About our Couples Therapy Training

The thirteenth year (2026-2027) year of this couples therapy course will provide participants with the opportunity to learn from lecture, observation, and dialogue with seven internationally known couple therapists. Whether you are a veteran or just starting to work with couples, you will enhance couples counseling skills, thinking and practice. Our couples therapy training provides the unique opportunity to see a role play couple interviewed by different therapists with different foci. The learning also supports relational work with individual clients.

New this year: we will use the same role play couple for multiple demonstration sessions providing the experience of seeing the way the couple progresses in treatment and how the same couple responds to a variety of interventions and clinical styles.

Invited guest faculty will present critical ideas that are foundational to their approach. Course members will be encouraged to note opportunities for learning and questions that arise as they watch the moment to moment unfolding of the role play interviews. After the demonstration interview there will be small group discussion among participants followed by a Q & A with the guest faculty. Participants will enrich their own approach to couple work. Some class members will have the opportunity to learn experientially by playing the role of a member of a demonstration couple. Each evening will include opportunities for participants to connect and learn from each other in small groups.

Detailed Description of Each Couple Therapy Training Class

November 2, 2026 with

Lana Kim, PhD, LMFT
Description: Equity in relationships is a value that many partners espouse, but conversations about this typically revolve around divisions of labor. While decisions about “who does the dishes” and how household and family responsibilities should be divided between partners is an important aspect of partnerships, this misses other critical aspects of relational work. Terms such as ‘mental load’ or ‘invisible labor’ highlight the unseen emotional and mental energy and effort required to build, manage, and maintain relationships. Yet, the burden of relational work and the work of caring are still largely gendered, unacknowledged, and undervalued in our society. In this training, Lana will use a socioculturally attuned lens to facilitate a discussion about the societal structures and power processes that fuel gendered expectations underlying relational imbalances. She will address common issues that couple therapists encounter that relate to inequities in mental and emotional work. Finally, she will discuss how invisibility around relational work can inadvertently be perpetuated in therapy and demonstrate how therapists can work with partners to shift this process and open up transformative possibilities. 

Couple conflict and dissatisfaction are commonly connected to imbalances in carrying out the mental and emotional work that is invisible but integral for managing and maintaining relationships. Yet, therapists can inadvertently overlook this and collude in perpetuating gendered inequities. Practices that visibilize the work in relational care help rebalance this load and facilitate more satisfying visions for partnership.

Power dynamics based in societal structures and the intersectional dynamics they produce affect the invisibility around care work. By using a socioculturally attuned lens to challenge the societal ideas that promote gendered expectations for relational responsibility, therapists can deepen their anti-racist and anti-discriminatory practices.

 Lana Kim, PhD, LMFT is Associate Professor and the Director of the Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is also a licensed marriage and family therapist and both an Oregon board and AAMFT approved clinical supervisor. In Dr. Kim’s clinical work, she draws from narrative and experiential frameworks and socio-emotional relationship therapy (SERT). She is particularly interested in the ways in which culture and larger social contexts shape identities, lived experience, relationships, and therapeutic process. Dr. Kim holds a specialization in medical family therapy and her research interests include couple therapy, invisible load and relational responsibility, second generation Asian-American families, integrative care, and culturally responsive MFT practices. She is an active member of the American Family Therapy Academy and has served on their board and leadership team. Born in Canada and raised in a Korean immigrant household, she currently resides in Oregon with her husband and two daughters.
 

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn to:

  • Describe how to address gendered inequities in relational work using a socioculturally attuned lens.
  • Identify common couple therapy issues that relate to underlying imbalances in carrying the invisible emotional and mental aspects of relational work.
  • Discuss both sociocultural and therapeutic processes that inadvertently invisibilize the work involved in relational care.

