Stanley Gross, Ed.D., instructor

This workshop introduces the hot button reaction, a commonly experienced expression of fight/flight/freeze responses to social threat (e.g., rejection, criticism). The intervention is an eleven-step process designed to reduce reactivity to hot buttons. It brings together the topics of emotional regulation, awareness, habits, self-control, core belief, affect, and stress. The workshop experientially and conceptually approaches the “black box” of reaction ingredients and reviews the elements of a treatment strategy. Materials include individual worksheets for the eleven steps. This approach evolved over a sixteen-year period during which Dr. Gross used various iterations of the program with psychotherapy clients who experienced emotional regression following stress. He observed the power of core beliefs to drive the perception preceding emotional deregulation. He came to see that embedded habits hid the value of the core belief and played a key role in the maintenance of the behavior.

Specific learning objectives:

• Develop a greater sensitivity to the implications of hot buttons for work with clients

• Discuss the origin, significance, and persistence of hot button reactions

• Describe interventions in psychotherapy and psychological education

Program Code: HMIB
6 CE Credits MFT
Location: at William James College, Newton

Stanley J. Gross, Ed.D., recently retired after twenty-five years of clinical practice in Quincy and West Roxbury, MA.  He is Professor Emeritus of Counseling Psychology at Indiana State University, Terre Haute IN.  Dr. Gross authored Of Foxes and Hen Houses:  Licensing and the Health Professions (1984) and Pathways to Lasting Self-Esteem (2004).