Mary Jo Peebles, PhD will present on…
We have all felt stuck as therapists. This may be difficult to admit (and seldom do we tell our patients). But rest assured, the experience is universal. Feeling stuck has been discussed in traditional psychoanalytic settings as being stuck; i.e., a point of non-movement, or “impasse,” whose synonyms include “deadlock, standoff, stalemate, and dead-end,” words implying resistance, opposition, and no-more-life. Systems theory, strategic psychotherapy, and strengths-based approaches, on the other hand, view stuck places as rich in life and interaction. From their lens, feeling stuck is not immobility, it is being vitally engaged at the nub of the very thing that brought our patient to seek us. Through role plays, clinical examples, mistake-sharing, and audience engagement, this workshop will bring alive the life inside feeling stuck. It will develop a way of thinking, from a theoretically synthetic point of view, about elements that make a difference when psychotherapy feels stuck. By the conclusion, psychotherapists may feel encouraged, and perhaps wonder, if feeling stuck is exactly where they want to end up being.