Session Description: Mental health problems are complex. The causes, course, underlying psychological dynamics, context, and consequences vary greatly from person to person. As a result of this complexity, psychotherapy requires deliberate, intentional clinical and ethical decision-making.

The purpose of this case-based conference is to help participants consider the unique ethical challenges associated with treating people with mental health problems. This case-based conference goes well beyond mundane descriptions of ethical principles and codes of conduct. We delve into clinical and ethical decision-making processes, describing and applying cognitive dynamics associated with ethical vs. unethical behaviors. Challenging cases are presented by the facilitator and discussed by participants throughout the conference.

In Part I of this case-based conference, we distinguish between principles and processes associated with ethical decision-making. We demonstrate that major ethical principles sometimes conflict with each other, and we discuss stages of ethical decision-making (before, during, and after ethical decisions are made). Part II of this ethics conference builds upon and extends Part I, with the focus shifting specifically to behavioral ethics and cognitive processes potentially related to ethical decision-making. For example, we discuss constructs such as bounded ethicality, "want" versus "should" thinking, and motivated reasoning. Finally, the main points of these two sessions are summarized, and participants are encouraged to describe how they plan to apply ethical principles and processes in their own clinical practices.

Session Description: Digital tools have revolutionized mental health care, transforming how assessments, interventions, and support are delivered. From early online resources to advanced AI-driven platforms, these innovations have expanded accessibility, personalization, and scalability. This presentation examines the evolution of digital mental health tools and their impact on clinical outcomes and patient engagement.

From evidence-based mobile apps to FDA-authorized prescription digital therapeutics (PDTs), these tools enhance traditional care by enabling early detection, real-time monitoring, and precision interventions. While promising, barriers such as digital literacy gaps, inequities in access, regulatory challenges, and data privacy concerns must be addressed to ensure equitable adoption.

The session will also explore neuroplasticity, highlighting how certain digital therapeutics incorporate strategies to promote positive neural changes. These strategies aim to enhance emotional regulation and strengthen neural pathways, improving treatment outcomes.

This presentation equips mental health professionals with actionable insights to leverage digital innovations effectively. Attendees will learn strategies to improve care delivery, enhance patient outcomes, and bridge disparities in mental health services through the thoughtful integration of technology.

Session Description: Mental health problems are complex. The causes, course, underlying psychological dynamics, context, and consequences vary greatly from person to person. As a result of this complexity, psychotherapy requires deliberate, intentional clinical and ethical decision-making.

The purpose of this case-based conference is to help participants consider the unique ethical challenges associated with treating people with mental health problems. This case-based conference goes well beyond mundane descriptions of ethical principles and codes of conduct. We delve into clinical and ethical decision-making processes, describing and applying cognitive dynamics associated with ethical vs. unethical behaviors. Challenging cases are presented by the facilitator and discussed by participants throughout the conference.

In Part I of this case-based conference, we distinguish between principles and processes associated with ethical decision-making. We demonstrate that major ethical principles sometimes conflict with each other, and we discuss stages of ethical decision-making (before, during, and after ethical decisions are made). Part II of this ethics conference builds upon and extends Part I, with the focus shifting specifically to behavioral ethics and cognitive processes potentially related to ethical decision-making. For example, we discuss constructs such as bounded ethicality, "want" versus "should" thinking, and motivated reasoning. Finally, the main points of these two sessions are summarized, and participants are encouraged to describe how they plan to apply ethical principles and processes in their own clinical practices.

Session Description: There’s no escaping the dire reports about the high rates of anxiety and depression in teens and young adults. Regardless of what you attribute the cause to—the pandemic, social media, parenting, or the state of the world in general—there’s plenty to worry about. We therapists surely want to step in, but is what we’re doing really working? Are our methods and common ways of treating depression and anxiety in young people helping, or are we inadvertently reinforcing the problem? In this workshop, we’ll challenge current trends around treating anxiety, and explore some surprising approaches for bolstering young adults’ mental health. You’ll discover how to develop clear treatment goals for young adults and offer effective therapy that involves actionable steps, psychoeducation, and building connection.

Is this your first time at the Evolution of Psychotherapy, or are you a returning attendee looking to optimize your time at the conference? Join us for an informational session on getting the most out of your Evolution experience, including navigating the event venues, accessing conference information, selecting sessions, visiting special features onsite, and exploring the exhibit hall.

Session Description: The End of Mental Illness discards an outdated, stigmatizing paradigm and replaces it with a modern brain-based, whole-person program rooted in science and hope. Based on the world’s largest functional brain imaging database, Dr. Amen believes we should stop talking about mental illnesses, and call them what they really are – brain health issues that steal your mind that can be helped when we heal your brain.

