Date: June 13, 2025
Times: 10:00 am-5:30pm Eastern (Find the time for your location)
Instructor: Corky Becky, PhD and Bob Stains, MEd
Location: Live in Person; Scandinavian Living Center, Newton, MA. Lunch will be served.
Credits: 6 CEs
Polarization in Couples, Families and Communities: Helping Therapists Bridge Divides
Polarization prevails today in couples, families and communities in multiple ways including increasing family estrangement. This creates emotional threat to basic needs for connection, recognition, agency and shared values. Differences potentially enrich relationships. Under a variety of kinds of threats to relational needs, differences can become polarizing divisions. When polarized, people feel more alone, isolated, alienated, invisible, demoralized, and disempowered. They often seek a person or a group with similar positions to meet needs for connection thereby amplifying divisiveness in other relationships within couples, families and communities. In the larger community, people also often seek others to blame, deepening “us/them” narratives.
Amid tension caused by deep differences -about their vote for president, or their position on a variety of human rights- partners and family members often fight with each other about whose vote or beliefs seem wrong-headed and dangerous. Even if people are not actively fighting with each other, differences in values can cause significant distress and distance in relationships. This workshop will offer ideas to help people who are struggling with these challenges by offering a different question to frame the interpersonal dilemmas. Instead of paying attention to and engaging with what people are fighting about, we will help you discern what people in conflict are fighting for. Reframing the fight in this way allows for the emergence of increased understanding and connection despite differences. We will discuss several conversational resources you can use to help people speak and listen with greater empathy and complexity. The foundational idea is to encourage dialogue rather than debate, allowing people with opposing viewpoints to share personal stories and build understanding through deep listening, rather than trying to change each other’s minds or win an argument.
We will present ideas and skills for understanding and bridge their differences in constructive ways whether in a couple, family, larger community or organization setting. The ideas we share about how to create a context and conditions for dialogue across differences were originally developed from family systems strategies taught at the Family Institute of Cambridge which became Therapy Training Boston. The Public Conversations Project, which has become Essential Partners, has used these ideas for decades in many community contexts including schools, universities, and religious institutions to help people live, work, worship and learn better together. Teaching will include didactic, discussion, and small group exercises that you can use with your clients, at home, and in other community settings
Carol (Corky) Becker, PhD
Carol (Corky) Becker, PhD, is a Founding Associate of Essential Partners. She is a clinical psychologist, family and couple therapist, family therapy supervisor, teacher/trainer and consultant. Her private practice focus has been transforming conflict into dialogue. The highlights of her work with Essential Partners (previously known as the Public Conversations Project) included the development of the approach to dialogue with pro-life and pro-choice participants in the early 1990’s, work on Population and Development for the UN summit, dialogues at Randolph College transitioning to co-education, training at the Chapin school, Intra Jewish dialogues on the Middle East, and dialogue with Zen teachers. Her workshops included work on interviewing to prepare for dialogue, neuroscience of arousal and how our approach addresses those dilemmas for participants and facilitators. She collaborated with IFS therapists to develop approaches to dialogue that incorporate Internal Family Systems ideas. Corky taught in TTB’s Intensive Certificate Program in Family and Couple Therapy for over 20 years. She developed and facilitated TTB’s Master Series in Couple Therapy for 10 years.
Bob Stains, MEd
Bob Stains is the Founder of Bob Stains and Associates, Conflict Transformation and the Transforming Dialogue training, mentoring and group coaching program. His highest purpose is to help people to get curious about and become more human to each other, especially when they are divided. Over the space of two decades, Bob helped build the Public Conversations Project –a pioneer of the modern dialogue movement- from a small local group to an internationally-renowned team of practitioners, trainers and consultants now known as Essential Partners where he serves as a Senior Associate. Bob has worked for decades across the US and in ten other countries facilitating dialogue and while training and mentoring others to do the same. He is a seasoned designer and facilitator of conversations that cultivate understanding and connection in the midst of divisive identity differences. Bob weaves his past experience as a family therapist, his practice of mediation and his understanding of interpersonal neurobiology into the design and facilitation of conversations that cultivate understanding and connection in the midst of divisive differences. Bob is also a skilled trainer, coach and mentor who equips leaders and practitioners with the internal and external skills to design and facilitate dialogues that repair torn communities.
Schedule:
Schedule of the Day:
10:00 am-11:30 am
Break 11:30 am- 11:45 am
11:45 am-1:15
Lunch served on site: 1:15 pm- 2:15 pm
2:15 pm-3:45 pm
Break: 3:45 pm-4:00 pm
4:00 pm- 5:30 pm
Learning Objectives
1. Participants will describe a minimum of two interactional dynamics that lead to and reinforce polarization in families, couples and communities
2. Participants will be able to describe four means of interrupting dysfunctional patterns in polarized relationships and communities
3. Participants will utilize a minimum of three techniques to create contexts and conditions for constructive non polarizing conversations
4. Participants will describe how to engage in constructive conversations as participants and facilitators
5. Participants will be able to identify and change conversations to expand narrow stories that maintain polarization using a minimum of two new skills.
Target Audience
This learning event is designed for helping professionals including, but not limited to, social workers, mental health counselors, and marriage & family therapists. People who attend from professions other than those for whom we are approved for CEUs may check their local Board of License Registration to see if these CEUs will apply.
Cost: includes breakfast snacks and lunch
- Individual Registration: Regular Rate—$160; Early Bird Rate: $140
- Early Registration Deadline: April 4, 2025
- NEAFAST Member Rate: $110
- Our EQUITY rate for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ clinicians is $100. Use the “promo” code EQUITY in the online registration form to access this discount.
- Please contact us for discount codes. No application is required.
- 6 CEUs will be available at an additional cost of $25 paid upon registration for social workers, mental health counselors, marriage & family therapists and anyone else who determines their board will accept our CEUs.
Additional Information
Participants MUST attend 100% of the program to earn the 6 CEUs approved for eligible professions.
CEU 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 CEUs FOR MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELORS -
This activity has been certified by NEAFAST on behalf of the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Allied Mental Health & Human Services Professions for LMFT Professional Continuing Education. Certification #212779353-B LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CEUs FOR MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS
- This program has been approved for 6 Social Work Continuing Education hours for relicensurc, in accordance with 258 CMR, NASW-MA Chapter CE Approval Program Authorization Number D 10211-3
- LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CEUs FOR SOCIAL WORKERS
- Check with your state board to determine whether our approved CEUs meet the criteria for your license
Read detailed information about CEUs here.
No refunds are available for late cancellations. If participants cancel 30 days or more prior to the start of the event, 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.