Thursday - May 4th
8:00am - 8:30am Registration/Breakfast:
8:30am - 4:30pm
  12:00pm - 1:00pm Lunch (included)

Trauma and Internal Family Systems Therapy: Working with Couples and with the Parts of the Trauma Therapist      
Presented by: Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.

Description: Developed over the past three decades, Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers an empowering and non-pathologizing approach to treating trauma.  It helps clients access an undamaged essence from which they heal the parts (subpersonalities) of themselves that continue to live in shock, pain, and shame.  Very often, trauma clients hold the belief that they have been so damaged that they will never heal and that their very essence is tarnished.  IFS helps clients honor their parts’ attempts to protect, gets permission from the parts to go to the exiled pain they are trying to manage, heals that pain, and helps the parts find a new role in the internal system.

This workshop will begin with a brief overview of IFS, followed by specific strategies for managing therapists’ countertransference in the face of fearful, enraged, or wounded client parts, and for applying IFS in couples therapy.  The workshop will include lecture, videotaped interviews, as well as experiential exercises.

When the Therapist Gets Triggered:  One of the chief obstacles to effective trauma treatment can be the therapist’s view of trauma symptoms like dissociation, rage, and suicidal thoughts as frightening evidence of deep pathology, rather than an expression of the natural human impulse toward self-protection.  This workshop will also demonstrate how the IFS model offers a way to enter into clients’ inner ecology without the overemphasis on containment and stabilization that’s common in trauma work today.  You’ll learn an approach that moves more quickly by honoring clients’ inner protectors, getting their permission to access inner exiles, and contacting the core Self – a reservoir of calm, wisdom, and inner leadership.  Dr. Schwartz will discuss methods for honestly and transparently handling situations in which you become emotionally triggered by your client’s parts.

Couples Therapy with Traumatized Parts:  Often couples come to us awash in emotions and impulses that make for difficult interactions and impasses.  IFS provides a language and framework for helping each person identify and speak for the traumatized parts of themselves that are driving the conflict – and gives an opportunity for each person to feel witnessed by the other.  Video will be used to demonstrate the IFS model applied to working with two people,including how to manage emotional interactions.

Objectives: 

1. Identify the basic theory and principles of Internal Family Systems Therapy as they apply to working with trauma.
2. Distinguish among a client's parts - including protectors, managers, and exiles - and be able to communicate and negotiate with each one.
3. Identify the effects of trauma on parts and Self, including how to utilize the model in releasing personal trauma.
4. Gain an awareness of their own parts and how those parts impact therapy with traumatized clients whose behavior may be triggering to the therapist.
5. Identify ways IFS can be applied to couples therapy when one or both partners is/are accessing parts that have been traumatized.

About the Speaker: Click Here

Friday - May 5th
8:00am - 8:30am Registration/Breakfast:
8:30am - 4:30pm
12:00pm - 1:00pm Lunch (included)

The Biology and Psychology of Trauma & Recovery: Mindfulness, Compassion, and Embodied Awareness    
Presented by: Jim Hopper, Ph.D.

Description: This workshop provides theoretical and practical approaches to biological and psychological processes involved in trauma and recovery, particularly interventions that cultivate mindfulness, compassion and bodily awareness. Dr. Hopper provides a theoretical framework that draws on knowledge from several scientific, clinical and contemplative traditions, especially neuroscience, Buddhist psychology and Internal Family Systems (IFS). The framework clarifies how key brain circuitries – including those of seeking, satisfaction, and embodiment – are involved in fundamental cycles of suffering  and can be harnessed to cultivate healing and recovery. For example, what IFS calls “parts” can be understood as “apps” that run on and compete for key brain circuitries; and what IFS calls the “Self” as universal human capacities (e.g., mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom) that can transform the brain’s “operating system” and thereby alter how parts function and relate to each other in suffering, healing and happiness. Experiential exercises and discussion will be integrated throughout, and participants will be provided with information about IFS and other interventions for trauma that cultivate mindfulness, compassion, and bodily awareness.

Objectives: 

1. Participants will be able to define several key brain circuitries involved in post-traumatic suffering, healing and recovery.
2. Participants will be able to explain the basic elements of Buddhist psychology's teaching that aversion and craving are fundamental sources of human suffering.
3. Participants will be able to explain relationships among several key brain circuitries in cycles of suffering.
4. Participants will be able to explain relationships amog several key brain circuitries in cycles of healing and recovery.
5. Participants will be able to explain how IFS and contemplative methods for cultivating mindfulness, compassion and bodily awareness can harness key brain's circuitries to foster healing, recovery and transformation of psychological trauma.
6. Participants will be able to (a) name several emerging and empirically supported interventions for cultivating mindfulness, compassion and bodily awareness in traumatized clients, (b) explain how those interventions promote healing and recovery, and (c) describe how to acquire additional information about training in those interventions.

About the Speaker: Click Here

12:00pm - 1:00pm NHPA Annual Membership Meeting (lunch included)
This is your opportunity to meet with NHPA leadership, hear from the NHPA board, reconnect with colleagues, and discuss items important to psychology in NH.

4:30pm - 6:00pm Social Hour
Come join us for some fun, relaxed social engagement... make new connections, network, and reconnect with colleagues. 

6:00pm - 9:30pm NHPA Awards Dinner (purchased separately)
Every year NHPA gives awards for outstanding service to NHPA, the field of psychology, and the provision of mental health services in the state.  Come join us as we celebrate the people in NH making significant contributions.