Our personal and collective encounter with an invisible antagonist, our enforced sequestering, our interrupted activities, our removal from familiar points of reference occasion both anxiety and fear in us. How are we to understand this experience psychologically, move from a sense of victimage to personal agency, and find enlargement in times of diminishment.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define the concept of “the psychology of the second half of life.”
2. Develop a more evolved, more mature engagement with values in clients.
3. Explore on-going changes in American society and the preparation of the therapist to deal with them.

Women have courageously examined their roles and the limitations placed upon their souls.   Men similarly need to examine the presuppositions and limitations which govern their lives.   This program will explore the range of male definitions, the often-unconscious relationship to mother and father, the role which fear plays in men’s lives, and why doing therapy with men may be so difficult.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define how the socialization of male differs from female patients
2. Learn leading questions which can open a man to exploration
3. Identify the variations of male response to mother influence

Every few years a seemingly new psychotherapeutic approach surges in popularity, only to fade away later as a distant memory.  Recently a wide variety of interactive factors underlying many health and mental health problems have been identified.   This seminar synthesizes the substantial literature on psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics, combining it with the neuroscience of emotional, interpersonal, cognitive, dynamics, with psychotherapeutic approaches to offer an integrated vision of psychotherapy.  The integrative model promotes a conceptual shift in how we understand mental health problems and their solutions.  We can now understand how the immune system, diet, brain structure, and even gut bacteria effect mental health.  Psychotherapists in the 21st Century will by necessity become more like healthcare workers to address and resolve adverse mind-body-brain interactions.   Mind-Brain-Gene explores a wide variety of factors having multidirectional causal relationships between stress, depression, anxiety, the immune system, and gene expression.  The interaction between all these factors has been by illuminated by studies examining the effects of life style factors on the incidence of health and psychological problems.  There are significant relationships between immune system function, stress, insecure attachment, anxiety, depression, poor nutrition, bad quality sleep, physical inactivity, and neurophysiological dysregulation.  For example, insecure attachment, deprivation, and child abuse contribute to anxiety and depression as well as immune system dysregulation in far more extensive ways then was believed.  This complex range of health conditions effects millions of people who seek psychotherapy.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the relationship between health and mental health
2. Learn about the interaction between the immune system, genes, brain dynamics, and mental health
3. Learn how the stress systems can be turned on and are difficult to turn off

This presentation discusses the wide-ranging health and mental health ramifications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study. The presenter worked for 26 years in the system that produced this landmark study.  The ACE study highlights the interaction between early adversity and epigenetic affects expressed later in life that significantly impact mental health.  The rapidly evolving field of epigenetics reveals how the gene-environment interaction brings about the expression or suppression of the genes. Maternal neglect and growing up in poverty have been shown to suppress genes regulating the cortisol receptors on the hippocampus, making it more difficult to turn off the HPA axis later in life.  In the extreme, low cortisol receptors are associated with suicide.

Learning Objectives:

1. Examine the long-term effects of Adverse Childhood Experience
2. Learn about how early neglect and abuse can affect later stress potential
3. Examine how epigenetic processes underlie cortisol receptor development