This workshop will present an emotion-focused approach to unblocking blocked emotions. It will give clinicians practical and specific interventions to help clients experience themselves as agents in the blocking process. Two chair enactments will be discussed and demonstrated. In this process one part,  the interrupter,  is guided to enact the blocking process to help clients  become aware of how they block their emotions. Therapists will learn to promote unblocking using two chair enactment at markers of self interruption

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of being a therapist is the emotional exhaustion caused by our absorbing the intense, toxic, and often alien affects that our patients need to express. In the service of their growth, clients may need to make us into persecutors or victims or help less by standers. Therapists on the receiving end of these dynamics may feel painfully distorted and become defensive, thereby avoiding the intensity the patient needs them to bear; or they may feel horror and paralyzing shame at the patient’s activation of aspects of themselves (e.g., greedy, envious, sadistic)that profoundly challenge their sense of who they are. Dr. McWilliams will explore the concept of countertransference as it has evolved in response to clinical experience and neuroscientific discoveries. She will offer clinical vignettes about the activation of barely tolerable self-states and share ideas about how to endure the roles into which we may be cast.

For effective therapeutic change, clients need to be in contact with their emotions. The question is: What kind of contact? If clients tend to get overwhelmed by their emotions, they may experience fragility and fear of emotional states, possibly resulting in therapeutic failure. This presentation will demonstrate a way to foster the client's strong, calm, witnessing self by using gentle empathic prompts, even in a first session. Clients who are enabled to be present with their emotional states, rather than being tossed about by their feelings, can reflect on their experiences and offer needed emotional repair to their wounded younger selves.

A very common problem in psychotherapy of all types is the process where the patient directs anger towards the self through various psychological mechanisms. In this session, we will look at the various sources and mechanisms involved in overt self-directing of anger, as well as some treatment principles to helps clients overcome this process.

The neuropsychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy (and to psychiatry) is predicated on the idea that our patients suffer mainly from unsatisfied emotional needs. Emotional distress of various kinds is what brings our patients to treatment; this is usually the presenting complaint. In this talk, Mark Solms will outline the major emotional needs of the human being, as they are currently understood in the most authoritative neuroscientific classification. He will describe how these different emotional needs (when they are unfulfilled) present clinically, and how these presentations relate to DSM diagnoses.

Dive into a riveting panel discussion where leading voices in psychotherapy—Leslie Greenberg, NancyMcWilliams, Ann Weisser Cornell, Allan Abbass, and Mark Solms—unpack theintricate challenges of working with emotions in therapy. This session will explore how clinicians can navigate and resolve key therapeutic obstacles, from managing interruptions in emotional processing to dealing with self-directed anger. Our esteemed panelists will share their cutting-edge insights and practical strategies for fostering deeper emotional engagement, enhancing emotional tolerance, and breaking through persistent emotional avoidance. The debate will provide a rich exchange of ideas and practical strategies, offering attendees a deeper understanding of how to overcome the common therapeutic barriers that were presented by each keynote speaker.

Core unhealthy shame is a major source of psychological distress and human suffering. It results in feelings of worthlessness and self-contempt, difficulties in interpersonal relationships, and problematic behaviors (such as unhelpful anger/rage).  As a therapist, knowing how to work with healthy anger is fundamental in transforming core shame and accessing the sadness of grief related to childhood unmet needs. This presentation will teach therapists practical skills on how to transfrom shame with healthy, previously interrupted anger and to process the sadness of grief related to childhood shame and the unmet needs associated with the shame. I will discuss the relationship between shame and empowering anger and demonstrate working with shame and anger on videos

Often clients' emotional states tend to repeat without resolution, and there can seem to be no way forward. Clients who find emotional states unfruitful and burdensome can tend to shut them down, and escape into intellectualization and fruitless self-analysis. Yet in every emotional state there is forward life movement, which can be tapped into and experienced by getting a felt sense. Felt senses are embodied, wholistic summaries of everything connected with a particular life situation, and they contain a knowing of fresh forward steps of life. This presentation will show how to support clients in getting felt senses even when the client resists or avoids bodily-felt experience.

Schema therapy is effective for treating externalizing personality disorders, but most patients in outpatient clinics have avoidant, dependent, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorders, known as 'Cluster C'. Applying schema therapy to internalizing disorders like Avoidant Personality Disorder is effective but challenging. Therapists face patients' rigid avoidant coping modes, which hinder the expression of core emotional needs. These coping modes are often valued by those close to the patients, complicating change. Simply offering safe attachment, effective with borderline patients, is often insufficient for avoidant behavior patterns. Therapists need to be firmer, encouraging self-expression alongside providing warmth and safety.

This workshop helps therapists apply schema therapy to avoidant patients by focusing on unmet needs, schemas, and modes. It also demonstrates how limited reparenting must be adapted compared to schema therapy for borderline patients. Specific challenges and techniques like imagery rescripting and chairwork will be addressed.

This presentation will explore the personality structure and emotional worlds of individuals with schizoid tendencies, with an emphasis on how to help these sensitive individuals feel safe in relationship. Schizoid dynamics will be conceptualized as normal human inclinations that can be found on a continuum of severity from high-functioning to psychotically troubled. In summarizing psychoanalytic conceptions of schizoid dynamics, Dr. McWilliams will compare and contrast this inferential, contextual, dimensional understanding with the trait-based, descriptive diagnoses available in the DSM, focusing on the clinical implications of such a conceptualization. She will present in detail her own treatment of a deeply schizoid woman.

Unprocessed emotions can frequently result in bodily symptoms affecting the voluntary muscle, smooth muscle, and the cognitive perceptual field. The same processes can result in symptoms that make no sense from the perspective of anatomy and physiology, but are rather symptoms reflecting empathic responses to individuals towards whom the client has unprocessed anger. We will use video examples to review these processes, how to detect them, and the overall principles of management of these various somatic presentations.

The neuropsychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy begins with the identification (and classification) of the unfulfilled emotional need that the patient is suffering from. This is a descriptive task, since emotions are conscious phenomena and the patient is only too aware of them. The next task in neuropsychoanalytic therapy is to discern the way in which the patient is going about meeting this unfulfilled emotional need. This is an inferential task: the patient’s habitual strategy is inferred from their recurring behavioural patterns (broadly know as ‘transference’ in psychoanalysis) and from their developmental history – since these strategies are normally formulated in early childhood. The final task is to identify the defences that the patient deploys in an attempt to fend off the emotional needs they suffer from. The aim of neuropsychoanalytic therapy is to make the patient aware of these habitual (automatised) strategies and defences, in order to problematise them and thereby facilitate the process of helping them to formulate new and more mature strategies. This talk will outline these principles in a practical way.

As we conclude three days of enriching presentations and discussions, our final panel debate will bring together our keynote speakers to reflect on the key takeaways from the conference. This session will focus on synthesizing the insights gained and exploring future directions for the field of psychotherapy. Our panelists will discuss the implications of their work for ongoing clinical practice and research and share their visions for the future of their respective approaches. This is an opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of where the field is headed and how we can continue to evolve and improve our work with clients.