December 2, 2026 with

Carol (Corky) Becker

Description:

Couples in conflict often have relational needs that are not met because they are fighting. Corky suggests that there are four categories that couple therapists can be aware of to help them turn their complaints to requests. She proposes that couple therapists listen for longings and wishes for in these four categories: Connection, Identity, Agency and Values. When the clinician discovers how these wishes resonate with partners they can be validated and become a turning point and direction for couple therapy.

Couples in conflict are very challenging for couple therapists. When couples complain about each other it is easy to get triangulated into the conflict or problem pattern between them. The therapist can inadvertently get caught up in the content of what people are fighting about rather than focusing on the relational needs that underpin their distress. Refocusing on what each member of the couple is fighting for validates each partner’s needs, helps each person see the other in a positive light, and provides a direction for the sessions and the treatment.

The underpinning of these ideas is relational justice, the idea that each person has a valid claim to be connected, included, and to feel a sense of belonging; to be seen, recognized and valued; to be agentive, influential and empowered; and to share and have support for their values. These four categories of relational need are founded on the idea of equality, justice, and empowerment, transcending imposed categories of race, class, sexual orientation and other marginalized identities.

Corky is a couple therapist who has been in practice for fifty years, has taught couple and family therapy for forty years, has worked with a dialogue project helping people discuss polarized public issues (The Public Conversations Project) for 25 years, worked with the Harvard Negotiation Project helping people negotiate with others successfully for 25 years. She worked on the Kosova Professional Education Project after the war in Kosova for six years. She co-developed a course teaching family therapy in China for three years. Her paper entitled “What are you fighting for? Working with couples in conflict” has been accepted for publication in Family Process.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 

Attendees will learn to: 

  1. Describe how to listen for and identify relational needs when they hear complaints each person has about their partner.

2) Explain how to translate complaints into requests for a relational need, longing, or hope that is valid and legitimate. 

3) Articulate how to determine where to focus the work in couple therapy in treatment and in each session.



Laura Gambrel

Laura Gambrel, LMHC, LMFT, LPC

January 6, 2027 with  Laura Gambrel, PhD in marriage and family therapy, LMHC (WA), LMFT (NC), LPC (CO), AAMFT approved supervisor, ICEEFT certified EFT couples therapist, EFCT supervisor-in-training

Description: Couple therapists are increasingly working with clients who struggle with chronic reactivity, nervous system dysregulation, emotional disconnection, attachment injuries, and difficulty maintaining emotional presence during conflict. This experiential presentation will address these needs by introducing relational mindfulness as a framework for helping diverse couples move toward real change by enhancing emotional safety, attunement, and secure connection. Integrating mindfulness, somatic awareness, attachment science, systems theory, and experiential couples therapy approaches, participants will learn how to use practical, embodied, mindfulness-based interventions to cultivate awareness and acceptance of self, other, and the relational process in real time.

Dr. Gambrel will explore how therapists can facilitate relational mindfulness interventions to support co-regulation, vulnerability, authenticity, and deeper connection between partners. Therapists will gain practical tools to help couples de-escalate reactive cycles, increase attunement, and strengthen their capacity for authentic and compassionate connection.

The relational mindfulness approach supports anti-racist and anti-discriminatory clinical practice by emphasizing nonjudgmental awareness, cultural humility, nervous system safety, enhanced curiosity, awareness of difference, and attunement to each partner’s lived experience and context. Participants will be invited to approach both themselves and their clients from an embodied social justice perspective while avoiding imposing dominant cultural norms on relational processes.

Dr. Laura Eubanks Gambrel, PhD, LMHC (WA), LMFT (NC), LPC (CO), is a couple therapist, supervisor, author, and trainer with over 20 years of clinical experience specializing in experiential and attachment-based couples therapy. She is a Certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and EFCT Supervisor-in-Training, an AAMFT Approved Supervisor, and a certified mindfulness instructor.

