Challenging Your Critical Inner Voice: An Introduction to Voice Therapy
Presented by Lisa Firestone, Ph.D.

Web Conference Description

Learning to work effectively with the “critical inner voice" is central to all areas of life: personal development, healthy relationships, self-esteem, and career success. This Web Conference will provide participants with an introduction to Voice Therapy, a technique that can enhance the therapist's ability to achieve positive treatment outcomes for their clients. Participants will discover ways to help their clients identify destructive thoughts or voices that cause debilitating feelings of guilt and shame and interfere with all areas of life. They will learn how Voice Therapy techniques can be used to challenge and overcome these destructive inner thoughts and to more effectively cope with anxiety, depression, personal relationships and work. Participants can begin to develop new strategies to help their patients reassess their goals, understand and tolerate the anxiety of change, and identify achievable steps for positive and meaningful change in their lives.

Voice Therapy is a cognitive/affective/behavioral methodology that accesses clients’ core maladaptive beliefs in the presence of emotional arousal. It is called Voice Therapy because clients learn to verbalize their destructive thoughts or critical inner voices in the second person, as though another person were talking to them. Shifting to this second person format brings to the surface the emotional content of this destructive way of thinking. Releasing the feelings associated with the critical inner voice helps clients to separate their own rational point of view from internalized hostile attitudes, to identify their sources in painful childhood experiences, loss and trauma, and leads to collaboration between client and therapist to formulate suggestions for behavioral change.

Drawing on findings from research in attachment and interpersonal neurobiology, Dr. Firestone will describe the basic concepts of Separation Theory, in particular the concept of the Fantasy Bond, on which the Voice Therapy techniques are based. The theory integrates psychodynamic and existential systems of thought in explaining how psychological defenses formed very early in life are reinforced as children develop an understanding of personal mortality.

This Web Conference is intermediate instructional level and designed to help clinicians:

1) Describe an innovative cognitive/affective/behavioral methodology that accesses a client’s core beliefs and can facilitate maximum therapeutic change;
2) Explain to clients the role critical inner voices play in destructive patterns in life;
3) Utilize exercises to help clients identify and challenge self critical thoughts; 
4) Integrate Voice Therapy methods into their clinical practice.

If you have any questions about this Web Conference, or would like more information, please contact us here.