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Conference : Workshop Descriptions
Dr. William Glasser
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Counseling with Choice Theory: The New Reality Therapy
Friday, August 22, 2025. 9:00am - noon and continued from 1:30pm - 4:30pm.
Since he developed his original reality therapy in 1965, Dr. Glasser has been continually updating and expanding the way he counsels. At the present time all of his counseling is based on the Choice Theory he explains in his 1998 book, Choice Theory. His reality therapy has been upgraded in his 2025 book, Counseling with Choice Theory, the New Reality Therapy.
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He will begin the day by explaining Choice Theory because teaching this theory to clients has now become an integral part of the new reality therapy. Choice Theory explains that we choose all of our behavior and that the purpose of counseling is to help clients to make better choices so that they can improve their mental health. They can keep using the Choice Theory they have learned to improve their mental health once they leave counseling. Working this way, the time needed for counseling is shortened even though the counseling, itself, is more effective.
Further he explains that unhappiness is the cause of clients’ symptoms, and that the cause of their unhappiness is unsatisfied relationships. The unhappy clients are not mentally ill and there is nothing wrong with their brains that would preclude counseling and that the DSM-IV is an accurate description of all ways unhappy people choose to behave. While Dr. Glasser is a psychiatrist and can prescribe brain drugs he never has in all the years he has been in successful counseling practice. Find out at this workshop how to counsel anyone with a DSM-IV diagnosis, including the symptoms called schizophrenia, without drugs.
In August, 2025, over 400 people turned out in Fredericton, NB for Dr. Glasser’s full day presentation. Their comments were very enthusiastic; they especially appreciated his patient answers to their questions and his willingness to demonstrate what he explains by role-playing with volunteers from the audience. Come prepared to leave with new information about mental health as separated completely from mental illness, information you can put immediately to work with clients and in your own life. Dr. Glasser is a very entertaining speaker so if you don’t like to laugh, you may be disappointed
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Bill O'Hanlon, M.S.,FAPA
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Integrating Spirituality and Brief Therapy
Saturday, August 23, 2025. 9:00am - noon and continued from 1:30pm - 4:30pm.
Brief therapy and spirituality? Many therapists have been taught that spirituality and therapy shouldn’t be mixed. Brief therapy has a reputation of being pragmatic, directive and not very deep, much less spiritual. Bill O’Hanlon will turn these presumptions on their heads and show how spirituality is at the core of the brief therapy approach he has developed. In this program, he will offer a conceptual model and demonstrate practical methods for using spiritual resources to help clients elicit their own strengths, solutions and possibilities. He will detail the spiritual
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basis for solution-oriented therapy. Through demonstrations, lecture, videotaped examples and clear handouts, participants will learn new therapeutic tools and ideas that respectfully work with each client's sense of spirituality. Ideas for how to bring the therapist
?s own sense of spirituality into therapy without imposing specific beliefs and clients will be given. The workshop will offer practical methods and a conceptual model for connecting with spirituality and using spiritual resources and methods in the service of change, even when clients have an aversion to religion or spiritual sensibilities. With its strengths focus and relatively brief treatment length, this approach is especially appropriate for time- and resource-sensitive therapy settings.
What you will get out of the workshop:
- A clear, practical model for using spirituality in therapy
- Learn how to use spirituality in therapy without imposing or intruding
- Learn to do a rapid spiritual assessment
- Learn how to tap into spiritual resources to solve serious and previously intractable problems (even with agnostic, difficult or skeptical clients)
- Receive an overview and review of research on spirituality, therapy and health
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Ernest Rossi, Ph.D
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Mind, Body and Spirit: Facilitating Gene Expression, Neurogenesis and Healing in Creative Living
Sunday, August 24, 2025. 8:00am - noon.
Three fundamental discoveries of current neuroscience will forever change the way we understand the human mind, body, and spirit.
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| (1) Novelty, enriching life experiences, and physical exercise can activate neurogenesis—new growth in the brain throughout our entire lifetime. (2) Such experiences can turn on gene expression within minutes throughout the brain and body to guide growth, the differentiation of stem cells, and healing in ways that could only be described as miraculous in the past. (3) “Every Recall is a Reframe.” Whenever we recall a stress or traumatically encoded memory, nature opens up the possibility for us to reconstruct it on molecular-genomic and cellular levels. We will explore the implications of these discoveries for an emerging worldview of how we all have an opportunity to continuously reconstruct our brain and body on all levels from mind to gene during the 4-stage creative process of daily life, psychotherapy, and spiritual practices. We will discuss how enriching life experiences that evoke the novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis effect during creative moments of art, awe, drama, dance, humor, joy, literature, meditation, music, poetry and spiritual experience can optimize the psychosocial and cultural genomics of consciousness, personal relationships, and professional practice. |
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