MasterClass: Advanced Interventions in Emotion Focused Therapy to Resolve Complex Unfinished Business

OVERVIEW

Unfinished Business refers to unresolved emotional pain (such as hurt, anger, shame, complicated grief, resignation, or hopelessness) related to unmet needs from past relationships, often with a parent, caregiver, or significant person. These longstanding emotional wounds stem from experiences such as chronic neglect, emotional abandonment, the absence of warmth and caring, criticism, the experience of not being allowed to be who you are or not being accepted for who you are, experiences where support or love are conditional, or fear of an attachment figure who has been emotionally or physically abusive.  

Unresolved feelings from these experiences can result in emotional issues such as depression, anxiety, shame, unresolved grief, or damage to one’s sense of healthy identity and self-esteem. Clients with complex unfinished business often feel stuck in a cycle of bad feelings that do not resolve, and these feelings are easily triggered in current situations and relationships.   

This workshop is designed for therapists and supervisors who want to learn advanced skills and techniques to work with clients who have particularly difficult-to-resolve issues in complex unfinished business. This workshop is designed by Dr. Serine Warwar, co-developer of an evidence-based Emotion Focused Therapy treatment for resolving emotional injuries and a world-renowned expert on EFT. Video-recorded clips of real therapy sessions will be used to illustrate key principles and interventions.  

Who this workshop is for: This workshop is intended for therapists who have previously attended a presentation or training on working with unfinished business. It is designed to build upon foundational knowledge and focuses on more advanced interventions and skills.  

If you are interested in this advanced masterclass and do not have any previous experience in working with UFB, please feel free to attend our free 2-hour Foundational Skills Workshop on Resolving UFB on October 18, 2024 on these interventions. 

OBJECTIVES

This workshop is didactic and uses video clips of therapy sessions throughout.

You will learn:

• How to work with stuck points in the process of resolution (examples: in the arousal and expression stage, difficulty shifting clients from secondary blame/complaint, lack of empathy or regret in the significant other, difficulty resolving UFB that is also ongoing, clients who have difficulty accessing emotional memories). 
• How to use and integrate together the interventions of age regression, imaginal re-entry and transformation (to transform helplessness and powerlessness) and self-soothing (to access compassion when experiencing anguish related to unmet childhood needs) to help clients heal complex unfinished business. 
• How to adapt unfinished business interventions to process fear related to trauma. 
• How to facilitate several types of resolution in Unfinished Business: self-affirmation, self-assertion, setting boundaries, letting go of unmet needs, grieving, forgiveness. 
• Advanced micro-interventions in relation to unique micro-markers:
  •  How to work with UFB that occurs in a different language than the current therapy
  • Promoting softening when the significant other is defensive
  • Using two chairs for the significant other

• How to use case formulation to help clients make meaning and process the impact of unfinished business. 
• How to use writing exercises to help clients to process unfinished business and emotional injuries concurrently with therapy 
• How to adapt unfinished business to resolve issues with non-significant others. 
• Steps to resolve past unfinished business with a significant other when there are also current ongoing problematic issues with that same person.

RATES

• Early Registration: $210 (+ applicable taxes) 
• Regular Admission: $245 (+ applicable taxes) 
• Student Rate: $185 (+ applicable taxes) 

Early Registration Rates end November 1, 2024

For more information on registering for this workshop, please contact by emailing training@cpeh.ca

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Dr. Serine Warwar is a registered psychologist in the areas of Clinical, Counselling, and Rehabilitation Psychology. She is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Psychology and Emotional Health and the Greenberg Institute for Emotion-Focused Therapy. She is also the Director of the York University Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. Her interest in founding the Centre for Psychology and Emotional Health was to create a centre for excellence for training, education, clinical practice, and research in psychology and emotional health with a community of therapists, supervisors and educations who are interested in ongoing learning and evolution.

Dr. Warwar is passionate about training and provides EFT supervision, and consultation to graduate students and therapists.  She conducts international trainings, workshops and advanced classes in Emotion-Focused Therapy. She has been a therapist and researcher for several EFT randomized control trials, for the treatment of depression, and emotional injuries in individuals and couples. She co-developed an EFT psychotherapy treatment and research program to help couples and individuals resolve emotional injuries. In addition, she has conducted process-outcome research that has improved our understanding of emotional processing in EFT. She was trained in EFT by Dr. Leslie Greenberg, a world-renowned clinician and researcher, who co-developed emotion-focused therapy for individuals and couples.

Dr. Warwar has published in the areas of: emotional processing; emotion regulation, homework and experiential teaching; suicide and borderline personality disorder; and resolving emotional injuries and forgiveness in individuals and couples. She has also developed EFT mapping resources for therapists in both individual and couple therapy.

Dr. Warwar is a member of the College of Psychologists of Ontario, the Ontario Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, the International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy, the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration.