Integrating Emotion-Focused Therapy Principles and Interventions in Working with Older Adults

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AN ONLINE WORKSHOP FOR HEALTHCARE & OTHER PROFESSIONALS
When: Monday, Jan 20 – Sunday, Feb 16, 2025 (4 weeks) ONLINE weekly at your discretion
Cost:    $240 (Students $120) Sufficient Enrolment Decision Deadline: Mon, Jan 13, 2025
This workshop will be offered only if there is sufficient enrolment.

This introductory workshop will focus on the theoretical principles and practical skills to assess and process emotions productively while working with older adults. Through case presentations and didactic learning, participants will learn how to:

  • Assess clients’ unique emotional processing style and emotional processing difficulties
  • Facilitate emotional awareness, symbolize emotions, and deepen emotional experience
  • Be aware and intervene to resolve obstacles to productive emotional processing
  • Learn about step-by-step emotion sequences to transform unproductive emotional states into productive emotional processes
  • Learn about memory reconsolidation and emotional change by meaning-making, narrative elaboration, and co-creating new narratives to foster meaningful changes

Week 1: Introduction to Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)

  • Affective neuroscience: a bio-evolutionary theory of emotions
  • Presence and moment-by-moment attunement to emotion

Week 2: Early Phase

  • Emotion Assessment and differential interventions (primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary/symptomatic, instrumental)
  • Emotion regulation

Week 3: Middle Phase

  • Ongoing case formulation
  • Productive emotion processing
  • Basic change process in EFT: transforming emotion with emotion
  • Chair work: psycho-dramatic enactments

Week 4: End Phase

  • Emotion Transformation
  • Self-compassion and self-nurturing
  • Changing negative narratives

Instructor: Carmine Malfitano, PhD, MSW, RSW
Carmine is a registered social worker, graduated from the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto in 2014. Since 2024 he is the Director of Training and Education at the Centre for Psychology and Emotional Health and a Clinical Social Work Specialist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and an adjunct lecturer at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto.

Registration and payment available online at https://aging.utoronto.ca/642-2/  

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