Meet Our Presenters
I began attending CODA, codependents anonymous in 1990, as relationships were my big interest at the time. I began sponsoring people in that program, and was placed on the nationwide speaker circuit later that year. After speaking engagements up and down California, and then across the United States, I had become known for counseling in the 12-step world. I lectured in front of over 250,000 people from 1990 to 1996.
I began, for a brief time, attending Phillips Graduate Institute in Los Angeles in the hopes to complete a masters degree. I then took on an internship at the Family Counseling Center. I was placed in a supervision group with others gaining their 2500-3000 hours in the marriage and family therapy program.
I quickly learned in the masters program, and at the Family Counseling Center that it was all far too slow for me. I had read all the books in the masters program before I got there, and wound up teaching 30 minutes during a class in the first week because the professor had never heard of attachment theory.
I then knew a had some problems. One of them was that I was highly immersed in group therapy for myself, and I had just about rewritten a simpler version of the most known group psychotherapy book at the time, Irvin Yalom's Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. I had also summarized and taught some lectures on Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The teachings of the time were far too slow for me.
I negotiated with my supervision program to take the clients with me. I left the masters degree program. In the masters program there was one half of a book that was required reading on attachment theory. I somehow knew that was the only path that truly helps relationship issues.
I went on to become a co-teacher at a Buddhism awareness school in Los Angeles. And from that group came some other groups I ran utilizing John James book, The Grief Recovery Handbook. That training ran deep for me. I began to piece together trauma and attachment theory and realized the world barely has this training.
It wasn't until 2014 that I discovered Sue Johnson's work. I knew I wanted to build courses, and I wanted to focus on couples after attending the Interchange Counseling Institute for the year in 2013. Sue Johnson pieced together Attachment Theory and Couples, and most of what was in her training manuals, I had been doing already, but it was her scientific studies that sealed in my choices as counselor.
2015 was the first year I trained a psychiatrist on how to work with couples. I built the TherapistTrack program which teaches psychologists, therapists and coaches how to work with couples.
Therapists from around the world send me their clients, the most difficult clients, usually couples. 75% of my couples practice is with trauma-based couples.
Since 1990 I have formally done 36,000 of counseling. Since 2014 90% has been couples only. There is not a masters program to train practitioners how to work with couples. Over the next 5 years, I will be building the start of such a school.
I also worked with the board of behavioral sciences in 2015, when I researched masters degree programs again. First of all, there aren't any yet that have come up to speed with attachment theory. And even more importantly, the board of behavioral sciences would not back me on using my couples sessions as the training ground to teach the world, even with signed contracts. I hired an attorney to verify this with them. I won't be formally pursuing a license with the board of behavioral sciences.
Attachment theory bolted onto emotionally focused counseling is the only thing that helps distressed couples, at an 85% success rate. It's what my life will be dedicated to.
Every two people that want to be close have a problem right from the start. It's not taught anywhere what to do when conflict arises... conflict that lasts for an extended period of time. When this occurs, partners make up stories about the other, and then begin using those stories against each other. In this in depth look at how this wrecks our closest relationship, Derek Hart will walk us down the path of the most important thing to know to create repair in your relationships. You might say that this will be mostly an unlearning.
Bill Mannle, LMFT is a Gestalt and Marriage & Family Therapist in private practice in Connecticut, USA. He has been involved with Family Constellations since 2003. As an international trainer and facilitator Bill has conducted seminars in Connecticut, New York, California, Hawaii, Germany, Denmark, Australia, Mexico, Spain, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia and China. Interested in Constellation's ever-expanding form, he is exploring its deeper spiritual, heart opening nature, and the affects along the path.
Disruption in the flow of love caused by traumas, abandonment, and loss ripples into the shadows of the family landscape, often emerging as illness, insecure attachments, emotional difficulties, and broken relationships.
Family Constellations is a unique, experiential approach to healing. A kind of "living map," it provides a creative and profound way of seeing into turbulence that shapes our lives and the suffering we experience. It has the potential to touch us on a deep energetic level, often leading to a transformation and a realization that we are no longer alone.
In the words of poet David Whyte, the process offers an invitation:
"Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink; the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you."
"You will be found."
Benj Pasek/Justin Paul from "Dear Evan Hansen"
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/francesca.gentille
Website: http://www.francescagentille.com/
Website: https://tsshtraining.com/
Francesca Gentille, Certified Clinical Sexologist and initiated shaman, inspires transformation through combining the science and soul of sexuality. For over 20 years, she´s compassionately empowered 1000s of clients, and students around the world to reclaim the spark, bridge sexual differences, heal from trauma, and deepen self love!