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Session Description: Clinicians are navigating rising admin demands, rapid tech advances, and the isolation of remote work. This session explores how private practice is evolving and how technology and community can restore, rather than replace, the heart of therapy. We’ll name common challenges, examine the shifts in private practice, and unpack how technology and AI can protect empathy while maintaining strict data ethics and privacy. Lastly, we’ll explore the power of community and ongoing clinical growth. Participants will leave with a renewed vision of a practice where freedom and support coexist and where clinicians and clients remain at the center of care. This non-CME presentation is taking place during the Evolution of Psychotherapy. The opinions and recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Evolution of Psychotherapy or HMP Global. This program is not intended or eligible for continuing education (CME/CE) credits and does not meet guidelines governing CME/CE. By entering this session and having your badge scanned, you opt-into share and receive information from industry sponsors. If you wish to opt out, please speak with a conference representative.

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Session Description: AI is fundamentally reshaping clinical workflows. It excels at structured documentation, pattern recognition across massive datasets, and flawless execution of repetitive tasks. These capabilities are returning hours to clinicians every week, hours that go back into direct patient care. What AI can't do as well matters just as much, as you decide where to start. AI can’t replicate the judgment that comes from years of clinical training and real-world experience. It can't read visual cues that often drive clinical decisions. It can't navigate ambiguous, high-stakes situations. This ‘real honest’ session cuts through both sides. Where AI delivers measurable impact and where it fails. How to assess whether a solution adapts to your workflow or forces you to rebuild around it. Examples from actual implementations; what's working, what isn't, and the questions that separate useful tools from expensive distractions. This non-CME presentation is taking place during the Evolution of Psychotherapy. The opinions and recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Evolution of Psychotherapy or HMP Global. This program is not intended or eligible for continuing education (CME/CE) credits and does not meet guidelines governing CME/CE. By entering this session and having your badge scanned, you opt-into share and receive information from industry sponsors. If you wish to opt out, please speak with a conference representative.

Is ‘Insomnia' a Diagnosis or Symptom? Let’s demystify and improve sleep-mental health together.

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This non-CME presentation is taking place during the Evolution of Psychotherapy. The opinions and recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Evolution of Psychotherapy or HMP Global. This program is not intended or eligible for continuing education (CME/CE) credits and does not meet guidelines governing CME/CE. By entering this session and having your badge scanned, you opt-into share and receive information from industry sponsors. If you wish to opt out, please speak with a conference representative.

Session Description: Addressing sexual and gender issues is often overlooked as part of the psychotherapeutic process. Sexual health is part of a three-legged stool—physical, mental, and sexual health. All are important. But what is sexual health, and what does it look like? This presentation will discuss common sexual and gender issues that underlie or co-occur with common mental health issues. You don't have to be a certified sex therapist to deal with many of these issues, but it is also important to know your professional competence boundaries and when to refer for specialized treatment. The presentation will cover basic ways you can bring up the topic, assess common sexual and gender issues, and help individuals and couples feel more comfortable with their sexuality and overcome guilt, shame, myths, and misinformation, and improve communication skills and sexual functioning.

Session Description: Each person forms a relationship to the dimension of time, called a “temporal orientation.” How that relationship is defined and prioritized, whether consciously or non-consciously, plays a huge role in the way people go about living their lives. When thinking about different people’s lifestyles and how the element of time features within them, it is generally easy to see who is living in a way that more heavily favors one sphere of time over another. Even a client’s symptoms are likely to reflect a temporal orientation: Depression is largely past-oriented as individuals typically hash and re-hash life’s hurts and failures and use their past hurts to predict future hurts as well. Impulse disorders are, by definition, a self-destructive “live for this moment” approach to making choices. Anxiety is generally future-oriented, anticipating harms of one sort or another as though they are inevitable and imminent. These are obviously generalizations, but they have considerably more than a kernel of truth in them.
A future orientation in conducting psychotherapy is vital if we are to help clients transcend their painful histories or crises of the moment. A future orientation is more than just a philosophical or theoretical preference. In fact, it has been associated with some of the most fundamental factors shaping clinical practice, especially an individual’s treatment response. In this address, then, we will consider some of the many facets of a future orientation and some of the ways we can effectively promote resilience by encouraging a future focus in psychotherapy.

Session Description: A possible link between "madness" and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural beliefs.
It is also one of the most controversial. The lecture will present evidence for significantly increased rates of depression and bipolar illness in writers, artists, and musicians, discuss possible reasons for these elevated rates, and open up for discussion areas of potential clinical concern.

Session Description: Relational Life Therapy (RLT) leads men, women, and nonbinary clients into profound levels of connection—to themselves and one another—by explicitly helping them move beyond the mores of patriarchy. Clients release their repetitive “power struggles” by awakening to “ecological wisdom,” learning to think and live relationally. RLT offers a radical new vision along with practical tools to operationalize it. We therapists are at once personal facilitators and agents of social transformation.

Session Description: This workshop will describe the Creative Mind (CM) model for therapeutic change, developed over 50 years by Dr. Stephen Gilligan. CM sees human reality as generated from conversations between two mind/brains: the creative unconscious of the nonverbal/nature right hemisphere, and the secondary conscious mind of the verbal/virtual left brain. Each mind has equal capacity to interconnect or dissociate from the other. CM describes how isolated/dissociative relationships give rise to symptoms and persistent suffering, and how relationships of interconnected resonance allow transformation and creativity. The structure of the model will be described, along with different clinical examples to illuminate this very practical approach.