As a former faculty member and researcher, Dr. Gambrel has focused on studying the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions to enhance relationships. She developed an integrative framework of relational mindfulness that combines mindfulness, somatic awareness, attachment science, and experiential couples therapy to help couples move from reactivity and disconnection toward deeper attunement and secure connection. Her work emphasizes embodied awareness, nervous system regulation, and the healing cycle of reaching, responding, and receiving in relationships. She is the founder of the Institute for Relational Mindfulness, where she provides therapy, supervision, and training in Bellingham and virtually worldwide. 

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn to:     

  1. Describe the relational mindfulness process of reach, respond, and receive as a framework for promoting attunement and secure connection with couples.
  2. List three mindfulness-based and embodied interventions that facilitate emotional regulation, vulnerability, empathy, and co-regulation between partners.
  3. Identify how therapist presence, mindfulness, and self-of-the-therapist practices influence attunement and the therapeutic process in couple therapy.

Jean Malpas

Jean Malpas, LMHC, LMFT

February 3, 2027 with Jean Malpas, LMFT-D, LMHC-D

Description: Clinicians will learn to interview couples using questions pertaining to consensual monogamy and non-monogamy. Exploration of the couple’s presenting problem aims to identify whether the point of entry into these questions is a crisis (for instance, a transgression), a conflict, and/or a collaborative exploration of their boundaries and relationship structures. The interview discerns how the couple’s history, identity, and narrative address questions of emotional and sexual loyalty and freedom. Most explorations of consensual monogamy and non-monogamy emerge in the context of a form of conflict, difference, or difficulty with the topic.  Jean will help therapists learn five steps of exploration: each partner’s perspective, the cycle of interaction the conflict is embedded in, the detection and befriending of parts activated by the topic (fear, rejection, jealousy, abandonment, anger, etc). If and when the couple is ready, ways to address different perspectives on boundaries, commitment, fidelity, openness, decision making process, and rules to protect their agreements will be discussed. This approach also explores the question of how sexually and/or romantically connected the couple would like to be. 

Couple therapists are not always equipped with questions, themes and strategies to unpack the questions all intimate relationships face around commitment, fidelity, trust as well as autonomy, freedom and openness. 

Jean’s teaching acknowledges that while consensual monogamy and non-monogamy is practiced by couples of all racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, clinical and research literature tends to center white couples and experiences. His approach to interviewing will integrate intersectionality and race/culturally-driven power injustices. 

Jean Malpas, LMFT-D, LMHC-D, was trained in clinical psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He has been practicing as a psychotherapist, supervisor, and trainer in couple and family therapy for twenty-five years. After training in systemic therapy, Jean directed the International Training Program at the Ackerman Institute for the Family (NYC), where he also founded the Gender & Family Project and co-founded the Couples & Intimacies Project. His work with consensual commitment and queer couples has been published in numerous publications and presented at conferences across Europe, North and South America. He is the founder of JEM Therapy and maintains a private practice in New York City. 

Learning Objectives 

atendees will learn:

  1. Define consensual non-monogamy
  2. Explain how to explore relationship boundaries, structures, and hierarchy
  3. Use specific questions to explore relational interactions that organize the presenting issue in the couple

Fiona True Ackerman Institute for the Family

Fiona True, LCSW

March 3, 2027 Healing the Past in the Present: An approach to couples therapy that addresses past or present family violence.

with Fiona True, LCSW

Description: Balancing the differing therapeutic needs of a couple where missuses of power have occurred is a complicated and often a daunting task for the therapist. Fiona True will offer a therapeutic frame, developed by the Children and Relational Trauma Project of the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City. This frame addresses the needs of couples and families who have been harmed by occurrences of family violence. It emphasizes the need for moral clarity when treating couples who present with histories of relational ruptures and illustrates how to both respect the integrity of the family and simultaneously, protect its most vulnerable members. Fiona will lay out a methodology that allows for the repair of past traumas and the strengthening of safe relational bonds in the present. Offering a clear set of principles of practice, this frame allows the clinician to navigate the therapeutic dilemmas encountered in couples who present with these dynamics. This approach recognizes the systemic consequences on persons whose lives are subjected to racist and oppressive power structures and works to bring forth the ways in which those larger structural constraints affect the relational bonds between the couple. Bringing forth gender assumptions, that can serve to further abuses of power and control, are central to this therapeutic frame.