An expert in the field of integrating sexuality, consciousness, healing, Tantra, Conscious Non-Monogamy, and the use of BDSM as therapeutic modality. She is professor at the International Institute of Clinical Sexology, where she is studying to receive her PHD. She has conducted workshops, and presented at conferences in the United States, Netherlands, Italy, Malta, Israel, England, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, and England.
Our limbic systems have mirror neurons. While these are the source of empathy, they are also the source of escalation. With practices of Conscious Communication and Quantum Connection, we can create and sustain healthy relationships.
We will explore and practice:
We all carry certain levels of personal, cultural, or epigenetic trauma. We will unpack what has become normalized trauma and how to rewire it through new practices in relating.
Each trigger is not only in the moment it carries the echoes of our past. It´s so intriguing. Whether triggered toward desire or demands, connection or contraction, there is an age, and a life stage that is responding.
What I am most fascinated by is how these Inner Aspects, once recognized and consciously collaborated with can create more intimacy, pleasure, and play. When they are unknown, suppressed rejected or avoided, they act out underground in destructive and often familiar patterns.
We will discover and explore:
Website: www.exquisitedark.love
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/exquisitedarklove/
News, Events, Classes: www.facebook.com/groups/exquisitedarklove/
Facebook Wall: www.facebook.com/fuzzyp
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/philippesimonlewis/
IG: @exquisite.dark.love
Philippe is a relationship educator and founder of Exquisite Dark Love, a platform for supporting men and women in making informed choices about relationships through the practice of connection, trust, consent, intimacy, and love. He is also co-founder of ReMENber Brotherhood Journey and a coordinator with ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts. In addition, Philippe is a modern voice on critical thinking about morality and the integration of the Masculine, Feminine, Dark, Light, and Shadow. He has also founded the Open Relationship Community, Attachment Community, and Consent Community to support new conversations on these important topics. As a loving father to an 11-year-old son, Philippe is constantly inspired to deepen his understanding and practice of surrendering to love and living life to the fullest.
A very gentle introduction to self-regulation and co-regulation. This class will teach you the basics of finding your own center and finding balance with what is available around you, whether it is the ground, nature, breath, or someone else.
As you explore your journey to Secure, what skills, qualities, and superpowers are you discovering in yourselve and others that you feel express best your inner security? In what ways do you now have more space, resilience, clarity, and insight in your life as you engage with others? What are the superpowers that you are developing as you move from your own particular attachment style into an earned secure attachment? (hint: many of these superpowers were born from your time as an insecure attacher) In this class, we will discover and explore one set of secure attachment qualities, and share with each other the unique ones we have developed on our own journey.
Ever been in relationship and noticed how you or your partner seemed to be following a sort of unspoken emotional “script” or “dance” leading you two down a path where triggers, difficulties, arguments, challenges, insecurities, and limitations seemed to get the best of you? If you’ve been on this planet for long enough, you may have noticed that these patterns are more or less repeated for you and your partner. You’ve seen yourself enter these relationships again and again and again, always knowing that something is up but never quite knowing WHY.
Enters Attachment Theory, the remarkable view of relationships that seems to pretty much explain EVERYTHING about how people can be secure or insecure in relationship and how regardless of your attachment style you will likely be in relationship with people who are either. Knowing about attachment theory and recognizing and knowing how to work with people with various attachment styles is one of the single most useful skills you can have in life.
It was perhaps just a few weeks or months since you discovered attachment theory. You learned about the two main types of insecure strategies --avoidance and anxiety-- and the patterns of behavior that express these insecurities through a relationship to needs that perhaps seem to come from a deep and young part of yourself.
This class is about beginning the journey to a more mature relationship to needs. A journey to self-care and to interdependence. A journey to a secure attachment style.
In this original class, you will learn...
★ To locate yourself more clearly on the map of attachment styles.
★ To recognize your insecure patterns more readily, and to share them without shame with the people you engage with.
★ How to plan your journey to a secure attachment style.
★ Somatic, emotional, physical, social, spiritual, and primal practices to develop in order to grow your emotional balance.
★ To answer the question "What do a secure person do?" with clarity when in a difficult situation.
★ To identify who are the secure people in your life and who are your anchors
★ Practices for the individual and for couples to anchor/stabilize each other, and the downsides/reduction of control/freedom of being in intimate relationships
Perhaps you're anxious or disorganized and trying to understand your avoidant partner(s), or perhaps you're avoidant and trying to communicate your reality to your partners. Either way, this class is for you!
In this class we will discuss:
★ What it's like to have an avoidant attachment style from a nervous system and emotional resources perspective
★ Your partner's avoidant coping mechanisms and how best engage with them so they happen less
★ Your own anxious coping mechanisms and how to support becoming more secure so you don't have to use them so much (and reduce your partner's coping mechanisms in the process)
★ The dynamics that create your anxiety and their avoidance (and identifying them better so you can learn to avoid them)
★ A Q&A from the "kingdom of avoidant attachment" (ie, I'm here to answer all your questions, small and big)
★ Practices to develop better regulation, self-care, and re-sourcing to improve your ability to be in the mystery your avoidant partner presents every day.