Session Description: Many patients with bipolar disorder risk likely relapse or suicide by stopping their treatment. Medication non-adherence is the
major clinical problem in the treatment of mania and bipolar depression. This lecture will discuss the extent of the problem, the severity of the consequences, clinical and demographic correlates, and strategies for increasing adherence.

You’re invited to take a pause from the lecture halls and step into deeper connection over a shared meal. Today’s networking break is centered on a single, meaningful topic.
Today’s Topic: ChatGPT in Practice: Ethics, Connection, and the Evolving Therapist Toolkit
What to Expect:
1. Pick up your lunch from one of the vendor stations in the exhibit hall and bring it to the networking area.
2. Join your peers at any table—everyone is invited into the same shared conversation.
3. Connect over a meal, reflecting on today’s theme with openness, curiosity, and care.
4. After your conversation, scan the QR code at your table to share a personal insight, takeaway, or reflection.
5. When you submit, you’ll be entered to win a gift card to a local favorite, which will be announced before the afternoon plenary that same day:
○ Morton’s The Steakhouse or Seabirds Kitchen (vegan-friendly)
We believe that connection heals, and the ideas shared around the table today may resonate far beyond this time. Let your reflection be part of that collective wisdom!

Session Description: Relational Life Therapy (RLT) is a radical approach known for producing profound, permanent change quickly in individuals and couples. RLT therapists offer clients a new vision - how to think ecologically, relationally, about themselves in the world- and a practical toolbox to live it. When possible, we use our clients’ current relationships as the crucible in which to teach them how to connect to themselves and each other with a richness and skill that goes far beyond the norms of our culture.
Workshop participants will learn the three phases of the process:
⁃ 1- Waking Up Our Clients: Through deeply empathetic and precise feedback we ally with our clients’ best selves.
⁃ 2- Relational Trauma Work
⁃ Once we’ve articulated the repetitive “stance” each partner brings, we move back into childhood experience, doing deep trauma work in the presence of the partner.
⁃ 3 - Teaching Relational Skills: Confrontation makes the implicit explicit, opening up neural pathways. Trauma work decreases flooding, strengthening the client’s Wise Adult part. Now, we teach: - how to assert and stay loving, for example, the art of repair - offering a practical relational technology.

Session Description: Clinicians will oftentimes encounter individuals with compulsive sexual behavior. There are a number of models of treatment available with little guidance and/or consensus on how to treat individuals and address the issues among their partners. Each model emphasizes different treatment methods based. This workshop will illustrate through case examples and discussion his own assessment and treatment model utilizing a sex-positive and integrated approach. We will also discuss recent research on the relationship between CSBD and religiosity, moral incongruence, attachment styles, and emotion regulation and how to incorporate those issues into treatment.

Session Description: This 3-hour workshop will describe and demonstrate the 7 steps of the Creative Mind (CM) approach to therapeutic change. The first step involves activating a creative conversational field of positive presence, such that each of the conflicting/dissociated parts of a problem—intention, obstacle, resources—can be positively welcomed, then interwoven into a generative field, much like a good meal, champion sports team, or great musical band. This “parts/whole” interconnected matrix can meet the significant challenges of life in successful and transformative ways. Clinical examples and a demonstration will illuminate the 7-step model.

Session Description: Based on the world's largest brain imaging database of nearly 300,000 SPECT scans, Dr. Amen has come to believe that most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues at all. Rather, they are brain health issues that steal people's minds. And this one idea changes everything. Get your brain healthy and your mind will follow. Yet, most therapists get very little education about the brain and how to keep it healthy. In this workshop, Dr. Amen will give therapists the basics about brain health and optimization, especially how it relates to their patients and themselves. It will be fun and very practical.

Session Description: Working with the young adult with addictive disorders most often means working with co-occurring disorders of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidality. This presentation, the first of a two-part discussion, will focus on the dynamics of what lies beneath active addiction—recognizing not just blatant traumas, but addressing developmental trauma as significant in their treatment.

Session Description: 25% of therapists obtain 50% better treatment outcomes and they have 50% fewer dropouts from therapy. This presentation will discuss the core psychotherapeutic tasks and the transtheoretical principles that “expert” therapists employ. It will also consider how to spot hype in the field of psychotherapy.

Contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved far beyond its classical roots, offering valuable insights and tools for clinicians across diverse therapeutic orientations. This presentation will explore how modern psychoanalytic thought deepens our understanding of the therapeutic relationship, the role of unconscious processes, and the co-construction of meaning in treatment. By integrating contemporary relational, intersubjective, and neuropsychoanalytic perspectives, participants will discover how psychoanalytic principles can enhance empathy, clinical intuition, and effectiveness in any therapeutic modality. The session will also address how current psychoanalytic thinking informs trauma work, attachment theory, and the cultivation of reflective capacity in both therapist and patient.

