We know from recent research that many women do two-thirds of what it takes to run a home and a family, regardless of whether they work outside the home or earn the larger income—having significant impacts on mental and physical health, employment, and life and relationship satisfaction. This workshop will introduce a method of helping couples improve communication and negotiate issues related to resentment, burnout, establishing equity, and redistributing the mental burden of unappreciated and unpaid domestic work in the home. The Fair Play system utilizes structured decision-making and communication approaches to make invisible work visible and valued. Fair Play methodology has been tested on hundreds of couples from different socioeconomic levels and cultures. In this workshop, therapists who want to use this tool in their practice will discover how to help clients in relationships:
Eve Rodsky had built a flourishing career in organizational management when she suddenly realized that she was shouldering a wildly unequal amount of her family’s emotional and domestic labor. With the launch of her popular documentary, Fair Play, and NYT bestselling book and card deck of the same name, offer her challenge to therapists on how they can address the often hidden and invisible burdens that partners, often women, take on in their families and households.
Phyllis Cohen, PhD, is a psychologist/psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She’s a clinical supervisor at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, where she’s on the Executive Committee Family Systems and Psychoanalysis Project. She’s taught child, marital, and family therapy in many professional training programs, and is on the faculty of the Trauma Institute at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She’s the founder and director of the New York Institute for Psychotherapy Training in Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence, coauthor of The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book: Origins of Attachment, and coeditor of Healing after Parent Loss in Childhood and Adolescence: Therapeutic Interventions and Theoretical Considerations, among other publications.
