Transformative Couples Therapy® Institute

In these lively sessions you will learn about the Transformative Couples Therapy® model both from a left-brain perspective and from witnessing a powerful clinical example via these breakthrough sessions. The context aligns with Allan Schore’s surprising research on the differences between the male brain vs. the female brain. This is combined with Helen Fisher’s fMRI research on the brain’s remarkable way of expressing the state of being “in-love”.

This in-love state is successfully cued up and intensified resulting in a surprising new outcome for this endearing and complex couple and for their step-family.

This is the most popular ‘set of three’ training videos. A bi-racial couple work through issues of flirtation and resultant anxiety, jealousy and conflict that brought them to the edge of breakup. This is couples’ treatment and training that will inspire you to meet your traumatized couples with new confidence. You will find confirmation that couples’ treatment can generate quantum shifts in earned secure attachment, and you can absorb the theory and practice of Transformative Couples Therapy® in a lively exchange with an audience of seventy therapists.

Segment 1

The couple show signs of the numbing distance between them. (1 hour 40 minutes)

Segment 2

The couple struggles productively at the brink of separation. You will see and hear the break-through of the denial and dorsal vagal dissociation of the more avoidant couple member. (1 hour 31 minutes)

Segment 3

In multiple healing portrayals you will witness the at-times intense challenging from Dr. Mars of both partners to wake up themselves up to the opportunity to heal with each other moment-to-moment. (1 hour 22 minutes)

In this powerful series of closely edited individual and couple sessions, see the transformative process of how love motivates remarkable and lasting change.

Witness how this lovable couple from India reunites after being divorced for two years. Their treatment includes healing from historical trauma, innovating new cultural practices of expressing care, and sharing chores as acts of love. They establish a safe and stable family environment with two teenage sons. 1 hour 54 minutes.

Segment 1

We begin by establishing the rewards for us as therapists to increase our own capacity to access all Seven Channels of Experience. In this way we find more colors in our palette to help paint the picture with couple members who are blocked in expressing their internal experience. The distress of the couple of how the breakdown of their 25-year marriage inspires and informs the path forward for healing. (1 hour and 54 minutes)

Segment 2

Dr. Mars in couple session work unpacks what is needed in the treatment, revealing the severe violence, betrayal and abandonment in the male couple member’s history as a boy. Dr. Mars explores how the male’s unresolved trauma brought him to unconsciously target his wife for revenge, which nearly destroyed their relationship. (1 hour and 14 minutes)

Segment 3

Dr. Mars demonstrates the co-construction of a series of healing portrayals to bring about much needed trauma resolution. This emphasizes ways clinician can resolve traumatic material into a healing result for the individual and the couple. The couple has remarried and is now living together harmoniously with their two sons. (1 hour and 48 minutes)

This 3 part video series gives an intimate and vivid experience of a couple transforming through healing the trauma of an affair.

The model of Transformative Couples Therapy® expands to include the participants in the workshop interacting directly with the couple whose treatment is shown. The couple leave the workshop feeling honored, respected and lighter.

In sessions six weeks and six months later they described and demonstrated a continued deepening of their now stable intimacy and connection.

These three videos feature a moving and rare Community Healing Workshop with an audience of therapists. This course of treatment involves combining premarital Transformative Couples Therapy® with a focus on healing the long-term effects of sexual trauma. This video series shows the building love and loyalty in this heterosexual couple through the male partner standing in for the female partner during a healing portrayal. Witness as he offers her the protection, love, and deep acceptance which contrasts sharply and therapeutically with what she needed in her family of origin.

Segment 1



We learn how through resolving relational trauma together in premarital sessions, deepened intimacy is potentiated in both couple members. Dr. Mars goes on to show how to help couples internalize the Seven Channels of Experience. This segment will prepare you not only for the physical presence of the couple in the workshop (shown in following video segments), but for the application of these techniques in your own sessions.



Segment 2



We open with an early session recording of the couple’s TCT work. The audience of therapists and Dr. Mars interact with the couple demonstrating the safety and power of Process Language in integrating the therapeutic work they have done.



Segment 3



In the final segment, the couple remains present and interactive in the workshop. We move into a late treatment video recording, diving deeper into the healing process with a live rescue portrayal. We hear and see the real-time responses from the couple and how they integrate the changes and healing that has evolved in their relationship.

In this video you will witness how this couple goes from the brink of divorce to a more solid ground of a secure base of attachment guided by the therapist evoking and amplifying the somatic experience of love. Dorsal vagal response and moments of inflammation punctuate the session guided by the Transformative Couples Therapy® method. This video was recorded near Tel Aviv Israel. 2 hours 10 minutes.

This session features a healing reunion portrayal about the cancer death of her mother and is followed by a successful and lasting breakthrough.

Here we witness how a reunion portrayal is used in couples therapy to treat psychosomatic pain. Dr. Mars begins by describing the steps and the power and safety of portrayal work for this couple and other couples in treatment.
We learn the step-by-step process of the portrayal. There is an undoing of the aloneness of the young and formerly lost sub-part which had revealed herself through guilt and physical pain. The process culminates by creating a new experience of love and truth within the couple.

This video was recorded in a workshop in Israel and features the responses of an international audience. 1 hour 49 minutes.

The clinical video makes it explicit how we clinicians can bring the “unthought known” that Bollas has written about into consciousness. This video features a father who had a recent and disturbing dysregulation toward his teenage son. This shows how generational trauma can be laid to rest through the use of a future and redo portrayal that rehearses a new healing path to make needed repairs.

This narrated 90-minute video features commentary about the affective neuroscience research of Antonio Damasio, Allan Schore, Bud Craig, Jaak Panksepp and other luminaries.

In this compelling clinical video and didactic teaching piece of a Transformative Couples Therapy® session, a clear pathway to healing relational trauma and deprivation is laid out.

The video begins with a distillation of key points in Allan Schore’s research of the “perilous journey of being male”. This research shows that male infants are particularly vulnerable to deprivation of attunement and soothing from caregivers at birth.

When a father is punitive, shaming and himself insecurely attached, we see how this can predispose his son to be harmed. The father’s early trauma and deprivation have traumatized this now 40 year old male.

In this clinical video a clear case is shown of how the male in this couple finds the support in the portrayal to stand up to his abusive father. Dorsal vagal response (Porges) and anxiety spikes are navigated in the session to a successful completion. The long-term results of the session are reduced chronic anxiety, decreased dorsal vagal response and more differentiation between the son and his father. The portrayal also helps him to differentiate his wife from the harmful aspects of his father as well.

In this training video you will witness a Reunion, Redo, Rescue and Anger Portrayal within a single Transformative Couples Therapy® session.