Master Series in Clinical Practice

Co-sponsors: The Continuing Education Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Major Teaching Hospital of Harvard Medical School; Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; and William James College.

The Master Series affords the chance to spend a complete day with leaders in our field to consider the unique perspective each speaker brings to the challenging dilemmas in both theory and practice. We hope that you will consider joining us for the entire series at a reduced tuition or choose the programs most relevant to your own practice.

Suzanne McCarthy, PsyD & Danielle Green, LICSW, instructors

Participants will learn how to work with the dyadic system using the most effective contemporary approaches in the field of couple and family therapy.  In the past couple of decades, the empirically validated model of Emotionally Focused Therapy has become regarded as one of the most effective models of couples therapy ever developed. EFT is a short term, treatment model of couples therapy that has been shown to move 70 – 75% of couples from distress to recovery and 90% to significant improvements.  What EFT provides for therapists is a road map for better understanding of couples’ distress and how to work with it.  For the couple with whom the therapist is working, EFT provides a better understanding of what is underlying their recurrent pattern of conflict. Participants can expect to have a much better understanding of what drives couple escalation and detachment and how to work more effectively with it. Participants can expect to acquire a working knowledge of the models of EFT and begin to apply this to challenging couples who often present in our therapy offices as extremely dysregulated with rapidly escalating conflict or shut down and withdrawn. Class structure will incorporate didactic lecture, discussion, experiential role plays, and viewed taped sessions that illustrate specific therapeutic interventions.

Specific learning objectives:

1. To understand couple distress through an attachment lens and to learn to guide the couple dynamic to a more adaptive response.

2. Identify the three stages of Emotionally Focused Couples therapy and concomitant interventions.

3. Understanding of interventions of EFT with in the extremes of couple dynamics how to utilize them in key therapeutic change moments of couples therapy

Program Code: MS89

6 CE/CME Credits (MFT CE Credits available)

Location: William James College, Newton

Suzanne McCarthy, PsyD, is a licensed psychologist and certified EFT therapist practicing in the Boston area.    She graduated from MSPP with a specialty in health psychology and her dissertation studied the narratives of couples facing cancer and their impact on the couple’s ability to cope with this life crisis.  She has advanced couples training in models of EFT, IFS and AEDP. She is principal staff of the New England Center for Couples and Families and teaches EFT to psychiatric residents as member of the Harvard Medical School faculty.

Danielle Green, LICSW, is a Principal Staff member of NECCF. She received her MSW from Columbia University and completed 5 years of further specialist training in couples and family therapy at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, in New York City. She worked and taught at Cornell Medical Center for 10 years before relocating to Boston to serve as Clinical and Training Director of the Couple and Family Therapy Program, at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School. There, she trained psychologists, psychiatry residents and social workers and lectured extensively throughout the Harvard system. Danielle is a certified EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) therapist and supervisor. Her areas of specialty are GBLTQ relationships, parent/child dyads and relational crises such as affairs.