THURSDAY – JULY 31, 2025

Solution Focused Brief Therapy

An Approach As Lasting As A Diamond
Elliott Connie, M.S., LPC
July 31, 2025 – 9am

This presentation will introduce participants to The Diamond Approach (Connie & Froerer, 2022) of Solution Focused Brief Therapy. The presenter will cover each of the components necessary to carry out a session from this approach, namely, 1) acquiring a desired outcome/transformation, 2) developing a co-constructed description of the desired transformation with details from the history, resources, and a preferred future, and 3) closing a session in a way that is meaningful and that honors the client’s autonomy and agency. Participants will watch recordings of actual sessions from this approach and will have in-depth discussions about how this therapy is carried out. Finally, participants will have several opportunities to practice the skills needed to do this work. This workshop will be inspiring and you will leave more enthusiastic about the work you are doing! You will understand the value of seeing people as the best versions of themselves, and will be more able to treat them accordingly.

Care of the Soul

A Therapeutic Way of Life
Thomas Moore, Ph.D.
July 31, 2025 – 10:15am

“Therapy” is an ancient word, found for example in the works of Plato, that means care or tending.  It is used in the Gospels when Jesus “tends” the sick. It is not a process of fixing or curing as much as caring for a person so they may return to health. The ancient Greeks would say that it is the work of Asklepius (healing) and Hygeia (health). I like to say that I do not practice therapy but rather, I am a therapist.

In every human encounter I bring my identity as a therapist to offer health of soul to the world.  Teachers, business leaders, doctors, lawyers, parents and life partners are asked to be therapists every day.  We should know the basics of how to be therapeutic in every situation.

• Attendees will gain a broader and deeper understanding of psychotherapy.
• Attendees will learn how to help clients and patients activate the therapist in them.
• Attendees will come to know ways to help guide clients to include spiritual values in their work in therapy.

When Ungrieved Sorrow Pervades Personality

Working with Depressive and Self-Defeating Patterns
Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP
July 31, 2025 – 10:30am

Especially since the pandemic, therapists struggle to help clients with painful losses and challenges. Situational stresses interact with personality patterns, presenting us with complicated combinations of grief, mourning, and depressive and self-defeating (also called masochistic) dynamics. Because neither “Depressive Personality Disorder” nor “Self-Defeating Personality Disorder” is included in the DSM or ICD, official taxonomies offer little help to therapists in distinguishing between various painful self-states and framing psychotherapy accordingly. With vignettes from her own work, Dr. McWilliams will differentiate conceptually between depression and mourning, between anaclitic and introjective depression, between relational self-sabotage and “moral masochism,” and between depressive and self-defeating personality patterns, emphasizing the therapeutic implications of such distinctions and exploring appropriate clinical interventions.

The Fastest Route to a More Effective Practice

Target the Most Important Skillset in All of Mental Health
Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D.
July 31, 2025 – 1:45pm

The last half a century of research on mental and behavioral health has failed in simplifying our lives as practitioners or in making our work more effective. There are more than 10 million combinations of signs and symptoms that can lead to a DSM diagnosis, which is hardly simplifying. Our diagnostic system has not been shown to guide practitioners to effective intervention, and the impact of our intervention methods is not increasing over time. One bright spot may point to a way forward, however: personalizing interventions to the particular needs of the people we serve does in fact improve outcomes. This talk is about how we can best accomplish that task.

Almost hidden from view, there are thousands of studies that have examined the things that our clients actually do during treatment that leads to positive outcomes. I and my team have examined every one of them, and it turns out you can summarize all of that knowledge in a 20-word sentence that captures the most important skillset in all of mental and behavioral health. I will provide that sentence and suggest that if can you learn to target and change these core processes of change, your practice will become both simpler and more effective. Importantly, everyone implicitly knows what these processes are, but the organ between our ears hides this knowledge from us.

When we personalize treatment by targeting the key processes of change, we can focus on how to produce healthy differences in a few major areas, and then to ensure that these changes are kept and fitted to the needs of the client’s goals and situation. Every major therapeutic approach contains methods that target many of these areas, so no one needs to check their minds, preferences, or training at the door so as to become more effective – instead we can let our clients be our teachers, now that we know what skills to focus upon.

Treating Anxiety in 2025

Are We As Stuck As Our Clients?
Lynn Lyons, LICSW
July 31, 2025 – 3:00pm

People of all ages are more lonely, stressed and disconnected than ever; theories about what’s driving the increase are multiple and overlapping. And while therapists obviously want to help, are we truly doing what works? Or are we buying into the same mental health trends, assumptions and outdated theories as the clients we’re trying to help? In this keynote, Lynn encourages mental health providers to question the myths, trends, and sometimes surprising approaches to treating anxiety and depression, and offers concrete and often counterintuitive approaches based on action, connection, and accurate psychoeducation.

FRIDAY – August 1, 2025

One Size Fits None

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and a Process-Based Approach
Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D.
August 1, 20235 – Time TBD

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy provides a simplified framework for a unified and effective process-based approach to your practice, one that can integrate most of the things you already do well, while expanding your focus to include virtually all biopsychosocial change processes of known importance. This workshop will show you how to do that by embodying, reading, and targeting the key processes of change at a mental, biological, and social level. Instead of a focus on normative categories that label human beings but fail to guide successful intervention, we can attend to the specific change mechanisms that are related to particular goals for particular clients. This workshop will guide you to understand the how processes of change interconnect in different ways for different people so that we can finally abandon the “one size fits all” mentality that has dominated psychotherapy research, even though every clinician knows that treatment must be personalized to be effective. Through “real plays,” experiential exercises, skill demonstrations, and methods to improve the therapeutic relationship, the workshop will go beyond theory to implement an approach to practice in which every voice matters and clients can be helped without having to force them into syndromal boxes.