MASTERCLASS Swimming Upstream to Support Client Healing

Establishing and employing clear boundaries serves the practitioner and the client, as it helps to create an unambiguous set of ground rules upon which to build trust and guide the behavior of both parties.  A multitude of therapeutic boundaries – which support a client’s ability to react as well as the opportunity to explore those reactions – will be explored.  Making light of boundary crossings forgoes an opportunity for a client to make historical connections that lead to greater consciousness about defensive strategies to avoid deep experience and authentic connection.

During a deep dive, Core Energetics practitioners will be encouraged to share their wisdom and experience with transference and counter-transference issues.  Should a practitioner seek primarily to support positive transference, the work is robbed of the goldmine of negative transference.  Each practitioner will be asked to present one countertransference challenge that’s up for them during a Peer-Supervision session.

Erotic transference (ET) in therapeutic work is common – after all its normal to experience an attraction toward the person who is intently listening to you.  And yet, therapeutic attraction is paradoxical.  A client’s relationship with their Practitioner can feel both deeply intimate and profoundly safe, which can become extremely sexy and intensely alluring.  This can lead a client to want to give herself/himself/their-self to the Practitioner.  In one sense, the client wants to be surrounded by this great intimacy and safety.  Yet if the client were to give themself away sexually, and were the Practitioner to “take” it from the client, the very safety and intimacy would be largely crushed, destroyed.  The class will deal with barriers to dealing effectively with ET.  A framework will be offered for understanding and working with ET.

Experientials will be offered to build resiliency around ET issues.

Doug Wirth, MSW/AACEP/EMM

Doug Wirth brings master’s level social work (MSW), advanced Core Energetics (ACCEP) and Exceptional Marriage/Relationships Mentor (EMM) training into his teaching.  Doug is a faculty member of the Institute of Core Energetics in New York, a guest presenter at colleges from New York to Portland, and a former American Psychological Association senior faculty member.  Doug has led or co-led trainings across the United States and in Europe.  Besides therapeutic work with individuals, groups and couples, Doug’s passions include photography that has been featured in galleries and healing centers across the US, and which was also the focus of his 2009 book Flowering Stories:  Tending to What Nature Nurtures.