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Session Description: Drawing on real clinical scenarios, this presentation introduces a feedback approach that moves beyond traditional diagnostic categories and mental-illness labels. Instead of viewing symptoms as maladaptive, this paradigm reframes them as understandable, adaptive responses to trauma. A brief case example will illustrate how to deliver feedback that is both empathic and empirically informed, demonstrating how to connect a client’s present-day symptoms to past traumatic experiences in a way that fosters understanding rather than stigma. The goal of this presentation is to equip participants with practical, compassionate feedback language that can accelerate trust, strengthen the therapeutic alliance, and help set the stage for meaningful healing—starting from the very first sessions. This non-CME presentation is taking place during the Evolution of Psychotherapy. The opinions and recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Evolution of Psychotherapy or HMP Global. This program is not intended or eligible for continuing education (CME/CE) credits and does not meet guidelines governing CME/CE. By entering this session and having your badge scanned, you opt-into share and receive information from industry sponsors. If you wish to opt out, please speak with a conference representative.

Session Description: Parents crave concrete direction to help their anxious or depressed child. In fact, it's what they most often request when I ask them what they want during our time together: "Please tell us what to do!" Yet, therapists often spend multiple sessions doing an assessment, requiring a family to return again and again before offering instruction and a "treatment plan." This session focuses on the keys to a productive and instructive first session, so that even while patterns are identified and goals are laid out, families can get active and make change happen.

Session Description: After a quick review of common traumas, Dr. Black will further her presentation on treating the young adult with a focus on their internalized shame-based beliefs—believing they lack worth and value. She will then offer a detailed description of essential treatment considerations. She will put an emphasis on recognizing the family is the client.

Session Description: In trauma treatment, clinicians frequently encounter the deep interconnection between traumatic experience and a person’s spiritual life. This presentation will explore how recognizing and engaging a client’s felt spiritual connection can become a central element of effective therapy. When ignored, this dimension may leave clinicians stuck in therapeutic impasses—what trauma expert Dr. Levine calls “tight corners.”

Drawing from Somatic Experiencing® (SE), a naturalistic and neurobiologically informed approach to healing trauma, Dr. Levine will present clinical insights and practical strategies for supporting authentic transformation. Participants will gain tools to work more skillfully at the intersection of trauma and spirituality, enhancing client resilience, coherence, and meaning-making in the aftermath of overwhelming events. This session will support clinicians in expanding their therapeutic lens while honoring the full complexity of human healing.

Join Dr. McWilliams for an informal, interactive discussion exploring key themes, emerging ideas, and clinical applications from her work. This conversation hour offers participants the opportunity to engage directly with presenters, ask questions, and deepen understanding of the concepts shaping contemporary psychotherapy practice.

Session Description: Sleight of Mouth is about the magic of words and language. Language is one of the key representational systems from which we build our mental models of the world, and has a tremendous influence upon how we perceive and respond to the world around us. The right words at the right time can be uplifting, changing the course of someone’s life for the better; opening up new vistas and possibilities. Unfortunately, words can also confuse and limit us as easily as they can empower us. The wrong words at the wrong time can be hurtful and damaging.
Sleight of Mouth is the study of how language has been, and can be, used to make an impact on people’s lives and emotions.
This presentation will explore the power of words to be either helpful or harmful, the distinctions that determine the type of impact words will have, and the language patterns through which we can transform harmful statements into helpful ones.

Session Description: What if confrontation wasn’t scary to you or your clients? What if confrontation didn’t lead to defensiveness, disconnection, or escalated blame? In this transformative keynote, you’ll discover how to plant your feet and challenge dysfunctional patterns inhibiting developmental growth.
Through compelling stories, practical examples, and actionable strategies, this keynote will inspire you to push yourself and your clients to become more resilient in taking emotional risks.
Ellyn will introduce you to six distinct types of confrontation—each tailored to challenge clients to face what they would prefer to avoid. You’ll learn to be more creative in managing reactivity, staying grounded, and approaching confrontations with courage and compassion.

Session Description: This presentation will introduce participants to The Diamond Approach (Connie & Froerer, 2022) of Solution Focused Brief Therapy. The presenter will cover each of the components necessary to carry out a session from this approach, namely, 1) acquiring a desired outcome/transformation, 2) developing a co-constructed description of the desired transformation with details from the history, resources, and a preferred future, and 3) closing a session in a way that is meaningful and that honors the client's autonomy and agency. Participants will watch recordings of actual sessions from this approach and will have in-depth discussions about how this therapy is carried out. Finally, participants will have several opportunities to practice the skills needed to do this work. This workshop will be inspiring and you will leave more enthusiastic about the work you are doing! You will understand the value of seeing
people as the best versions of themselves, and will be more able to treat them accordingly!

Session Description: Join developer of Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), a naturalistic and neurobiologically informed approach to healing trauma, Peter A. Levine, PhD, for an experiential clinical session exploring the transformative potential of body-based healing. This presentation offers a rare opportunity to witness the core principles of SE being applied in real-time through a live demonstration.

