Enhancing Between-Session Interventions

David Treadway

Who ate the homework? While many couples therapists assign their clients homework, few couples comply. And too often, rather than engaging with their clients’ resistance, most therapists let the matter drop, ignoring the important insights and useful conversations homework can elicit. This workshop will demonstrate how to engage and motivate couples to do homework in a way that can transform treatment. You’ll explore:

• How homework can be even more of a catalyst for sustainable change than sessions themselves
• A wide variety of homework exercises for couples on topics like nurturing (Tender Loving Care), negotiating (Business of Business is Business), conflict management (Time Out/Last Word), communication (2 of you paying attention to 1 of you), and sexual expression (Loving Fingers and Hurt and Angry Feelings)
• How to deal more effectively with resistance and noncompliance, using a variety of effective carrot-and-stick approaches like betting, incentivizing, and penalizing

David Treadway, PhD, is a therapist and teacher who’s been giving workshops and trainings for 40 years. He’s a long time contributor to Psychotherapy Networker and the author of the upcoming Treating Couples Well and four other books.