Bring your challenges and your questions!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dolphin.kasper/
Email: dolphinkasper@gmail.com
Other links: https://linktr.ee/dolphinkasper
IG: @dolphinkasper
Dolphin Kasper is a Canadian Born Author, Communicator, and Life Breakthrough Catalyst. He has been working in the space of personal and relational transformation for over 23 years. Dolphin uses his own personal journey and his extensive work with individuals, couples, and groups to identify and clarify the most powerful ways you can finally heal your past and unlock the full potential of your future. This fundamental transformation is what lies at the heart of our ability to create and sustain the relationships and the life we have been longing for. His passion is for creating innovative spaces where people can rediscover their deepest purpose and learn how to express that purpose in their lives. Join him for what is always a potent opportunity to more deeply know yourself and to become reinspired to live out those things that matter most to you.
What if you could have a deeper understanding of the pieces at play in all of the difficulty in your life? What if you held the keys to unlocking ease and effortlessness in your communication, conflict, and the relationships you most want to create?
In this workshop, you’ll have the chance to explore a new model for the human condition that will demystify many of the confusions and misunderstandings people make when it comes to navigating and healing their relational lives.
Expect a unique new way of conceptualizing and making sense of human behavior and of attachment theory. There will be discourse, dialogue, and opportunities to ask questions, challenge ideas and see how this new model of the human condition applies and makes sense of the source of our pain and what we have struggled to fully understand about our relationships and why they’ve been the way they’ve been.
Come to this workshop and leave with a new sense of clarity and optimism with regards to what has previously felt stuck in your life and a roadmap for what can happen moving forward.
This workshop will build on the previous workshop - Understanding Attachment Patterns - but does not require it to participate.
In this workshop you will be guided in a series of particular, experiential activities in order to directly realize the underlying nature and structure of our attachment system and will be supported to learn the fundamental vocabulary of the integrative process.
What that means is that you will explore and come to understand how and why the unresolved aspects of your past keep showing up and impacting your present, adult life (whether negatively or positively) and you’ll be given the base language and the key tools that act as a blueprint for the integration of any and all disconnected or unresolved relational patterns.
Come, explore, play, discover and fulfill your relational potential!
Website: thegroundedfeminine.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.dantoni.5
Email: thegroundedfeminine@gmail.com
Naiya (She/Her) is a queer US-born consent and sex educator, embodiment therapist, movement artist, death doula, community weaver, and intercultural psychologist. She has had a deep relationship with the wisdom and mystery of the body since childhood, spending 20 years of her life in the water as a competitive swimmer. Since retirement, her foundation in the embodied experience of mystical states has has expanded to apply to reimagining community organisms through intentional and inclusive community organization.
Naiya holds a bachelors in Psychology from Florida International University and a masters in Intercultural Psychology from ISCTE-IUL in Lisbon, Portugal and The University of Oslo, Norway through the GLOBAL-MINDS Erasmus Mundus program. Her work and research has focused on sexuality in cross-cultural contexts, immigrant and refugee populations, intergenerational conflict, sexual trauma, youth wellness initiatives, harm reduction, and intentional communities. She is a Fulbright scholar (Romania) and a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Kyrgystan).
Naiya’s work in her private practice and group workshops is informed by IFS, systemic constellations, neo & non-dual tantra, Hakomi, 5 Rhythms, and somatic-focused psychotherapies. She has been guiding others in sacred earth medicine ceremonies, dance, community circles, breathwork, yin yoga, and somatic psychotherapy since 2016 and working as a consultant and freelance community organizer since 2008. Through her work, she creates space to empower others, individually and collectively, to express and integrate their inner voices through breath, sound, and movement. Though frequently nomadic, she currently resides in the high Rocky Mountains of Colorado (unceded Arapahoe territory) and is the daughter of third generation Sicilian and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants.
Come explore connection through contact as we ride the waves and stretch to touch the limits of contacting all parts of ourselves. What conditions challenge you to stay in contact with yourself? What dances would you rather do without the gaze of others? When and where do you hide? What happens when you make contact with another? What happens when you loose contact? We will explore this, and more, in a journey through sight, sound, and movement.
This facilitated collective practice uses a “felt-sense” approach (relying heavily on somatic responses) to surface patterns of interaction and interdependent relationships within a particular system. Together, we will enter the systemic field of attachment wounding to create a dynamic model or map of this particular system in order to visualize the patterns of interaction and widen the shared understanding of attachment individually and collectively.
