When: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 12-1:30pm (est)
Instructor: Nancy Knudsen, LMFT
Level: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
CE’s: 1.5 CE’s approved for Social Workers and Lic. Psychologists*

Hosted by the Smith College School for Social Work

This live webinar with Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Nancy Knudsen, explained how doing effective therapy with more than one person in the room is a whole different endeavor from working with an individual. Couple therapists often find that people come in not to make changes in themselves but to get the therapist’s help in changing the other. Shifting the frame from the problem lying inside one person to one that stems from an interactive pattern between two people can be a major undertaking. How to accomplish this task while offering deep empathy and validation for each member of the couple involves skillfully shifting back and forth from the systemic view of the couple to the careful exploration of the inner worlds of each individual.

This webinar was based on the basic concepts of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), an evidence-based approach that has been shown to be highly effective in helping distressed couples repair and create a secure bond. Based on an integration of structural systems theory, the theory of attachment and emotional bonding, and an experiential humanistic approach to exploring emotions, EFT offers a roadmap to help couples stuck in a perpetual cycle of conflict to find their way back to loving connection.

In this program, participants:

  1. Described the fundamental differences between individual and couple therapy
  2. Explained the challenges of holding two competing perspectives simultaneously
  3. Listed three contra-indicators for couples therapy
  4. Defined the role of the therapist as the safe attachment figure

Nancy KnudsenNancy Knudsen, LMFT is a Marriage and Family Therapist in Northampton, MA with over 30 years experience. Over the past 10 years, Nancy’s primary clinical modality has been Emotionally Focused Therapy. She is a certified EFT therapist and supervisor and has taught a number of workshops on EFT. Additionally, she is a Past President of the Massachusetts Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and is currently the director of the Couple and Family Institute of New England.