This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completion of the course, mental health professionals will be able to:

• Explain why an active, interventionist stance is important to render couples therapy both viable and constructive.

• List and define seven types of active interventions with couples to de-escalate conflict.

• Define and discuss how therapeutic guilt inducement can lead to apology rendering and conflict resolution.

• Explain how multi-cultural competence might involve therapists honoring traditional masculine ways of behaving and communicating.

• Discuss three ways in which couples therapy can be structured to render it male-friendly or conducive to a strong therapist/male client alliance.

This course identifies and describes a host of effective interventions for use with couples, drawing from evidence-based practice, practice-based evidence, and theoretical clinical concepts. Although the knowledge, case studies and clinical vignettes provided may improve a participant's ability to enlarge and sharpen their clinical skills with couples – the how-to’s of assuming an active, interventionist stance; pivoting between being both neutral and partial in the alliance with clients depending on the presenting problems; coaxing the expression of vulnerable emotions; handling gendered communication issues sensitively; and rendering couples therapy more male-friendly – these are therapeutic skills that require ongoing development beyond what any single course can impart.

This course will cover helpful therapeutic ideas and procedures that lead to favorable outcomes in couples therapy. Couples often delay seeking therapy until their problems are dire, requiring the therapist to adopt an active, interventionist stance in order for treatment to be both viable and constructive. Among the interventions that help clients de-escalate conflict are: toning down the intensity of reactions in ways that allows for legitimate grievances to be recognized; agreeing to disagree; realizing the distinction between acknowledging and agreeing; reducing hyperbolic and inflammatory accusations; engaging in benign ignoring; and rewording criticisms as complaints and wishes.

What distinguishes the skilled couples therapist is their know-how when it comes to the core procedures endorsed by most schools of thought in the field: keeping the alliance with both partners relatively balanced; unlocking vulnerable emotions; and accentuating client strengths. Research indicates that if couples therapy with heterosexual partners is to avert premature drop-out and lead to favorable outcomes, the therapist needs to diligently construct a positive alliance with the male partner because he is more inclined to resist treatment, yet potentially may benefit the most. A male-friendly approach falls under the rubric of multicultural sensitivity and respects empirically based stylistic male behaviors such as “fight or flight” stress reactions, a transactional and logical communication style, and struggles with emotional expressiveness. Motivation to be more intentional in improving one’s relationship with a significant other can be derived from existential themes such as death anxiety and the desire to break intergenerational patterns of relationship dysfunction.

This course will address all of these topics in descriptive and learnable ways, as well as: what constitutes a marriage-affirming approach in couples therapy; the use of therapeutic guilt inducement to curate responsibility-taking behavior and apology rendering; and how humor can be capitalized upon to reduce conflict and engender good will. Case vignettes and therapist responses to client issues will be interspersed throughout the course to maximize the practicality and usability of the ideas and procedures covered.

3 CE Hours - $74

Approved for:

• American Psychological Association (APA) continuing education for psychologists

• Social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/9/2005-3/9/2027.

• NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6323.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology (NYSED-PSY) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0048.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work (NYSED-SW) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0561.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners (NYSED-MHC) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors #MHC-0229.

No conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors.

This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completion of the course, mental health professionals will be able to:

• Discuss four ways in which the enactment of traditional informed consent procedures can have alienating effects on clients, and how these procedures might be handled from a humanistic ethics standpoint.

• Explain what metacompetencies are and why they are important aspects of clinical competency that psychotherapists have an ethical duty to maintain.

• Describe how true multicultural competence requires awareness of how individualistic values can be different from the norms often adopted by clients from collectivist cultures and nondominant groups.

• Define the concept of “moral injury” and the potential ethical obligation to treat psychological problems as moral injuries.

This course draws on findings from evidence-based practice, practice-based evidence, and theoretical frameworks to explore when and how psychotherapists might prioritize humanistic ethics when a more rigid implementation of professional ethics threatens to negatively impact the quality of client care. While the knowledge and clinical vignettes provided in this course will advance participants’ ability to more caringly and judiciously handle professional duties, including informed consent to treatment, boundary crossings, multicultural competence, and the upkeep of clinical competency-these are areas of ethical practice that require ongoing development above that which any single course can impart.

This presentation will cover a host of ways in which, paradoxically, psychotherapists can compromise the quality of care offered to clients when they adhere to narrow definitions of professional ethics in the everyday world of clinical practice. We psychotherapists have an overarching ethical obligation to practice in ways that enhance client well-being (beneficence) and mitigate any potential for harming clients (nonmaleficence).