The 5Rhythms are flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. They come together to create the Wave, a movement meditation practice. There are no steps, just your own expression as choreography. Leaning into each of the rhythms as a teacher, not just in the dance, but in life. What do these rhythms have to teach us? You can expect to meet different and sometimes unknown aspects of yourself as your dance unfolds and your practice of the rhythms deepens over time. The 5Rhythms are states of Being. They are a map to everywhere we want to go, on all planes of consciousness – inner and outer, forward and back, physical, emotional and intellectual. They are markers on the way back to a real self, a vulnerable, wild passionate, instinctive self.
Email: consentaslove@gmail.com
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/consentaslove
Website: https://cymariegiordano.wixsite.com/consentcoaching
FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1931239683783717
FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/consentaslove
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbqSCwoU-jR-nvWN623rE5w
IG: @consentaslove
Cyrena Giordano teaches and inspires her students and clients (and just people around her) to embody consent culture and to practice tools and structures to cultivate healthy, nourishing relationships.
Author of Clarity Conversations for Empowered Relationships workbook, alongside teaching numerous workshops, online courses, coaching, enacting interviews, videos and blogs around consent culture and healthy relating, Cyrena continues to ignite hundreds of people into more empowered connections.
After learning the benefits of consent culture on individual relationships and within communities in college, and through her study and major of interactive theater for social change, she created an interactive theater show and was hired to train the 20 co-op housing communities affiliated with her school, UC Berkeley around cultivating consent culture.
Since that time, she’s been highly passionate about the benefits of consent culture and healthy relating, regularly inspiring those around her into deeper choice with themselves and others, which eventually manifested in her solidifying her brand consentaslove at age 26.
Through this brand (among hosting many other workshops throughout the years) she has consolidated all of her content into a regular online course called Empowered Relationships and has expanded into a coaching practice involving healthy relating, mediation, and repair.
Cyrena believes that it's truly through empowered education and awareness of healthy relationships practices that humans can and do obtain and sustain healthy and nourishing connection
This is a workshop that informs humans the overlap and inter-relationablity of trauma- informed care and consent culture. I’ll be covering concepts around basic trauma, how it works, how to actually relate being trauma-informed, poly-vagal theory, basic consent culture and consensual relating, my Consent and the 4 C’s, and how and why that enhances all of our relationships. We will also lightly brush how the drama triangle, attachment theory, and the concept of “domain” relate to trauma-informed relating. Come attend to learn more and have this empowered knowledge enhance your connection to and ability to care for self and other immediately!
This is a workshop that covers the three pillars of healthy relationships! I’ll take you through a journey of my personal story and how and why these three breakthroughs enhance all your relationships while also adding a healthy dose of consent culture in the process! Come and attend to find out these relationship essentials so you can have this empowered knowledge for the rest of your life and attract and sustain the relationships that you deserve and that truly nourish you!
Shayna Cass
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shayna.cass/
Email: shayna@returntolove.shcass.com
Website: returntolove.shcass.com
Shayna Cass is an artist, designer, educator, and somatic healer focusing on the intersection between relational trauma and neurodivergence. She's passionate about helping people to connect deeply to themselves so that they can connect deeply with others. Shayna uses a multidisciplinary approach rooted in Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy and expressive arts to help her clients step outside of the neurotypical box they've been trying to fit into their entire lives, embrace their highly sensitive nervous systems, and start living a life that aligns with their authentic nature.
In this 2-hour workshop you will be introduced to the 5 practices of Authentic Relating:
1. Welcome everything
2. Assume nothing
3. Reveal your experience
4. Own your experience
5. Honor Self and other
Through experiential exercises using playback theater, you'll learn how to apply these practices to your everyday life, transforming your relationships.
In this class you will learn the basics of parts work using the IFS model and learn how to map out your parts using diagrams and expressive arts.
Links: www.linktr.ee/jayaberged
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jaya.s.berged/
Email: playgroundbeyou@gmail.com
IG: @playgroundbeyou
Jaya Berged is a theatremaker and life coach based in Melbourne, Australia. She is passionate about creativity and connection, and pursues all spaces where the two intersect. Attachment theory has been a game changer in her life, and she loves to use her creative practice and mentoring to help facilitate other people's journey towards secure attachment.
A class on acting fundamentals and attachment theory basics, explored through a short story and two monologues. This class creates space for deep reflection and asking/answering questions within the safety net of fiction. Participants can choose their level of personal vulnerability and allow the stories of the characters to guide them into a journey of deeper empathy and well-rounded perspective of various attachment styles.
An exploration of the cyclical/non linear process of growth through the stages of presence, play, practice, and progress. This structure applies to all kinds of growth, but we will use attachment theory as an example to demonstrate how the growth cycle might look in the process of developing relationship health. Participants will come away with deepened self-awareness, and practical ideas for what the next steps in their own growth journeys might look like.