Training Attention, Reducing Emotional Suffering, and Developing Intimacy
Description: This workshop focuses on practical applications of mindfulness-based skills that can be useful to our clients (and ourselves). John Mader will guide participants on how to focus and direct their attention as a way to become aware and effective as clinicians. He will also explore how core mindfulness skills (taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy) serve as a basis for regulating negative emotions and for reducing conflict and increasing intimacy in relationships. The workshop draws on the innovative work of Alan Wallace, Marsha Linehan, and Alan Fruzzetti, and will include experiential exercises and an introduction to the mindfulness practice of shamatha.
Trainer: John Mader, MA, LMFT has more than twenty years experience as a therapist in community mental health centers and in private practice. His work includes more than ten years of teaching meditation, core mindfulness skills in DBT groups, and workshops on the parallels between Buddhist Psychology and DBT. He is an AAMFT Approved Supervisor and provides family therapy supervision and training groups and teaches a graduate course on family therapy at North Carolina Central University. In 2005, the North Carolina Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, Triangle Area DBT, and OPC Area Program recognized him for his contributions to the profession.
UNC Chapel Hill School of Social Work Clinical Lecture Series