All too often, psychotherapists approach the task of obtaining informed consent for treatment in medico-legal ways, meeting the risk-management and bureaucratic needs of practitioners, or the institutions they are affiliated with, at a delicate moment early on in therapy when clients want these matters to be of secondary, not primary importance.

Maintaining strong professional boundaries is perceived as crucial to preserve the basic structure of therapy. However, so-called “boundary crossings,” such as therapist self-disclosure, the giving and receiving of gifts, and non-sexual physical touch, under certain circumstances, can be invaluable ways of cultivating therapist-client rapport. An overzealous approach to professional boundaries can rationalize what clients experience as off-putting aloofness, coldness, and indifference on the part of their psychotherapist.

Practicing with multicultural competence has become elevated as a critically important dimension of professionalism in the field. But, is it enough to simply acquire knowledge of and show respect for diverse races, ethnicities, and identities, or are psychotherapists beckoned to take a bolder approach: namely, working in concert with clients to help them understand and address the myriad ways they are marginalized, oppressed, and minoritized by dominant cultural values?

Psychotherapists’ training and education does not come to a grinding halt at licensure. Maintaining and upgrading clinical competency is a professional/ethical mandate. But what are the continuing education implications of mounting evidence showing that clinical effectiveness and favorable treatment outcomes are connected to the personal and interpersonal skills of the psychotherapist? What life pursuits might enlarge and deepen psychotherapists’ personhood in ways that improve their clinical effectiveness? Related to this, if many psychological problems are the result of “moral injuries,” or human wrongdoing as the result of betrayal, deceit, unfairness, exploitation, and the like, do psychotherapists have an ethical obligation to familiarize themselves in deeply personal ways with these aspects of the human condition so as to be of maximum benefit to clients?

This presentation will address these topics and questions in highly practical ways to help participants be more aware of the pitfalls associated with seemingly benign ways of employing professional ethics and the gains that can be yielded in therapeutic effectiveness by prioritizing humanistic ethics of care.

Case vignettes will be inserted throughout the presentation to ground research findings and theoretical ideas in a manner that renders them more clinically useful.

3 CE Hours - $74

Approved for:

• American Psychological Association (APA) continuing education for psychologists

• Social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/9/2005-3/9/2027.

• NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6323.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology (NYSED-PSY) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0048.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work (NYSED-SW) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0561.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners (NYSED-MHC) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors #MHC-0229.

No conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors.

This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completion of the course, mental health professionals will be able to:

• Explain the difference between a therapeutic stance which embodies an ethic of compassionate detachment, of dispassionate detachment, and of disciplined compassion.

• List three clinical reasons for engaging in therapist self-disclosure.

• Discuss four ways therapists demonstrate authentic care with clients.

• Describe three ways in which the sensitive use of humor can strengthen the therapeutic alliance.

• Explain how multi-cultural competence includes examining personal biases of the therapist based on their own ethnic/racial identity.

This course incorporates a contemporary mixture of evidence-based practice, practice-based evidence, and theoretical information pertaining to ways psychotherapists can use their selfhood to strengthen the therapeutic alliance and optimize treatment outcome. Although the knowledge, case studies and clinical vignettes provided may improve participants’ ability to manifest qualities such as greater empathy, genuineness, and effective use of humor and self-disclosure in their work with clients, these are therapeutic skills that require ongoing development beyond that any single course can impart.

This course is based on two chapters from Dr. Gnaulati’s book, Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care (Beacon Press, 2018). The book unpacks the problematic incentives in the health-care system and academic psychology that explain the declining availability of quality talk therapy. A persuasive case is made for preserving in-depth, personally transformative psychotherapy.

This course will outline and elaborate upon “disciplined compassion” as a therapeutic stance that can be adopted by psychotherapists to enliven and optimize their work with clients. There's a performing – not just informing – dimension to putting clients in touch with underlying feelings. The therapist's care and compassion manifests itself as skill at knowing how and when to amplify versus dampening a response, prolong or foreshorten an emotional reaction, use sparse versus ample wordage, react animatedly or sedately, make a point loudly or quietly, and make eye contact or avert it. All these decisions must be coordinated as authentic expressions while the therapist rapidly processes verbal and nonverbal interactional information in the consulting room.