In the live demonstration, Dr. Levine will guide a volunteer through foundational somatic practices, illustrating how trauma is held in the body and how regulated, embodied awareness can restore balance to the nervous system. Drawing from over 50 years of clinical experience, Dr. Levine will share insights into trauma resolution that emphasize the body’s innate healing intelligence.

Whether new to Somatic Experiencing or seeking to deepen clinical application, attendees will leave with practical body-based tools and a greater appreciation for the subtle, yet powerful, ways the nervous system reorganizes toward resilience and regulation.

You’re invited to take a pause from the lecture halls and step into deeper connection over a shared meal. Today’s table discussions are centered on a single, meaningful topic.
Today’s Topic: Navigating Burnout, Boundaries & Self-Compassion
What to Expect:
1. Pick up your lunch from one of the vendor stations in the exhibit hall and bring it to the networking lunch area.
2. Join your peers at any table—everyone is invited into the same shared conversation.
3. Connect over a meal, reflecting on today’s theme with openness, curiosity, and care.
4. After your conversation, scan the QR code at your table to share a personal insight, takeaway, or reflection.
5. When you submit, you’ll be entered to win a gift card to a local favorite, which will be announced before the afternoon plenary that same day:
○ Morton’s The Steakhouse or Seabirds Kitchen (vegan-friendly)
We believe that connection heals, and the ideas shared around the table today may resonate far beyond this lunch. Let your reflection be part of that collective wisdom!

Session Description: Effective and sustainable change is a function of a number of different levels of influence. These levels relate to our environment (where and when we act), our behavior (what we do), our capabilities (how we think and plan), our values and beliefs (why we think and act the way we do), our identity (who we perceive ourselves to be), and our sense of purpose (for whom and for what we dedicate ourselves). These levels form a type of pyramid – moving from environment to purpose – in which each successive level transcends and includes the level below it. This demonstration will show how to identify and leverage the different levels involved in a process of change.

Session Description: The vacillation between praise and criticism, good days and bad ones, normal and dysfunctional, abusive and less abusive characterizes the confusing landscape of relationships with individuals with narcissistic/antagonistic personalities. This talk will provide an overview of narcissism and antagonism and discuss the associated relational dynamics to introduce and orient you to what happens in narcissistic/antagonistic relationships and the subsequent impact on our clients. This framework can inform treatment planning, psychoeducation, and our own preparedness when working with clients navigating familial, intimate, or even workplace relationships characterized by narcissistic personalities.

Session Description: During this session the presenter will demonstrate how to conduct a session when using the Solution Focused Approach with a live volunteer. Too often professionals are thrust into the field never truly having witnessed how an approach works in the real world. So, in this session attendees will see exactly how to use the Solution Focused Approach to help a client overcome a real life problem.

Session Description: This one-hour speech will cover a specific type of betrayal — the discovery of information that changes everything (DICE). In this case, the secret-keeper has kept vital information from the discovery-partner – such as a love affair, sexual acting out, financial decisions, a secret life, and other instances — that they had a right to know. The secret-keeper withheld, lied, misled, and used gaslighting to cover their tracks. The reveal or discovery of important information that, if previously known, would have changed everything, is arguably the most devastating form of betrayal in romantic relationships. The discovery partner almost always exhibits PTSD symptoms of mood instability, sleep problems, flashbacks, intrusive and obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and abandonment depression. A specific therapeutic architecture and therapist stance is vital to a successful therapeutic outcome of partner secure functioning.

Session Description: Dr. McWilliams will explore, with clinical examples, the personality organization, affective experience, defenses, conflicts, and organizing cognitions of individuals with schizoid psychologies. She will depict the continuum of severity from high-functioning to psychotically troubled versions of personalities characterized by conflicts around closeness, contrasting this inferential and dimensional understanding of schizoid themes with the DSM's trait-based, descriptive, categorical descriptions. She will suggest some clinical implications of appreciating the subjective worlds of deeply introverted patients.

Session Description: Betrayal is a core dynamic of narcissistic relationships – and includes breaches of trust, emotional abandonment, infidelity, chronic deceit, and emotional abuse. These chronic betrayals, occurring within a relationship that is meant to be predicated on trust, connection, and attachment, result not just in significant psychological fallout for our clients, but also a loss of trust in other people, the world at large, and themselves. Understanding the framework of betrayal trauma theory and the role of betrayal in narcissistic relationships is KEY to successfully working with these clients. This program will apply Dr. Jennifer Freyd’s models of betrayal trauma theory and betrayal blindness and apply them to optimizing antagonism informed work with clients experiencing the harmful impacts of narcissistic relationships.

Session Description: Couples have trouble communicating because effective communication takes managing intense emotions, tolerating the tension of differentiation and embracing a growth mindset. Ellyn will demonstrate the Initiator-Inquirer process and show how to use it to build new emotional capacities in your clients. She’ll provide tools you can use immediately to help couples build vital skills and integrate the process into your therapy practice.

