Assessing Response-to-Intervention in Dynamic Psychotherapy: ISTDP’s Unique Transtheoretical Contribution

Maury Joseph, Psy.D.

February 21, 2020 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm

MPA Office, Columbia, MD or Online Via Zoom

Workshop Instructional Level: Introductory: This program is very low-jargon and ultimately transtheoretical, so it should be comprehensible to graduated and licensed psychologists of all levels and training backgrounds, and will be most accessible to those with some knowledge of psychodynamic theory

Therapists of all stripes think carefully about how to intervene, what to say and when. Our interventions are important, but we also need ways to assess whether and how the patient is responding to our current treatment plan. The more immediately we can get that feedback, the better. So, what signals can we look for to help us form and test hypotheses about whether an intervention did what we meant it to do? This lecture will briefly review ideas on assessing "response-to-intervention" from the wider psychotherapy literature, and then focus on a unique tool for assessing patient's responses from Davanloo's ISTDP-- careful observation of non-verbal signals of anxiety in the body. Participants will watch videotapes of psychotherapy sessions and will be assisted to detect and track nonverbal signals of anxiety as one means to assess the relative validity of different interventions. The case will be made that attention to non-verbal signals in the style described by Davanloo may have utility for therapists of all stripes.

This workshop is designed to help you:

  • detect signals of unconscious anxiety (e.g., sighing respirations) in accordance with ISTDP theory
  • use ISTDP theory to hypothesize about the efficacy of an intervention by attending to the patient’s immediate response
  • describe Davanloo’s hypothesis about the clinical significance of unconscious anxiety in the striated muscles

 

 

REGISTER 

Maury Joseph, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist in Washington, DC. I am a local expert in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), an evidenced-based treatment strategy for a wide range of mental health conditions, and I have advanced training in several other approaches to therapy. In 2017, I co-founded the Institute for Emotions and Health in DC, a practice focused on diagnosis, treatment, and research of medically unexplained physical symptoms, psychophysiologic disorders, and TMS symptoms like chronic pain, irritable bowels, headaches, and chronic fatigue. I am on the faculty of the Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy training program at the Washington School of Psychiatry, where I help train post-graduate therapists. I also serve as an assistant clinical faculty member at George Washington University and adjunct faculty at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and I help train clinical psychology graduate students in the practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy at both schools. I am a regular blogger for goodtherapy.org and other mental health advocacy websites