Saying The Unsayable

Training in Family Therapy

with Elizabeth Olson Psy.D., LCSW

April 9, 2021, 9am-1pm

Family Therapy can be a challenging treatment modality. One of my supervisor’s once said that truly effective family therapy is learning how to tolerate saying the unsayable in the system.

In this training, several clinical vignettes will be discussed within a modern psychoanalytic framework that is oriented toward family treatment. We will discuss how emotional induction can teach us about the nature of a family’s patterns, homeostasis, and overall organization. We will explore effective strategies for addressing resistances to change.

We will also discuss the practicalities of family treatment as well as special considerations when working with families that have divorced parents, step-families, co-parenting dilemmas, and youth-at-risk. Difficult ethical dilemmas will be explored and strategies will be discussed for how to best address the challenges.

Dr. Elizabeth Olson will facilitate this training. This training can be used for Continuing Education hours toward professional development.

In this training, you will learn to:

• Identify common family homeostatic patterns
• Become more familiar with the nature of typical family inductions
• Develop strategies for how to attune and join with family members 
• Effectively interrupt procedural patterns in the system 
• Understand the communication of problematic actions such as self-harm, eating disorders, and addictive behaviors 
• Create opportunities for progressive interactions to occur and more effective communication between family members