Fiona True, LCSW is Faculty Emeritus of the Ackerman Institute for the Family and a Co-Director of the Center for Children and Relational Trauma, a clinical research program that has addressed issues of family violence and relational trauma since 1992. She has authored several papers that address the dilemmas and clinical impasses that this set of presenting problems generates and trained many front-line clinicians in residential care, foster care and community mental health settings in the clinical practices the Center developed. As a member of the Teaching Faculty, she taught at all levels of the Ackerman training program and supervised Extern Students from 1995 through 2020. She served as Director of Community and international Training for 12 years during which time she was instrumental in developing collaborative relationships with training institutes in Hong Kong, Japan, Chile, Argentina and Spain. Together with her colleagues Marcia Sheinberg LCSW and Peter Frankel PhD, she was the recipient of the 2004 American Family Therapy Association (AFTA) Award for contribution to Theory and Practice.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn to:

1)Identify the dynamics that render the couple vulnerable to reactivity

2)Utilize both/and thinking to form safe therapeutic alliances with each member of the couple

3) Name a strategy for addressing violence in couple therapy

socioculturally attuned couples therapy

J. Maria Bermudez, PhD

April 8, 2026 with Maria Bermudez:                                                                                                                                                                                                          ANVIET as a Guide for Couples Working Toward Transformation Change

Description: Socioculturally Attuned Family Therapy is a transtheoretical framework that helps family therapists address relational distress within the broader social, cultural, structural, and systemic contexts that shape our lives. At its core is ANVIET (Attune, Name, Value, Intervene, Envision, and Transform), a framework designed to integrate critical and sociocultural perspectives across major family therapy models and promote transformational change toward greater equity and justice.  ANVIET’s potential as a psychoeducational and relational tool for couples remains underexplored. Outside the therapy room, couples often lack a practical guide for attuning to one another, identifying their needs, and engaging in meaningful dialogue and behaviors that generate and sustain transformational change. 

Through clinical demonstration, guided discussion, and practical application, participants will learn to help couples: (1) attune to one another’s experiences, needs, and meaning-making; (2) name dynamics that have been ignored, hidden, or unjust; (3) identify values and recognize where devaluing has occurred; (4) intervene in and interrupt inequitable or destructive relational patterns; (5) envision new possibilities for themselves and their relationship; and (6) transform their relationship through the development of new narratives, behaviors, and mutual support practices. Therapists will gain a concrete framework for helping couples sustain transformational change long after therapy has concluded. By fostering deeper understanding, accountability, and mutual respect, ANVIET helps couples create more equitable, inclusive, and affirming ways of relating, moving beyond awareness of injustice toward transformational change.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES Attendees will learn to:

  1. Describe the six components of the ANVIET framework (Attune, Name, Value, Intervene, Envision, and Transform) and their application within a socioculturally attuned approach to couple therapy.
  2. Explain ANVIET as a psychoeducational tool for sustaining transformational change beyond the therapy process.
  3. Discuss the various contexts in which ANVIET can be applied, such as supervision, teaching, research, and community outreach.

 

Dr. Maria Bermudez, PhD, LMFT, is an Associate Professor at the University of Georgia in Human Development and Family Science and Marriage and Family Therapy. She has practiced family therapy over 30 years and is licensed as an LMFT in Georgia. She is an AAMFT Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor and a feminist informed narrative therapist. Her work centers around feminist and strength-based approaches to clinical practice, teaching, research and outreach for Latinx immigrant families. 

