In-Person Training (Knoxville)

This training is presented in partnership with Relationship Builders.

6 CE Hours

“Transforming Addictive Processes through Attachment and EFT”

Michael Barnett, LPCC

*A Professional Membership is just $125.
To join and receive a discount on this and other trainings, visit https://tlpca.net/become-a-member/.

After a century of ground-breaking advances in addiction research and treatment, our best efforts for successful treatment outcomes continue to produce efficacy rates well below what we as a field aspire to achieve. The familiar skill-based tools we teach are extremely important, yet when clients are faced with the “perfect storms” of life’s challenges, these well-honed interventions often fall apart. Although skill-based interventions are crucial for stabilizing addiction, they are not designed to access the neural networks that hold the traumatic distress highly correlated addictive processes. When traumatic distress is not addressed, clients will always remain vulnerable to relapse.

This workshop offers a demonstration of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), an attachment-based, trauma-informed model of psychotherapy that accesses, processes, and metabolizes the dormant emotional pain that clients have been attempting to self-medicate through addiction. EFT offers a relational, non-pathologizing psychotherapy component to addiction treatment that addresses the unresolved wounds that drive addictive processes, while simultaneously creating a replacement for self-medicating with substances: secure attachment. This workshop will provide participants with immediately applicable EFT interventions that participants will be able to use in their practices to create opportunities for healing within the context of their client’s relationships. We will explore how EFT accesses our client’s attachment systems so that we may work with, and ultimately dissipate traumatic distress, and in doing so stabilize our client’s recovery.

Objectives:

• Describe and identify addiction through the lens of attachment theory.
• Describe the correlation between unresolved trauma and addiction.
• Describe addiction as an adaptive response to loss, and disconnection.
• Describe the limitations of behavioral skill-based approaches to addiction
• Define Natural Recovery
• Describe how addiction is approached through Emotionally Focused Therapy

About the Speaker(s)

Michael Barnett, LPCC

Michael Barnett, MA, Ed.S, LPCC is a licensed psychotherapist in Atlanta Georgia with over 30 years of clinical experience. Michael is an ICEEFT(International Center of Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy) certified supervisor and trainer in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT), and is the founder and director of the Atlanta Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. He is also a partner at Pine River Psychotherapy Associates, a highly respected and visionary private practice in Atlanta since its inception in the 1970s. Prior to starting his private practice, Michael worked in inpatient addiction treatment centers, experiential outdoor training facilities focusing on the healing of addictive processes, and in intensive outpatient addiction programs for more than six years before beginning his private practice as an experiential psychotherapist in 1993. He began presenting workshops and trainings on experiential psychotherapies the same year. Michael received 27 years of mentorship from one of the leading psychologists in the Atlanta psychotherapy community, Dr. Kirk Lalor. By the time that he began his training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples in 2005, he had led dozens of trainings for psychotherapy professionals, and business leaders alike. By 2008 Michael became an ICEEFT certified trainer in the model and was leading EFT certification trainings, workshops and speaking engagements on EFT across North America. Michael has ardently worked toward integrating working with addictive disorders through both traditional and experiential processes. This humanistic, attachment-based work culminated in a systematic creation for tailoring the EFT model to more effectively treat couples who present on the addictive continuum. In doing so Michael has added his unique contribution to the existing body of EFT education and training. In February 2017, he and several colleagues completed a 3-year research project implementing EFT into the treatment regime at a metropolitan inpatient addiction hospital in Atlanta. The data is currently being analyzed and will hopefully be completed within the next eighteen months. In September 2017, Michael was selected to co-present at the EFT Summit with Dr. Gabor Mate, where they had the opportunity to share their personal and clinical insights about working with addictions from a humanistic perspective to a broad audience of psychotherapists from around the world. Michael and Dr. Silvina Irwin were also invited to co-present at the LACEFT and ACEFT masterclass series on working with trauma through the EFT model. They have added a special emphasis to the secondary traumatization that can impact therapists working so closely with traumatized clients.

TLPCA Contact

If you any questions, please contact Megan McCarter Cates.