Speaker(s):
Presentation: In this presentation, Skurtu offers specific tools clinicians can use when couples are in high crisis and high conflict. Many clinicians have never been given any tools for how to address conflict in the moment. Clients come in fighting about a variety of issues and clinicians can feel overwhelmed by their chaotic presentation. However, helpful couples therapy cannot take place if a couple is too emotionally dysregulated. If clinicians don’t find ways to bring the crisis down, they often lose the client and the potential to help. Skurtu will describe specific interventions that can be used to help couples calm down both in sessions and outside of sessions. Skurtu will also describe case by case scenarios for how to organize sessions. Finally, she will offer some best practices for worst case scenarios including cases where Intimate Partner Violence may be present. This will be presented from a systemic perspective but will also include some elements of emotion regulation from DBT.
Objectives:
- Develop tools for reducing client conflict in sessions
- Understand how to use systemic models to address couples’ problems as a unit
- Identify at least 3 interventions clinicians can use the next day in therapy
- Evaluate when to incorporate a crisis plan for situations such as Intimate Partner Violence
