Helping Time-Starved Couples Center Love

CPD

Speaker

Elizabeth Earnshaw, LMFT Related seminars and products

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Elizabeth Earnshaw, LMFT, is a Marriage and Family Therapist, Clinical Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), Certified Gottman Method Couples Therapist, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and AAMFT Approved Supervisor. She is the author of the best-selling relationship book I Want This to Work, The Couples Therapy Flip Chart, and Til’ Stressed Do Us Part. She is the owner of a national therapy practice that provides systemic therapy to individuals, couples, and families. Elizabeth has worked with hundreds of couples since becoming a couple’s therapist. She lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with her husband, children, and dog.
 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Elizabeth Earnshaw is the founder of Intensive Couples Therapy Institute and A Better Life Therapy, LLC. She receives royalties as a published author. Elizabeth Earnshaw receives a speaking honorarium, recording and book royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Elizabeth Earnshaw is a fellow of AAMFT and a clinical member of Postpartum Support International.

Additional Info

Access never expires for this product.

For a more detailed outline that includes times or durations of time, if needed, please contact cepesi@pesi.com.

Objectives

1. Identify the clinical challenges dual-income couples face, including time scarcity, role overload, and workplace stress, particularly during the transition to parenthood.
2. Apply brief-session and asynchronous therapy interventions that meet the needs of time-starved couples.
3. Facilitate structured conversations about parenting roles, stress, varying responsibilities, and mental load while helping clients understand how family-of-origin dynamics shape stress responses.
4. Support couples in identifying postpartum-related mental health concerns and provide tools to repair early parenting injuries and restore co-regulation.

Outline

• The clinical profile of dual-income couples
• Internalized gender roles and contemporary stressors
• Relationship impacts of role overload and time scarcity
• Cultural myths of "doing it all"

• The collision of identity shifts, sleep deprivation, and stress spillover
• Birth trauma and postpartum depression/anxiety as relational injuries
• Recognizing ruptures like feeling unprotected or emotionally abandoned
• The relationship between supportive family structures and relationship wellbeing

• Adapting therapy for irregular attendance
• Providing psychoeducation to couples on stress and mental load.
• Three step system for navigating stress

• Surfacing invisible dynamics and family-of-origin wounds
• Dividing labor fairly without reinforcing binary thinking
• Dyadic Coping: Tools for co-regulation, stress recovery, and emotional attunement
• Social media's impact on gender scripts, expectations, and comparison

• Findings may be limited by heteronormative and middle-class samples
• Some strategies require adaptation for partners experiencing IPV or trauma

Target Audience

• Counsellors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Psychotherapists
• Therapists
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Addiction Counsellors
• Physicians
• Other Mental Health Professionals

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