WHEN The Force IS WIth YOU:
Working With Transference & Counter-Transference in Depth Psychotherapy
A One Day Professional Consultation Workshop
With Michael Mervosh
Saturday, March 30th, 2019
The Wise Mind Institute
Redwood City, CA
An In-Depth Examination of What Depth Psychotherapy Is – How & Why It Works.
- What are our clients getting themselves into when they seek out psychotherapy? What are we getting ourselves into as their therapist?
- What are our most essential therapeutic tasks, and what exactly makes them effective?
- How can we learn to think about our clients and ourselves in ways that can enliven and vitalize the therapeutic encounter?
Gain Insight Into Essential Therapeutic Tasks
How to Hold Fundamental Therapeutic Frames in Mind
An Enlivening Approach to Working With Trouble in Mind – In the Client & In the Therapist.
- Too often in psychotherapy, both clients and therapists set ‘problem solving’ agendas that tend to foreclose the therapeutic process, warding off and thus perpetuating the deeper issues and dilemmas that brought them into therapy in the first place.
- How can we learn to avoid the common entrapment of being a problem solver and the ‘good fixer’ for our clients?
- What allows us to drop the need to compensate or become the good therapist, so as to drop deeper into the source of the real trouble?
Taking the Work Deeper
Looking More Deeply Into the Forces of Transference and Counter-Transference.
Christopher Bollas teaches that the meaning embedded in transferences can come alive with a compelling sense of urgency and aliveness – through the unconscious communication felt in the pressures of the therapeutic relationship – showing us, rather than telling us, the darker forces of unprocessed experiences from the past.
- The unconscious past comes alive in the felt present, through the transference being communicated to us by our clients.
- Our own counter-transferential identifications with our clients can both inform our work as well as distort it.
In this workshop, we will explore our understanding of these powerful underlying forces, so as to better use them and respond to them in our work with clients.
Transference
Counter-Transference
Calling Ourselves Into Question – Re-Establishing the Enlivening & Disturbing Edges of of Vital Therapeutic Work.
Being a psychotherapist is very unique profession, and a peculiar one as well. We have the capacity to help heal, and through our mistakes we can hurt our clients, while taking our therapeutic endeavors to new possibilities of relatedness.
In the psychotherapy process, there are issues and themes that seem to always recede into the background, living on as unexamined assumptions and expectations that simply don’t work.
The therapeutic task is to observe and call into question – and back to conscious attention – those very issues that are constantly set aside, avoided or ignored by our clients.
- In this workshop, we will better understand our ‘dumb’ spots, our ‘blind’ spots, and our ‘hard spots’ as therapists, to better embrace the inevitable and necessary risks and uncertainties of the therapeutic endeavor.
- We will also explore the enlivening risks and benefit of a ‘shared vulnerability’ of going into the unknown together, rather than settling for the deadening security of more ‘transactional’ modes of relating.
About The Workshop Presenter
Michael Mervosh is a licensed clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and founder of MGM Psychological Associates, located in Pittsburgh, PA.
He has been devoted to full-time private practice, providing intensive individual and group psychotherapy for more than 25 years. He originally honed his psychotherapy skills for four years at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, with an emphasis
He has since been in ongoing training and supervision for the last 25 years. He has incorporated approaches from Radix, Object-Relations theory, BioEnergetics, Jungian analysis, developmental character styles, body-oriented psychotherapies, energy work, and a deep immersion in the mythological teachings of Joseph Campbell.
“If you really want to help this world, what you really will have to teach is how to live in it.”
―
Enroll Now For The Workshop
$200
Same Day Registration – if available seats.
Registration at the door, the morning of the workshop.
$230
Agenda For The Workshop
Morning
* THINKING ABOUT OUR WORK – Exploring the Investment & Benefit of Depth Psychotherapy
* BEING A STABILIZING CONTAINER & A DISTURBING FORCE – Exploring Safety & Enlivenment in the Therapeutic Encounter
* ENTERING THE FORCE FIELD OF TRANSFERENCE & COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE – Becoming Informed By What We Feel, & Not Just Reactive To it.
* CALLING OUR WORK INTO QUESTION – How To Work at Growing Edges with Impasses and Dilemmas in the Therapeutic Endeavor
Afternoon
* CASE PRESENTATIONS by participants, with consultation with the presenter, along with group discussion.
* REVIEW OF THE WORK – reflecting further on the day’s key teaching and learning points.
Call
Office: 412-363-1530
Fax: 412-661-6910
Workshop Address
Wise Mind Institute
617 Veteran’s Blvd #204
Redwood City, CA 94063