You’re invited to step off the session-to-session hamster wheel and into a more impactful way of helping couples in distress.
Does this sound familiar?
You're in a 50-minute session with a couple that’s barely scratching the surface. Just as you start making headway, one partner floods—or you have to pause for a deep moment to stay on schedule. Next week, they come back saying, “We didn’t get anywhere.”
Week after week, the cycle repeats...
Now imagine what’s possible when you have two full days with a couple—to slow down, go deeper, and create real momentum in their healing.
Learn a Proven Framework for Doing Transformative Work—Fast
In this free, immersive 2-day online training, renowned couples therapist and Certified Gottman Therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw will walk you through the foundational skills, structure, and strategy for running your own intensive couples therapy sessions.
Elizabeth will walk you through four detailed case studies that illustrate common
presentations, intervention strategies, and outcomes:
- Alex & Priya – Chronic low-grade conflict and existential drift
- Marcus & Dani – Post-baby relational strain and resentment
- Linda & Charles – Later-life relationship under stress
- Jordan & Ray – Coupleship in recovery under threat
These examples will show how assessment, intervention selection, enactment facilitation, and regulation skills unfold across the two-day intensive format.
Whether you're just getting started with intensives or want to level up your process, over
two days, you will gain practical, applicable skills for:
- Structuring an intensive: purpose, goals, clinical indications, and contraindications
- Assessing fit: identifying when intensives are appropriate and when they are not
- Pre-session preparation: informed consent, scheduling, payment, and consult calls
- Day One protocols: joining with couples, conducting assessments, and presenting feedback
- Day Two protocols: facilitating enactments, managing dysregulation, and pacing deep work
- Ethical decision-making: knowing when to pause or discontinue an intensive
- Closure and follow-up: planning, referrals, and clinical handoffs
Register for
FREE
Today!
Can't attend live?
Register anyway for 14-day free access to the training!
Reserve your spot today and gain the tools to deliver deep, sustained change for couples in crisis.
NOTE: Sign up today and you’ll have the immediate option to upgrade to our CPD package.
An Accelerated Approach to Repair, Stabilize, and Strengthen Couples in Crisis
Elizabeth Earnshaw, LMFT, CGT, 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, Til’ Stressed Do Us Part, and The Clinician’s Guide to Intensive Couples Therapy. 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.
Click here for information about Elizabeth Earnshaw.
Sign up for this free workshop today to gain the foundational skills, structure, and strategy for running your own intensive couples therapy sessions.
Couples Intensives: What They Are, Why They Work, Who They Help
- What is intensive couples therapy?
- Purpose, benefits, and risks of longer-format therapy
- Relational dynamics and clinical issues intensives are helpful for
- Contraindications: interpersonal violence, substance use, mixed agendas, suicidality
- Logistical and ethical considerations
- Limitations of the research and potential risks
- Training, credentials, and characteristics of an intensive couples therapist
- Pre-session communication: policies, paperwork, expectations
- Consultation calls: How to manage client expectations ahead of the session
- Scheduling and payment considerations based on the client
- Assessment: IPV, SI, substance use; modality-based assessments
- Therapist humility: cultural and person-of-the-therapist knowledge
- The first 90 minutes
- How to “join through hope,” and instill a sense of possibility and security early on
- Early enactment: Observing patterns, communication
- Assessment of readiness to change, familial influence, commitment, and goals
- Individual interviews
- Deeper dive into the history of the problem
- Further assessment: Co-morbidities, family of origin issues, disclosures
- Preparing and presenting feedback
- How to share observations effectively
- Creating a “roadmap” for change
- Case studies:
- Alex and Priya: Chronic Low-Grade Conflict, Existential Drift
- Marcus and Dani: Post-Baby Drift and Resentment
- Linda and Charles: Later-Life Love Under Strain
- Jordan and Ray: Recovery Under Threat
- Therapist preparation
- Clinically-informed review of previous day’s feedback sessions
- Choosing the appropriate interventions and exercises
- Prepare to be unprepared: When things don’t go “to plan”
- How to start session with containment and focus
- Enactments: Bringing relational dynamics into the room in real-time
- Successful enactments: Assessment, facilitation, redirecting, and restructuring
- Choosing exercises to build enactments: Speaker/Listener, the HARD conversations model, guided imagery, the intimacy wheel, repair, negotiation, and more
- Differentiating between “conflict” and “flooding” (diffuse physiological arousal)
- Intervening in dysfunctional patterns to create a new path
- Emotional regulation tools
- Interventions: Stop the Pattern, Map The Dance, commonly used psychoeducation, cross-tracking, doubling, Physiological Self Soothing, and more
- The final hour of the intensive
- Reflection of the shared experience for the couple
- The Farewell Conversation
- Future planning through couple agreements and plans, referrals, and follow up appointments
- Case study couples revisited: Enactments, exercises, closing practices
Both days, there will be two 15-minute breaks and one 60-minute lunch break.
An Accelerated Approach to Repair, Stabilize, and Strengthen Couples in Crisis