She serves on numerous editorial boards and has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Dr Bernmudez has taught over 100 professional presentations in the fields of marriage and family therapy, human development and family science. She has published four books focused on intersectional, global, and contextual perspectives in the practice of couple and family therapy and the study of human development across the lifespan. She is passionate about working with couples and families in therapy and collaborating with colleagues from diverse disciplines and perspectives on socially just scholarship, outreach, and clinical practice

Tammy Nelson, LPCC

Tammy Nelson, LPCC

May 5, 2027 with  Tammy Nelson, LPCC                                                                                                                                                                                                    Title:  Affairs: Infidelity And Betrayal Trauma In Couples– Using Integrative Relationship Therapy Treatment

Description: Infidelity remains one of the critical issues in couple therapy, yet many clinicians receive little formal training to address it. Therapists are often faced with intense emotional reactivity, polarized narratives, questions about disclosure and forgiveness, and uncertainty about whether relationships can survive after an affair. Without a clear framework, they may inadvertently reinforce blame-based dynamics or become aligned with one partner’s experience at the expense of the relationship system. Tammy Nelson will discuss the range of issues related to affairs, the varieties of affairs, and the many ways that relationships can heal from this betrayal that affects intimacy. She will review three phases of treatment and the steps of the recovery process that lead to long term healing.  Issues related to trust, forgiveness, new visions of monogamy, sexuality and connection as they impact the future of the couple’s relationship will be reviewed. Her structured, trauma-informed model helps couples move from crisis stabilization to meaning-making and ultimately toward creating a new vision for their relationship. Therapists will learn interventions that support accountability, emotional regulation, transparency, relational resilience, and sustainable healing. They will leave with practical tools for addressing trust, forgiveness, sexuality, attachment injuries, and the renegotiation of monogamy agreements in contemporary relationships.

Participants will be encouraged to examine their own assumptions about monogamy, fidelity, family structures, and relationship values, while developing greater cultural humility in their clinical work. The training moves beyond dominant cultural narratives that define healthy relationships through a single lens and instead explores how couples from diverse backgrounds create meaning around commitment, betrayal, healing, and intimacy.



Tammy Nelson, PhD is an internationally recognized sex and relationship therapist, author, speaker, and educator with more than 30 years of experience helping individuals and couples create healthier, more authentic intimate relationships. She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Integrative Sex Therapy Institute and a leading expert on relationships, sexuality, consensual nonmonogamy, affair recovery, and trauma-informed couples therapy.

Dr. Nelson is the author of several influential books, including Open Monogamy, The New Monogamy, Getting the Sex You Want, When You’re the One Who Cheats, and Integrative Sex and Couples Therapy. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and numerous television, podcast, and radio programs worldwide. She is the host of the podcast The Trouble with Sex and a sought-after keynote speaker whose work focuses on intimacy, truth-telling, desire, healing, and relational transformation.



Learning Objectives

  1. Understand infidelity using the three-part definition and how partners are affected in a marriage or committed partnership.   
  2. Learn the effects of betrayal trauma on relationships 
  3. Identify why some systems of recovery from affairs can retraumatize clients.    
  4. Describe the three phases of treatment after an affair including the crisis, the insight, and the vision phases.
  5. Explain how to create new monogamy agreements
your instructor

Liz Brenner, LICSW

course information

Individual registration $775. Early registration is $750.

  • September 14, 2026 is the early registration deadline. Payment plans are available.
  • CEUs: additional cost of $40 for CEs for the professions who are eligible and people who would like to access those. CEU information below.
  • Our EQUITY rate for Black Therapists Rock, National Association of Black Counselors, NEAFAST Members, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ clinicians is $700. Use the “promo” code EQUITY in the online registration form to access this discount..
  • Please note: you must register for the couples course as a whole. Attendance at individual sessions of the course is not allowed to maintain the integrity of the learning group. Contact us for more information.

Location

The event will be held live on Zoom. We will not be recording this event for participant access.

