2016 Spring Conference

Don't Ask Me To Forgive You!  A Radical Approach to Healing Infidelity and Other Interpersonal Wounds

with Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D., ABPP

Please join us for our Annual Spring Conference on April 15, 2016 in Oklahoma City. Lunch is included in the price of the conference. Dr. Janis Abrahms Spring will present "Dont Ask Me To Forgive You!  A Radical Approach To Healing Infidelity and Other Interpersonal Wounds." Licensed mental health professionals may earn six (6) hours of continuing education units.

(Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D., ABPP will present for 5 hours; 1 additional hour of ceu will be a panel discussion focused on practical aspectf of forgiveness in marital therapy.)

Note: These prices are good through midnight of April 14th. Registration at the door on the day of the event will cost an additional $25 for all categories.

Workshop Description:

Forgiveness has been held up as the gold standard of recovery from interpersonal injuries. We’ve been taught that forgiveness is good for us and that good people forgive. In real life, however, hurt parties often find that they can’t or won’t forgive, particularly when the offender is unrepentant or dead.

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. You’ll 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. You’ll 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 damaged caused. Ten concrete steps for achieving Acceptance will be described.

Everyone is struggling to forgive someone. This workshop 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, parent, in-law, sibling, child, friend, or significant other 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.

Participants will learn:

• to challenge popular assumptions about what it means to forgive;
• to provide hurt parties with a radical, new alternative which allows them to become physically and spiritually healthy – without forgiving an unapologetic offender;
• to compare four different responses to interpersonal injury and to identify what makes two of them dysfunctional and two of them healthy;
• to follow specific, concrete guidelines for helping offenders earn forgiveness and for helping hurt parties foster forgiveness.

Cost: The cost is based on membership and license status.

• $150 Licensed Professionals who are OKAMFT members (Clinical Fellows)
• $190 Licensed Professionals who are NOT members
• $90 Candidates who are OKAMFT members (Pre-Clinical Members)
• $125 Candidates who are NOT members
• $60 Students who are members
• $90 Students who are non-members

• Note: These prices are good through midnight of April 14th. The price(s) will increase by $25 for all categories for at-the-door registration on the day of the workshop.