Difficult Conversations: How Therapists Can Help Families Talk about Aging, Illness, and End of Life [AM] AND From Love at Last to Not So Fast: Helping Couples and Families with Challenges Re-Coupling in Later Life [PM]

This day consists of two separate programs.
You can register for ONE or BOTH programs.

Agreement to Maintain Confidentiality of Clinical Information and Restrictions to Copying Workshop Content

By attending this workshop I am agreeing to the following:

I understand that I may hear clinical material in this course that must be kept strictly confidential and not discussed or disseminated in any form outside of the course. I agree that I will not record, take photos, or store digital content from the course other than those materials which have already been provided by the presenter and PCFINE. I understand that I need to view the on-line program in a private place where it cannot be overheard or observed by others who are not registered for the course.

MORNING PROGRAM: 9:00am - 12:30pm EST  (3.0 CEs)

Difficult Conversations:
How Therapists Can Help Families Talk about Aging, Illness, and End of Life

Special Panel:  Carolynn Maltas, Ph.D., Jennifer Stone, Ph.D. and Steven Krugman, Ph.D.

Featuring “Wooden Nickels,” an improvisational drama about aging created by playwright Devorah Medwin.

People over 75 now comprise the fastest growing segment of our populations. Yet most therapists have little or no formal training on how to help their clients and their families have the difficult but necessary conversations about aging, illness and end- of-life planning. This workshop is designed to address this gap in preparedness.

This on-line interactive workshop will begin with a viewing of “Wooden Nickels,” a 35-minute video showing adult children attempting to talk among themselves, and with their mother, about fears related to the mother’s memory problems. The video illustrates how family dynamics can present obstacles to working collaboratively to meet the challenges of this stage in an aging parent’s life and in the lives of the adult children.

The workshop will then focus on therapeutic approaches to facilitate discussions between elders and their adult children about healthcare, living preferences, and end-of- life choices. Jennifer Stone, Ph.D. and Steven Krugman, Ph.D. will use a psychodynamic and family systems approach to working with dysfunctional family dynamics. Barbara Coombs Lee, a national authority on end-of-life care and choices, will be seen on video using a psychoeducational approach with this same family.

Carolynn Maltas, Ph.D. has been working with couples and families for more than 45 years, and written and spoken extensively about them. She is a co-founder of the Psychodynamic Couple and Family Institute of New England (PCFINE) where she was Director of Education for its first 15 years and is a faculty member and co-chair of the Committee for Ongoing Learning. Previously she was at McLean Hospital for 23 years where she co-founded the McLean Institute for Couples and Families in the 1980s. She is also a founding member and past-president of the Section on Family and Couple Therapy of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the APA. She taught couple and family therapy at Harvard and Tufts Medical Schools.

Jennifer Stone, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist working with individuals, couples and families in her Newton practice. For 35 years, she has helped to train psychologists at Harvard Medical School and DMH. Jennifer coordinates the Family Therapy Consultation Group for PCFINE members in addition to teaching in PCFINE’s Couple Therapy Fellowship.

Steven Krugman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who has practiced in the Boston area for over 40 years. He trained as a psychodynamic clinician with a special interest in attachment theory. He has also trained and practiced as a family and couple therapist. He was an active faculty member of PCFINE and chair of the Brunch Committee for many years. Dr. Krugman was the founder and director of the Family Project, an experimental domestic violence intervention program, as well the director of training at the Boston Trauma Clinic. He taught psychodynamic psychotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital for many years.

AFTERNOON PROGRAM: 1:00pm - 4:30pm EST  (3.0 CEs)

From Love at Last to Not So Fast:
Helping Couples and Families with the Challenges of Recoupling in Later Life

Newly recoupled adults in mid-life and beyond and their adult children are increasingly showing up in our offices in pain and asking for help. The fantasy for these “gray recouplers” is, “The kids are adults; the dog is dead. It’s just us. Now it’s our time.” They all too soon discover that it’s not “just us.” Rather, gray recouplers find themselves pulled apart by their adult children’s responses to their new relationship and polarized over parenting differences. They frequently wrestle with divisive pulls from multiple generations of extended family, many with loyalties to their previous partners.

The adult children of these couples also often seek our help with their own intense feelings about their parents’ recoupling. In addition, for both gray recoupled families and long-time stepfamilies, issues of elder care, end-of-life decisions and inheritance all too frequently become painfully contentious.

This workshop will give you a map of this territory. Dr. Papernow will describe some all too “easy wrong turns” that later-life stepcouples and their therapists make. She will give you tools and practical strategies for helping these couples and families navigate these complexities and meet their often intense challenges.

Dr. Patricia Papernow is an internationally recognized expert on stepfamilies. Her work integrates a wide variety of modalities and theoretical models and is informed by over four decades of clinical practice and a deep understanding of research in this area. The recipient of the award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Psychology from the APA Couple and Family Division, Dr. Papernow is the author of several classic books in the field, including Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships: What Works and What Doesn’t, and, with Karen Bonnell, The Stepfamily Handbook: From Dating, to Getting Serious to Forming a “Blended Family.” In addition, she has authored numerous articles and book chapters on this topic. Dr. Papernow is a psychologist in private practice in Hudson, MA, and Director of the Institute for Stepfamily Education.

Registration Fees & CEs

*The Equity Rate is intended for prospective workshop participants who identify as belonging to racial or ethnic groups with historical barriers to access, and/or clinicians who work primarily with low-income individuals or groups who have also endured historical barriers to access by virtue of their race or ethnicity.

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