Course Information

Don't Ask Me To Forgive You! A Radical Approach To Healing Interpersonal Wounds

Don’t Ask Me To Forgive You! A Radical Approach to Healing Interpersonal Wounds

Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D., ABPP

6 CE Credits

for Psychologists, Social Workers and

Professional Counselors and Therapists

April 30, 2010

Loyola University Maryland Graduate Center

Columbia, MD

9:00 a.m. –  4:30 p.m.

$155/MPA members   $210/Nonmembers

Workshop Level:   Beginning, Intermediate or Advanced Practitioners

We’ve been taught that forgiveness is good for us and that good people forgive – but is this true? How do you forgive someone who is unremorseful – or dead? When is forgiveness cheap? Are some injuries simply unforgiveable?

In this workshop, Genuine Forgiveness will be reframed as an intimate dance, a hard-won transaction, which asks as much of the offender as it does of the hurt party. Participants will learn to help offenders perform bold, humble, heartfelt acts of repair to earn forgiveness, such as bearing witness to the pain they caused, delivering a meaningful apology, and taking responsibility for their offense. Participants will also learn to help hurt parties release their obsessive preoccupation with the injury, accept a fair share of responsibility for what went wrong, and create opportunities for the offender to make good.

The presenter will also propose a radical, new alternative to forgiveness – a profound, life-affirming, healing process called Acceptance. This can be accomplished by the hurt party alone, when the offender can’t or won’t make meaningful repairs for the damage caused. Ten concrete steps for achieving Acceptance will be described.

Everyone is struggling to forgive someone. This talk invites you to participate – personally, or vicariously for your patients – in an experience designed to help you rise above a violation, repair the rupture within yourself, and consider forgiving the partner, parents, sibling, child, in-law, friend, or colleague who has hurt you. For those of you who have wronged someone else, it will offer you concrete steps for earning that person’s forgiveness – and your own.

This workshop is designed to help you:

• Challenge popular assumptions about what it means to forgive;
• Provide hurt parties with a radical, new alternative which allows them to become physically and spiritually healthy – without forgiving an unapologetic offender;
• Help hurt parties release themselves from their obsessive preoccupation with the injury;
• Compare four different responses to interpersonal injury and to identify what makes two of them dysfunctional and two of them healthy;
• Follow specific, concrete guidelines for helping offenders earn forgiveness;
• Follow specific, concrete guidelines for helping hurt parties foster forgiveness.

NOTE:

The Janis Abrahms Spring books, How Can I Forgive You?, After the Affair, and Life With Pop will be available for purchase at this workshop.

About the Presenter:

Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D., is a nationally acclaimed expert on issues of trust, intimacy and forgiveness. She is author of the award-winning books, After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful; and How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, The Freedom Not To (which have sold more than 450,000 copies and are published in 13 countries), and her latest, Life with Pop: Lessons on Caring for an Aging Parent. In private practice for over three decades, Dr. Spring is a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology, a recipient of the Connecticut Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Practice of Psychology, and a former clinical supervisor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. The originality and clinical richness of her work make her a popular media guest on programs such as NPR and Good Morning America, and she trains thousands of therapists each year at professional venues such as The Smithsonian Institute, Smith College, and The Ackerman Institute. She and her husband live in Westport, Connecticut, and have four sons. Visit her website at www.janisaspring.com.

Registration Details:

Registration deadline is one week prior to the workshop date. Registrations made after that date are subject to available space and a $10 late fee.

Please refer to registration page for all registration rates.

Cancellation Policy:

Full refund up to one week prior to workshop date. No refunds thereafter, except in cases of participant illness (with timely notice to MPA) or cancellation by MPA.