MERCER COUNTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Presents:

Solution-Focused Therapy: Integrating Strengths, Competencies, and
Resilience Focused Approaches into Your Practice.

Presenter: David Krauss, Ph.D.

Friday November 15, 2024

TPC Jasna Polana – 4519 Province Line Rd, Princeton, NJ 08540 

Registration 8:30AM – 9:00AM. Presentation 9:00AM-12:15PM
Includes 15-minute mid-morning break and buffet breakfast-snacks

Registration for the Workshop is done on MCPA website, https://mercerpsych.org/calendar/, and click Register Now at the bottom of the page

CE – 3 APA Approved Credits (via NJPA)- Register and pay prior to the workshop at https://psychologynj.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?id=24162294

Program Content

Almost all modern-day therapist-clinicians have learned the importance of identifying, highlighting, and using client strengths, resources, and competencies. We may, though, struggle to consistently put these intentions into practice. We, like our clients, have been wired by evolution, and perhaps by some of our training, to focus our attention quickly-and-automatically on client weaknesses, deficits, and pathology. It can take much deliberate effort to consistently respect and use our clients’ skills and talents, their natural problem-solving abilities and solution patterns. Solution-focused therapy interventions can help us do better – and can be readily integrated into the work of clinicians practicing from a wide range of orientations, perhaps especially cognitive-behavioral, accelerated experiential dynamic (AEDP), adaptive information processing (EMDR), and family therapies. This workshop will first review some of key principles underlying this collaborative, client directed, strengths-based approach. It will then teach strategies and techniques for eliciting and amplifying exceptions to problems and individualizing solutions while enhancing clients’ sense of agency and self-efficacy. This in-person workshop will include demonstrations and small group practice.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This workshop is designed to help participants:

• Summarize what solution-focused therapists mean when they say ‘leading from behind‘, ‘a vision of a preferred future’, ‘treasure hunting for exceptions’, ‘if it works do more of it’, ‘a difference that makes a difference’, and ‘make it interactional’; as well as be able to apply these solution-focused principles in their practice.
• Understand how seeing the client as (a) an expert (on themselves, their situation), and (b) likely already having the strengths and skills upon which to build solutions; can (c) help generate solutions that are more likely to fit the client and their situation (compared to therapist generated solutions), and (d) that this might be especially true for clients whose ethnic, racial, and/or socioeconomic background differs from their own.
• Describe how the times and places the problem does not manifest, or manifests less, especially what the client themselves is thinking and doing at those times, is important information – data that can be used to build on exceptions and other resources and generate individualized solutions.
• Be able to list five questions that can elicit exceptions (to the problem), five that can identify competencies and mastery experiences, five that can develop a sense of agency and self-efficacy, and five that can instill hope; and know ways to integrate these into their work with clients in their practice.
• Know ways to integrate these questions (exceptions, competencies, agency, hope) into work with clients who have experienced trauma.
• Know ways to integrate these questions (exceptions, competencies, agency, hope) into their work with children (e.g., neurodivergent) and their parents (e.g., parent management training).

Cost of Program:

MCPA member $60,

Non MCPA member $90

Students: $15

Scholarships are available, please ask us.

Additional Fees for CE credits from NJPA –

NJPA CE Credits Fee (A separate fee paid to NJPA) Please register for CE’s BEFORE the workshop at https://psychologynj.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?id=24162294

NJPA member $15,

Non NJPA member $25

Sustaining members are free.

You must attend the entire program to be eligible for CE credits.

Refund Policy:

A refund is available if (non-COVID related) cancellation is received

3 business days in advance, minus a $10 processing fee. If you need to cancel, contact Judith Margolin, [email protected].

Instruction Level: Introductory, and the target audience is psychologists and other mental health professionals

ADA Accommodations available upon written request by emailing Laura Skivone, PhD at [email protected] no later than November 10, 2024.

Presenter Bio:

David Krauss, Ph.D. has been working for over 35 years with neuro-developmentally atypical children, adolescents, and adults along with their parents and families. He trained at Yale’s Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy, the Yale Child Study Center, in the New Haven Public Schools, and at The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). Dr. Krauss worked in UMDNJ’s adolescent inpatient unit and School Based Youth Services program at New Brunswick High School before moving to independent practice. He was a clinical field supervisor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) for many years. He is a past-president and long-time board member of the Mercer County Psychological Association. Dr. Krauss has an independent practice in Hopewell, NJ and writes the “Atypical Children-Extraordinary Parenting” blog at Psychology Today.

This workshop is co-sponsored by NJPA and MCPA. NJPA is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing education for psychologists. NJPA maintains
responsibility for the program and its content.