Training Topics:  Couples

If your organisation is interested in approaching me for teaching on couples, please review the descriptions below of the one or two day presentation topics. You might prefer to use a combination of these workshops or presentations in order to meet the particular needs of your group.

​Making Change Stick in Couple Work

A 1 day workshop on the practises that enhance resilience.
This 1 day workshop will highlight the conceptual framework and the practices that support us and the people we work with to move from reactivity to responsiveness.

In couple work reactivity breeds reactivity. People experience a strong reaction to a situation or a comment or a behavior. In turn, this reaction provokes a search for an explanation where fault is often centralized,’ it's either my fault or yours ‘. This process leads to a dead-end where people experience a loss of closeness and intimacy.

I have developed a Relationally orientated communication style or ROCS where the experiential reactions we have in relationships are used to orientate us toward discovery and thus intimacy. I will demonstrate and you will practice the ROCS process which has 6 steps.

This workshop will be orientated toward using the ROC process in therapeutic conversations with couples.

Affairs, Making Change Stick in a Climate of  Injury
The kind of injury generated when one person in a relationship has had an affair is often akin to losing those reference points that have given life meaning and stability. The loss of faith in the beloved, joins hands with a loss of faith in perceived reality.the relationship ‘story’ can feel shattered as the past memories are reviewed, present experiences are doubted and future dreams are suspended.

This workshop will assist you to create an environment where injury is expressed, responsibility is taken and repair is negotiated and enacted.
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This is an extra-ordinary process that has the potential to challenge and change all participants, including therapists. I will discuss and demonstrate ways to create a body, mind and heart synergy where compassion, respect, trust, fear and loss become part of the fabric of a new relationship narrative.

During the workshop participants will practice the following:
  • Assisting people to acknowledge the injury.
  • Negotiating the movement of intentions to practices.
  • Developing strategies to grieve for the losses whilst holding the possibility of hope for the relationship.
  • Assist people to develop an explanation for what happened without this explanation being used as an excuse.
  • Negotiate practical ways to protect the relationship while talking about emotionally evocative issues
  • Negotiating practical ways to move discoveries out of the therapy room.

We talk, we listen but do we understand? 

A 2 day workshop for practitioners working with couples.
We often meet couples who are struggling to find any common ground in respect to understanding past events.  Consequently, we can find ourselves managing a conversation shaped by accusation and counter-accusation. In this workshop I will discuss and demonstrate a conversational process that allows us to step away from accusation in order to find a third way. The third way incorporates each person’s experience while exploring the sometimes complex and contradictory moments which occur within relationships. 

By using a process that emphasises a relational perspective, we can explore and renegotiate the taken-for-granted notions which act to shape relationships.

Throughout this presentation I will demonstrate a therapeutic process where I engage couples in addressing serious concerns such as, significant betrayals of trust, longstanding conflicts, the impact of losses and grief, and the negotiation of change in relationships.

Change-Making Conversations with Couples

A one day workshop for practitioners working with couples.
In this workshop we will practice generating change-making opportunities by working with the tensions and differences that occur in the room.   I will emphasis the practical skills I use to generate experiences of movement for couples.  This sense of movement inevitably creates opportunities for therapists to highlight agency, ideas and practices that are supportive of change. 

I will demonstrate that new story-lines can come into existence as we notice, name and explore these moments of direct experience.

Constructively Talking About ‘Affairs’ 

A two day workshop for practitioners working with couples.
This workshop will provide participants with strategies to assist people to acknowledge the hurt they've caused and feel whilst also taking up responsibility.  I will demonstrate how we can use this acknowledgement to weave a new relationship fabric that incorporates the injury that occurs when one person has an affair. 

During the workshop participants will practice the following:
  • Assisting people to acknowledge the injury.
  • Negotiating the movement of intentions to practices.
  • Developing strategies to grieve for the losses whilst holding the possibility of hope for the relationship.
  • Negotiating practical ways to move discoveries out of the therapy room.