This two-day online training is a package offering that includes Emotion-Focused Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy: Theory and Practice and Emotion-Focused Chair Work: Transforming Self-Criticism and Emotional Avoidance & Cultivating Assertion and Forgiveness. To register for either of these trainings as single day-offerings please click the appropriate link above.
The training is intended for health and mental health clinicians. It is recognized by the Ordre des psychologues du Québec.
Emotion-Focused Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy: Theory and Practice
Ketamine is emerging as a powerful catalyst to accelerate the healing and recovery process in individuals suffering from treatment-resistant depression. When paired with psychotherapy, ketamine is thought to increase the client’s receptivity to treatment by interrupting the default mode network, promoting cognitive flexibility and increasing clients’ optimism about and engagement the therapy process.
Emotion-Focused Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (EF-KAP) is a therapeutic model developed as an extension of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (Lafrance & Robison, 2020). Every aspect of the treatment is guided by emotion theory as it is well understood that problematic emotion processing plays a key role in the onset and maintenance of mental health issues. As such, EF-KAP aims to support the affected individual to make contact with, attend to and work through affective experiences, developing mastery with emotion processing over time. The development of skill and confidence with emotions also makes symptoms less necessary to cope with stress and distress, including patterns of avoidance.
To further support the healing process, a family member or close other is recruited to support the client throughout the treatment protocol in specific ways. Doing so facilitates the optimization of a recovery-friendly environment outside of the therapy office, strengthens meaningful relationships, and potentially extends healing and growth beyond the client and into the system.
This workshop will provide a review of ketamine and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy followed by a step-by-step overview of the EF-KAP model, including an optional experiential activity. Research data, clinical vignettes and video clips with EF-KAP clients will also be shared.
Emotion-Focused Chair Work: Transforming Self-criticism and Emotional Avoidance & Cultivating Assertion and Forgiveness in Psychotherapy
One of the psychological markers of anxiety, depressed mood and other emotion-based difficulties relates to difficulties with emotion processing, referring to the capacity to attend to, label, regulate and move through emotions. When external stressors overwhelm our internal capacities, the human organism seeks out ways – consciously and unconsciously – to get relief, including via thought and behavior patterns like self-criticism, self-interruptions and avoidance patterns. It can also become difficult to connect with healthy assertion and forgiveness, states essential for mental health.
This workshop will introduce powerful and efficient emotion-focused interventions for the transformation of self-criticism and emotional self-interruptions in therapy, as well as the cultivation of assertive anger and forgiveness. Using chair-work and informed by theory and techniques from EFT and EFFT, participants will be provided with scripts and opportunities to observe the interventions in action via video or demonstration. Opportunities for practice may also be available.
Only the training on March 12th will be recorded and available to participants for two weeks. The training on March 19th will not be recorded because it includes accounts of clients.