Session Description: Well-known instruments, such as the Adult Attachment Interview, have been employed by researchers for assessing current adult attachment. As a linguistic tool, the AAI has achieved worldwide recognition for its ability to predict offspring attachment. However, it is a tool, as with others in its category, which requires training that can continue up to a year. A psychobiological approach to couple therapy (PACT) offers other assessment tools for researchers and clinicians alike by employing movement protocols between partners that evaluate both proximity-seeking and contact maintenance impulses and behaviors. These protocols, which we might call “exercises” or “games” while in session, combine movement with static positioning that stress partners to a degree that a clinician, or researcher, can detect and code somatic changes occurring between partners as they participate in these experiments.

In this hour demonstration, attendees will learn at least one protocol called, Toward and Away. This will be through a live and a video presentation.

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Session Description: Discover how ketamine-assisted psychotherapy can dramatically improve outcomes for treatment-resistant patients while transforming your clinical practice. Explore the neuroscience behind ketamine's ability to rewrite neuroplasticity in the brain, unlocking breakthrough results for clients stuck in treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Learn how ketamine-assisted therapy combined with skilled integration and post-session work helps clients establish lasting positive thought patterns, break entrenched habits, and achieve sustained healing when traditional approaches have plateaued. Better U also offers holistic psychiatry, HRT, and innovative mental health treatments that move beyond the outdated one-size-fits-all model to support truly individualized care. This non-CME presentation is taking place during the Evolution of Psychotherapy. The opinions and recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Evolution of Psychotherapy or HMP Global. This program is not intended or eligible for continuing education (CME/CE) credits and does not meet guidelines governing CME/CE. By entering this session and having your badge scanned, you opt-into share and receive information from industry sponsors. If you wish to opt out, please speak with a conference representative.

Session Description: Since connectional rupture brings couples to therapy, restoring connection is the challenge and task of couple's therapy. Since connectional restoration goes beyond cognition to experience, it requires learning and practicing a skill that connects. Participants in this session will learn the source of disconnection and be introduced to the three step dialogue process which is essential for restoring and sustaining connection.

Session Description: In this presentation we’ll explore an interpersonal neurobiology approach harnessing the insights of developmental neuroscience to illuminate how early temperament interweaves with attachment experiences in the cultivation of nine patterns of personality. Agency, bonding, and certainty are deep motivations that combine with an attentional orientation of inward, outward, and dyadic as both to form nine patterns of personality that shape the developmental pathways of our lives. These patterns mold how we experience and express emotion, focus our attention and find meaning in life, and even how we interact with others in our world. These nine patterns offer us ways of growing toward wholeness, a lifelong journey this “Patterns of Developmental Pathways” model helps see and shape in our inner and relational lives. Inspired by tens of thousands of narratives from the perspective of the Enneagram system of personality, this PDP framework helps us to gain insight into how we became who we are and offers practical steps into how we can intentionally open what may have become a prison of personality into a playground of possibility. Informing us about the individual-specific routes of overwhelm and burnout, this model of personality also provides strategies for reigniting passion and purpose in our lives as we regenerate and reignite with a renewed sense of resilience and meaning. This presentation offers approaches that can be effectively integrated into the clinical assessment and treatment plan of our client population.

AI is here to take over our work. Used right, it takes over the right kind of work—saving time and reducing burnout. You trained to be a healer, not an administrator. That's why Upheal is building a new system to replace EHRs, where AI handles the non-clinical side of therapy. See how AI can become your business partner and clinical ally. Helping you to reclaim your focus and do more of what matters.

Session Description: In this presentation, we’ll examine the notion of “connection” and its correlation with mental health. When we feel disconnected from our inner life, we suffer; when we are disconnected relationally—from people and nature—we can become anxious, depressed, despondent. What is this powerful “connection” actually made of, what is it, and how can we take the science of connection and inform the practice of psychotherapy? In many ways, the experience of a separate, solo-self may underly the many challenges we face, from racism and social injustice to environmental destruction. The field of mental health can play a pivotal role in how we help our human family move toward a new way of living on Earth by addressing the modern cultural excessive focus on individuality in the separate sense of self. These questions and their personal, professional, and public implications will focus our discussion on the nature of both interconnection—the links between parts of a system—and intraconnection—the wholeness of the system.

Session Description: This session will equip participants with:

1. A description of the dialogue process which they can share with others.
2. How to introduce couples to the dialogue process.
3. Suggestions for helping couples integrate dialogue into their relationship.

Session Description: When the goal is to inform, therapist communication is direct and clear. When the goal is to prompt the realization of concept evocative methods are needed. We will explore the use of ambiguous methods of evocative communication that are needed to prompt realizations. Hypnosis serves as a foundation because trance cannot be informed; trance must be realized.

Session Description: The normative categories embodied in the DSM and ICD approach to diagnosis have long frustrated practitioners with an ugly combination of demands for their use in order to be paid, needless complexity, and a deep sense that this approach is not helpful to actual clinical outcomes. In this talk I will describe the sad and disturbing history behind traditional diagnosis and case conceptualization and will attempt to prove not only that it has not worked, but that it is a scientific certainty that it never will. I will show how the flaw that is hidden in our current practices comes from a form of cultural, ethnic, and racial bias that is as current as today's news. Fortunately, we now have a nascent practical solution at hand in the form of "idionomic" analysis that resonates deeply with the sensibilities of actual clinical practice. For this solution to replace the traditional approach, however, practitioners will need to become the front line in a battle royal with entrenched interests that have distorted the cultural zeitgeist for more than a century.