Disciplined compassion, as embodied by the therapist in these ways, provides the sort of receptivity and sensitivity clients need to effectively access, articulate, and acquire expressive mastery of their own unformulated emotions. To take a reserved approach out of the belief that the therapist's expressiveness could contaminate the client's access to presumed fully formed, self-contained, pure emotions can limit the range and intensity of emotions clients can access and articulate. Clients also need to know we not only can encounter them, but can also counter them. Not only face them, but also face off with them. Too neutral a stance can deprive clients of valuable direct feedback from the therapist who supposedly knows them intimately and is well positioned to offer it.

This course will address these topics in highly practical ways, as well as notions of authentic care; the use of humor and self-disclosure in therapy; and, how therapists who aim to be transparent and personable can still be eminently professional. As we shall see, it is quite possible to be both personable in your clinical role and highly professional – one doesn’t cancel out the other. Case vignettes will be utilized throughout the course to heighten the practicality and usability of the ideas covered.

4 CE Hours - $99

Approved for:

• American Psychological Association (APA) continuing education for psychologists

• Social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/9/2005-3/9/2027.

• NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6323.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology (NYSED-PSY) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0048.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work (NYSED-SW) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0561.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners (NYSED-MHC) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors #MHC-0229.

No conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors.

This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completion of the course, mental health professionals will be able to:

• List four differences between ADHD and typical narcissistic tendencies in children/adolescents.

• Explain how early child development, and gender specific traits and communication styles can be mistaken for autism spectrum behavior.

• Discuss the importance of ruling out normal childhood behavior and expected reactions to stressful life events before applying a diagnosis of ADHD or autism spectrum disorder.

This course relies on data from evidence-based practice, descriptive material from practice-based evidence, and theoretical information to assist mental health professionals differentiate between actual cases of childhood disorders, such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, and behavioral reactions to the normal psychosocial and developmental challenges all children encounter. The positions taken in this course are in no way meant to minimize the validity of these disorders, nor to dissuade mental health professionals against early evaluation, detection, and intervention. Although robust empirical findings and theoretical justifications are provided to support the positions taken in this course, the topics discussed are under-researched and further studies are necessary to lend relevant empirical support.

The material in the course is based on two chapters from Dr. Gnaulati’s book, Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Beacon Press, 2013).

The training of mental health clinicians can predispose them to assign diagnoses to children when the behavior in question falls instead within the broad scope of normalcy. (Defresne & Mottron, 2022; Merten et al., 2017) It can be exceedingly difficult to disentangle transitory disturbing reactions to stressful life events; lags in socio-emotional maturation; struggles related to mismatches in where a child is at developmentally and the cognitive and behavioral expectations placed on him or her at school; the outcome of patterns of emotional reactivity in the parent-child relationship; the manifestation of incipient difficult personality traits; a combination of all of these – and clear-cut evidence of a mental health diagnosis.

Remarkably high rates of ADHD might be due to how symptoms of this disorder mimic normal childhood narcissism. (Weissenberger et al., 2017; Emeh, et al., 2018; Silverman et al., 2022) When assessing ADHD, common-sense questions need to be asked: Hyperactivity, or overdramatic attention-seeking behavior? Failing to finish tasks, or trouble persisting in the face of overconfident expectations? Disorganization, or magical thinking? Forgetfulness, or habitual under-preparation? Disproportionate numbers of African American children and adolescents are diagnosed with ADHD – one study showing rates of 14.5%, compared with 10% percent in the general population (Cenat et al., 2021) – raising concerns that a medicalized approach shunts the focus away from socio-economic and educational disparities that contribute to ADHD-like phenomena.

When assessing high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, certain rule outs need to be entertained in order for an accurate diagnosis to be confidently arrived at: Is this a child whose presentation is better explained by delayed, but not impaired, language development? Problematic, but not disordered tantrumming and picky eating? The combination of incipient mental giftedness, introversion, and autonomy-seeking in boys? Or, the interplay of several, or all of these? (Bishop & Rinn, 2020; Kubicek & Emde, 2012); Machado et al., 2021; Silver et al., 2022)

This course will address all of these issues, enabling mental health clinicians working with children/adolescents and their parents to use non-pathologizing, developmentally normative ways of understanding and altering the types of struggling behavior that all-too-often gets mistaken for evidence of ADHD and/or autism spectrum disorder.

3 CE Hours - $74

Approved for:

• American Psychological Association (APA) continuing education for psychologists

• Social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/9/2005-3/9/2027.

• NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6323.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology (NYSED-PSY) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0048.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work (NYSED-SW) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0561.

• New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners (NYSED-MHC) as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors #MHC-0229.

No conflicts of interest have been reported by the authors.