Power Issues in Psychotherapy – Dr Malin Fors
Event Overview
This workshop addresses disparities in social privilege and their practical implications for psychotherapists. Dr. Fors will discuss core themes of her book, A Grammar of Power in Psychotherapy (APA Books), and her upcoming book, tentatively titled “Working with Interpersonal Power Dynamics in Psychotherapy” (Guilford Press).
Most training on cultural competence, power-sensitive ethics, feminist psychotherapy, and similar areas focuses on addressing power discrepancies. This workshop goes further: It is about repair, about what to do in the clinical setting beyond noticing unfairness or improving one’s “cultural competence” or creating “cultural safety”. Without minimizing differences among varying social power categories such as racism, ageism, homophobia, and sexism, it aims to integrate scholarship from a range of human rights fields into a flexible construct that is useful regardless of which power theme is addressed. Dr. Fors will suggest non-shaming ways for therapists to engage with difficult topics, without anxiety about making errors or being insufficiently competent. She will posit that social power issues are embedded in all psychotherapy and that ignoring their presence can lead to errors in building the alliance, developing a case formulation, making interventions, and noticing trauma triggers. Becoming more aware of power dynamics helps us make more effective technical choices.
The seminar suggests how to increase therapeutic effectiveness within the therapist´s preferred model. In other words, its perspective can easily be integrated with any therapy method. Dr. Fors posits a matrix of relative privilege that includes four core patient therapist dynamics: similarity of privilege, privilege favoring the therapist, privilege favoring the patient, and similarity of non-privilege.
Clinical topics explored include, among many others, voluntary and involuntary self-disclosure, visible and invisible similarities between patient and therapist, internalized oppression, and choosing whether or not to address privilege explicitly.
This webinar will focus on the psychotherapy field, although other fields may find the discussion of interest. £50 members/£100.00 non-members.
A recording of the event will be made which you can purchase by signing onto the event, but please note, we are only able to issue CPD certificates for those who attend the actual workshop. Please note that in some cases the recording may be edited to ensure confidentiality
Ticket sales will end Thursday 4th December at noon.
The Zoom Link will be sent out to all participants the day before the event.
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