Registration Instructions

Please note the online system allows you to register and pay for the couples therapy training: using your Paypal account, using Paypal as a conduit to your credit card or mailing a check. Please complete the online registration form at the link below even if you will be mailing a check for payment. Your space is not secure until payment is received.

Additional Information

  • 6:45pm-7:00pm Break out discussions
  • 7:00pm-7:05pm Speaker introduction
  • 7:05pm-7:45pm Guest presenter teaching
  • 7:45pm-8:00pm Break
  • 8:00pm-8:40pm Live demonstration of couples therapy 
  • 8:40pm-8:55pm Debrief role players’ experience of the interview, identifying the impact of the session on the couple
  • 8:55pm-9:10pm Small group discussion of role play
  • 9:10pm-9:35pm Large group unpacking of learning and questions for the speaker

Couple therapy is energizing, challenging, and rewarding work. Doing couple therapy well is a complex task that requires ongoing learning and practicing of new skills. This couple therapy training will include expanding participants frame to work with a wide range of couples who are struggling with relational skills including problems related to our larger social contexts that impact just relationships due to marginalization of sexual, gender and other critical identities. There will be a minimum of three hours spent discussing couple therapy that includes antidiscrimination practices. There is a need for practical, accessible approaches that empower couples to become active agents in their own relational transformation. By helping couples apply these processes on a regular basis, therapists can extend the impact of therapy beyond treatment and promote greater relational resilience and sustainability.

This couples course is designed for helping professionals interested in the principles and practices of couples therapy, including, but not limited to, social workers, mental health counselors, and marriage & family therapists. The program serves the needs of beginning and intermediate couples therapists with little to a moderate amount of formal couples therapy training who are or would like to work with couples and families. We also support couples therapists and other practitioners who take the course to deepen their knowledge, enhancing capacities for supervision, teaching, training, and administrative roles.
Participants will:

  1. Describe two interviewing skills learned in each evening of the course.
  2. Compare interviewing skills demonstrated by senior couple therapists and discern when to use what approaches.
  3. List four techniques for preventing or working with conflict.
  4. Explain three different approaches for increasing connection and empathy in couples.
  5. Identify two similarities among the approaches to couple therapy presented.
  6. Identify two differences among the approaches to couple therapy presented.
  7. List two concepts related to working with each of these topics: using mindfulness in couples sessions, addressing gender and power in couple therapy, working with what couples are fighting for, addressing relational boundaries related to consensual monogamy and non-monogamy, working with violence and working with affairs and other betrayal.

Participants MUST attend 100% of the program to earn the 12 CEs approved for eligible professions.

CE certificates will be downloadable within three days of each event after participants complete the workshop or course and fill out the online evaluation.

  • Therapy Training Boston is approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6707 for Mental Health Counselors. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Therapy Training Boston is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs. LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CEs FOR MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELORS 

  • This program has been approved for  18 Social Work Continuing Education hours for relicensure, in accordance with 258 CMR. NASW-MA Chapter CE Approval Program Authorization Number D 10680-1 LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CEs FOR SOCIAL WORKERS

  • Check with your state board to determine whether our approved CEs meet the criteria for your license

Read detailed information about CEs here.

No refunds are available for cancellations by participants regardless of the reason or time frame. If participants cancel 30 days or more prior to the event beginning, they may apply the fee to a future program. Workshops may be cancelled by Therapy Training Boston if minimum enrollment requirements are not met or in the case of other unexpected circumstances. If this occurs, a full refund will be provided.
Course content level: This workshop will provide important information for clinicians who are at an introductory or intermediate level of knowledge about this topic. Advanced practitioners are welcome to attend the event to deepen their knowledge of the subject for practice, supervision, teaching, and administrative roles. Audience: This offering is relevant to all helping professionals including but not limited to social workers, mental health counselors, and marriage & family therapists. There are no conflicts of interest: There is no commercial support for this program.
For all event policies read this, detailed CE information here.