuka, and a third with Dr. Snyder. The first two videos
will illustrate two variations on introducing a family or
couple to the RE skills and dialogue process. The third
video will illustrate the therapist making an extended use
of the Becoming mode of empathy with a couple in a first
session.
Learning Objectives: Attendees completing this workshop
will be able to:
-
Identify the unique characteristics
of the RE Experiential Format compared to the
Time-Designated Format
-
Identify the circumstances under
which a therapist might choose to employ the Experiential
Format in preference to the Time-Designated
Format
-
Apply the Experiential Format in
their own clinical work with couples or
families
-
Utilize the Identification or
Becoming Mode of Empathy more effectively in their own
clinical work
Rob Scuka, Ph.D., is Executive
Director of the National Institute of Relationship
Enhancement® and author
of Relationship Enhancement Therapy: Healing through
Deep Empathy and Intimate Dialogue (Routledge,
2005), along with a number of professional articles on RE
Therapy and other therapy topics.
Bernard Guerney, Jr., Ph.D., is the
creator of Relationship
Enhancement® Therapy and the founder of
the National Institute of Relationship
Enhancement®. His book Relationship
Enhancement (Josey-Bass, 1977) was the first formal
theoretical statement of the RE Therapy and
psychoeducational model.
Maryhelen Snyder, Ph.D., has been a
mental health professional for 40 years, specializing much
of that time in Relationship Enhancement therapy. She has
authored many professional articles and book chapters and
served as an adjunct professor at the University of New
Mexico Medical School. She is also a poet. Her recent
book Sun in an Empty Room (Mercury
HeartLink, 2012) has a similar focus to her therapy work,
which is wildly celebrative of human beings and human
possibilities. Her most recent book of poetry
is Never the Loss of Wings (Passager Books,
2015).
Mary Ortwein, M.S., LMFT is the
founder of IDEALS for Families and Communities (IFC), a
mental health non-profit in Frankfort, Kentucky, which
specializes in providing quality mental health services for
the working poor and for those in shelters. Co-author with
Bernard Guerney, Jr. of the Mastering
the Mysteries of Love series of Relationship
Enhancement materials and author of the Filial parent
workbook, Mastering the Magic of Play, Mary is
an experienced Relationship Enhancement therapist,
supervisor, and trainer. She recently completed a
Master's of Pastoral Theology at St. Meinrad
Seminary.
Registration
Information
Location: The AFREM annual meeting and
workshops will be held at the National Institute of
Relationship Enhancement® (NIRE) conference suite on the
Roof level of the Topaz House at 4400 East-West Highway,
Bethesda, MD. The Topaz House is located six miles from the
White House and Georgetown. NIRE is less than three blocks
from the Bethesda metro stop.
Parking: Parking on
Friday may be available at the Topaz
House’s underground garage on a first come first
served basis. There is a public parking lot at East-West
Highway and Waverly Street, a block and a half from the
Topaz House. Be certain to
bring plenty of quarters for the public parking lot. The
cost is $.75 per hour in long term parking; plan on 9 hours,
i.e., $6.75. [To be safe, bring a roll of quarters, as
parking rates may have gone
up.] Parking is free on Saturday. On
Saturday parking should be easier at Topaz House, and is
free at the public parking lot.
Schedule: Each workshop will be 3 hours
long. There will be one 15 minute break during each
workshop.
Refreshments: Starting at 8:40 a.m., and
available all day, each day, there will be a sidebar with
fruit, coffee and tea, soda, and snacks.
CE Credits: IDEALS/NIRE is approved by
the American Psychological Association to
sponsor continuing education for psychologists. IDEALS/NIRE
maintains responsibility for each program and its content.
NIRE has been approved
by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education
Provider, ACEP No. 5560. Programs that do not qualify for
NBCC credit are clearly identified. NIRE is solely
responsible for all aspects of the programs. IDEALS/NIRE is approved by
the Maryland State Board of Social
Workers to offer Category 1 continuing education
programs for social workers. NIRE also is approved by
the Association for Play Therapy to offer
continuing education specific to play therapy. APT Approved
Provider 95-009. IDEALS/NIRE maintains responsibility for
the program.
Each workshop will earn attendees 3
CE credits.
A Certificate will be issued to you
attesting to your completion of each workshop attended and
documenting the CE credits you have
earned.
Cost: The fee for each 3-hour workshop
is $60. The fee for currently enrolled, full-time graduate
students is $10.00 for each workshop, or $30 for all four
workshops.
Lunch: Lunch each day is the
responsibility of each participant, though
arrangements will be made to provide lunch on Saturday for
those who wish. The cost will be $10.00 per
person. Please see the registration form below for
details.
Optional Friday Night Dinner (Dutch
Treat): Many
participants at past AFREM annual meeting workshops have
enjoyed each other’s company over dinner at a
restaurant in Bethesda. We will do the same this year, on
Friday, April 8 at 6:30 p.m. While prepayment is not
necessary, it is necessary for planning purposes to know who
plans to attend, so please indicate on the registration form
that you would like to attend the dinner so that we can make
appropriate arrangements and reserve table space for our
group. Some participants may also choose to go out to dinner
on Saturday evening, but that will not be a formally
organized event.
Travel: For those coming by
air: NIRE is 15
miles from Washington National, 22 miles from
Baltimore-Washington, and 18 miles from Dulles
Airports. For those coming by car: NIRE is two
miles south of the Connecticut Avenue exit or the Wisconsin
Avenue exit of the Beltway (I-495).
Municipal parking is very close and
is free on Saturday (at Waverly and East-West
Highway). Be certain to bring plenty of quarters to
feed the meter for parking on Friday. The cost is $.75 per
hour in long term parking; plan on 9 hours, i.e., $6.75. (To
be safe, bring a roll of quarters!) Parking is free
on Saturday. All registrants will be sent a map detailing
how to reach NIRE.
Accommodations: Discounted hotel rooms are
available at the Bethesda Court Hotel. To secure the
discounted rate, please call 1-800-874-0050 and ask
for the “NIRE” rate, which for 2016 is $129
per night Thursday through Sunday, plus a $15.00 per night
fee for parking. This
discounted rate is available until the hotel reaches a
certain point of capacity for the respective dates, so you
are advised to make reservations as early as
possible. Information about alternative
accommodations can be provided when you
register.
For Further
Information about arrangements, call Chriss Stanton at
301-680-8977.
Registration: To
register, please
(1) call NIRE at
301-680-8977
(2) send your Registration Form by
fax to 1-502-226-7088
or (3) mail your Registration Form
and check to: NIRE, 4400 East-West Highway #24, Bethesda, MD
20814-4501.
Caution: Do not send credit card
information via email.
Registration Form
AFREM Special Workshops Registration
Form
We look forward to seeing you
there!
Rob Scuka,
Ph.D.
Executive Director
National Institute of Relationship
Enhancement®
Role of Religion in Relationships 
The Progression of Sexual Relationships 