Session Description: In this 1-hour conversation, Dr. Dan Siegel will explore how the science of personality can deepen and enhance therapeutic practice. Drawing from his latest work, he will guide attendees through a deeper dive into the 9 Patterns of Developmental Pathways, offering insights into how these pathways shape personality and inform clinical approaches. This conversation will provide practical tools and strategies for applying the science of personality to help clients achieve greater integration, well-being, and transformation.

Session Description: Dr. McWilliams will present a video of her clinical work with a man she conceptualized as schizoid despite his not being overtly withdrawn or quirky in stereotypical ways. The interview, videotaped by the American Psychological Association in 2012, allows viewers to watch the therapist struggling with the patient's defenses against affects that he felt as overwhelming.

Session Description: In this demonstration I will show how to apply a process-based approach to the specific needs and goals of a client, using idionomic assessment and analytic tools. In this approach, problems or prosperity goals provide the context for a person-specific search for vicious and virtuous loops in process of change. Using an extension of the psychological flexibility model, I will apply this approach to a particular person seeking help.

Join Dr. Burns for an informal, interactive discussion exploring key themes, emerging ideas, and clinical applications from his work. This conversation hour offers participants the opportunity to engage directly with presenters, ask questions, and deepen understanding of the concepts shaping contemporary psychotherapy practice.

You’re invited to take a pause from the lecture halls and step into deeper connection over a shared meal. Today’s table discussion is centered on a single, meaningful topic.
Today’s Topic: What We’re Learning Now: The Books, Ideas, and Voices We’re Learning From
What to Expect:
1. Pick up your lunch from one of the vendor stations in the exhibit hall and bring it to the networking lunch area.
2. Join your peers at any table—everyone is invited into the same shared conversation.
3. Connect over a meal, reflecting on today’s theme with openness, curiosity, and care.
4. After your conversation, scan the QR code at your table to share a personal insight, takeaway, or reflection.
5. When you submit, you’ll be entered to win a gift card to a local favorite, which will be announced before the afternoon plenary that same day:
○ Morton’s The Steakhouse or Seabirds Kitchen (vegan-friendly)
We believe that connection heals, and the ideas shared around the table today may resonate far beyond this lunch. Let your reflection be part of that collective wisdom!

Session Description: Are you putting your energy where it has the most clinical impact? How can you apply your therapist wisdom, while also being evidence-based? The fact is every therapist, and every client, is different--and even though we have toolbelts overflowing with tools, we need wisdom, individualization, and wise effort to approach the person in front of you, not their diagnosis. In this engaging talk, you will be empowered by a new way of approaching mental wellness--Process Based Therapy-- where you can flexibly show up with your personal skills, orientation, and strengths, and support the greatest change in each and every unique client you work with.

The main objective of this presentation is to demonstrate why some therapist’s peculiar resources should be considered an essential factor in producing effective therapeutic interventions. More than the use of sophisticated and complex techniques, the way the therapist succeeds in establishing a strong therapeutic alliance appears to be related to deeper and more durable changes. Therefore, it seems crucial to understand when and how therapist’s emotions can be utilized by clinicians during the therapeutic process and becoming a powerful therapeutic resource. Clinical cases will be described to demonstrate how therapist’s emotions, fantasies and isomorphic behaviors can provide both useful indications and effective therapeutic change. Personal and emotional factors that can help the therapist to develop a better therapeutic relationship and obtain more effective therapy will be explored, and guidelines for the therapeutic use of therapist’s emotions will be presented.

Session Description: Dr. Burns will argue that world class therapy skills depend on world-class assessments tools. What you discover may, and probably will, shock you--but can save lives and transform your clinical practice if you have the courage to din out how your patients REALLY feel--and how they feel about you!. Come to this riveting talk and discover an exciting new direction for your career.

Session Description: Addiction to online videogames has been a significant issue since the first reported deaths related to excessive gameplay came about in the early 2000’s. This presentation will highlight the psychological factors that play a role in developing excessive videogame play. It will also deliver an overview of gaming addiction with recent statistics on technology consumption. In addition to covering related impacts on mental health it will address the importance of feeling connected. Lastly, the consequences to excessive online gaming will be emphasized, giving a clear picture of how one can be impacted behaviorally, emotionally, and physiologically.

Session Description: We all have toolbelts full of tools that are supposed to help our clients. But the fact is, every client is different. And it's hard to know what "tool" to use with which client and when, even among those with the SAME diagnosis. In this real play session, Dr. Hill will demonstrate network modeling to create a powerful roadmap to support you in individualizing your approach for the person in front of you–not their diagnosis. You will explore the bio-psycho-social processes that underlie each unique client’s suffering, and be empowered to show up with your personal skills, orientation, and strengths.

