Trailblazing New EFT Ground: Beyond Context & Cultural Humility

Trailblazing New EFT Ground: Beyond Context & Cultural Humility

A new era of integrating cultural matters has been emerging adjacent to, but outside of major models of therapy. This clinical focus has been towards interventions that break the negative legacies of race and promote cultural thriving. Mental health, however, has persistently continue to treat race as a demographic category. Despite, People of Color presenting with many shades of cultural customs and practices. While clinical scholars of color have emphasized cultural diversity and encouraged treatment models to adaptation, the integration of cultural factors with the internal working models of self & others remains largely a clinical blind spot. The default treatment models’ stance, including EFT, seems to be stuck with merely offering cultural context as an assessment feature. In this regard, clinically addressing internalized racism, and the cultural deficit model has not been integrated into case formulations or interventions. Moreover, the new era of psychological liberation suggest that the development of cultural identity is essential for the internal well-being of each partner and their love bond.

This training will advance everyone’s EFT training as culture is integrated into the heart of the EFT process. In this regard, multicultural clinical dynamics is a life-long process. This internal cultural identity development involves personal growth while learning multicultural coping, emotional stress, and social wellness for both couples and therapists. This training focus moves well beyond the beyond the traditional contextual & cultural humility perspective of addressing culture, but only on the clinical fringes.

In Dr. Paul Guillory’s book Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples; Love Heals, he suggests that therapists work most effectively with Couples of Color when they have a conceptual model for cultural matters, including racism, racial identity, race-based events, and racial trauma. Integrating these concepts into the clinical work promote both individual wellness and the love bond with persons of color. This workshop addresses useful clinical concepts (e.g., talking about culture, internalize racism, cultural stress, cultural identity as internal dynamic processes) and how they can be integrated into clinical interventions. Case studies, vignettes, and video clips of clinical interventions illustrate the work with breakout groups to practice specific clinical interventions.Le

1. Describe why failure to broach culture in therapy can be harmful.
2. Describe and compare different types of adverse culture-based events that impact People of Color.
3. Describe three ways to help Couples of Color process adverse cultural-based events.
4. List Tango Moves where cultural dynamics might be include.
5. Discuss ways that therapists might reframe Cultural stress to promote relationship bonds.
6. Critique the goals of EFT couples therapy that are likely relevant for couples of color beyond the enhancement of a safe-haven & secure-base.

Paul T. Guillory, PhD, Lead Presenter: EFT Certified TrainerAssociate Professor at U.C. Berkeley, and author of “Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals.”

All registrations and proceeds from this event go to Conexa East Africa's Project Pamoja Kenya. For more information and to donate, go to: https://www.conexaintl.com/eastafrica

Jeff Scott, LCSW, Facilitator

Event Venue

Online