More than as an individual/linear event hypnosis can be conceived in a systems per¬spective, as a circular and evolving process. This view of hypnotic trance demonstrates to be particularly useful when intergenerational conflicts develop in the family with the consequence of blocking the course of the natural family life cycle. Adopting an Ericksonian Naturalistic approach, families can be considered as a source of natural resources that the therapist should discover and activate to solve interpersonal conflicts. Specific direct and indirect techniques to induce a deep and meaningful change of the most rigid family patterns will be described. The demonstration of a family hypnotic session will introduce the different stages of the hypnotic treatment as well as of how naturalistic systemic hypnosis can transform resistances in the required solutions of family conflicts.

Session Description: The mother of internet addiction, Dr. Kimberly Young, gave the world the solution one decade ago in her TEDx talk when she said, “Disconnect to reconnect.” Dr. Weissman’s research found that those who value the online connections and community the most, when they lacked an IRL (in real life) community, reported being lonelier. This presentation will address the importance of engaging in the real world with strategies and interventions from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Reality Therapy to treat online gaming addiction.

Session Description: It can seem both disheartening and perplexing to effectively treat individuals engaged in a protracted battle with disordered eating, including: anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, emotional eating or chronic issues of weight. The typical therapeutic process can leave both the client and the clinician feeling hopeless.

Since the1980’s, one model of evidenced-based treatment has dominated our field.  Yet research indicates that this “first line” choice of treatment for eating disorders is merely 50% effective.

In this HOPE-filled and expansive presentation, participants will come to appreciate the undeniable, yet under-recognized role that complex trauma plays in the etiology and maintenance of disordered eating.  Additionally, how unresolved complex trauma serves to obstruct the effectiveness of traditional modes of treatment, until it is appropriately recognized, treated, and resolved.

Utilizing poignant case presentation, attendees will learn how to both assess and conceptualize treatment when impacted by an interwoven relationship between complex trauma and “resistant” disordered eating.

Toward this goal, Dr. Anné Zeig will introduce her Reparative Model of FULL Recovery which includes her Strategic ~ Attachment Repair Therapy (S~ART)™, which allows even the most “treatment resistant” clients to attain full and lasting recovery from eating disorders.

Session Description: Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher, Epictetus claimed that humans are not disturbed by events, but by the views we take of them. For hundreds of years, scientists, philosophers, and therapists have hotly debated this issue. Cognitive therapists insist that negative thoughts, like “I’m not good enough,” come first and then cause negative feelings, like depression, anxiety, inadequacy, inferiority, shame and more. However, the emotion-focused therapists are just as vigorous in their insistence that emotions come first and then trigger negative cognitions.
Who’s right? And does it make any difference? Come to this powerful presentation and discover the surprising answer--and why you should care!

Session Description: Psychologists, especially cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, use the term “discrimination” to describe the process of making distinctions between different situations that then give rise to one’s reactions. For example, your reaction will be entirely different if you believe someone stepped on your foot by accident than if you believe they did so deliberately. Your ability to discriminate an intentional act of harm from a moment of mere clumsiness helps shape your reaction of either anger or tolerance toward the person.

Cognitive psychology, the study of how people think, has given rise to new understandings about how people gather and use information. This includes how people decide, usually at a level outside of awareness, what is salient to pay attention to in a given environment and, likewise, what is essentially irrelevant. When people get sidetracked into irrelevancy, paying too much attention to what doesn’t really matter and too little attention to what does, their perceptions and responses naturally lead them astray. More important, when someone’s perspective is so global or over-general that they simply don’t know how or what to decide, they are far more likely to make poor decisions on the basis of hurt feelings, old history, misconceptions, or blind faith. There are many different ways of making key life decisions, but when one employs an ineffective one, the results can be enduringly painful. In this workshop, then, we will look at people through the lens of cognitive style and HOW (not why) they make the choices they make.

Session Description: Fundamental principles of hypnosis will be presented along with concomitant understandings of how knowledge of hypnotic methods can inform the practice of psychotherapy. Lecture, demonstration, small group practice.

Session Description: Relationships everywhere are in crisis due to our inability to talk about "difference" without polarizing. Since objection to difference is the core human problem, we need a skill that helps us connect beyond difference. Participants in this workshop will learn and practice the Safe Conversations Dialogue process that moves all relationships from danger to safety, making connecting possible.

Session Description: An extended psychological flexibility model can account for the currently known processes of clinical change. This scientific finding greatly simplifies the learning task faced by practitioners. Instead of being forced into a narrow model or limited set of methods in order to be considered to be an "evidence-based practitioner," clinicians can focus on how best to foster psychological flexibility writ large, using whatever methods best accomplish that task for a particular person. From the beginning I have defined Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in a radically functional way that is unlike any other well known and widely practiced psychotherapy. ACT is but a name for targeting psychological flexibility. In this workshop I will show how that odd combination of features allows process-based ACT to be used as a way of empowering your own approach to evidence-based process-focused work.