Transformative Couples Therapy® experiential Skills Course 2026
22 CE available from CAMFT, which is affiliated with AAMFT
Wake Up Transformative Change in Your Most Challenging Couples
Join Our Exciting Monthly Training Series on Zoom!
Transformative Couples Therapy® Institute is excited to announce the third year of our Monthly Training Series, starting Tuesday, February 24, 2026. This series is designed for new and returning participants, offering a dynamic blend of teaching, clinical video examples, and hands-on practice to help you navigate even the most challenging couples' dynamics.
Why Join?
Deepen Your Expertise: The first hour of each session will dive into the theory and practice of Transformative Couples Therapy®, providing you with powerful tools and techniques to help couples break through longstanding struggles.
Key Insights: In the second hour, you’ll watch "unlikely transformations" unfold through clinical training videos, featuring couples working through complex issues like high conflict, premarital therapy in a cross-cultural context, working through sexual and financial conflicts, navigating issues of multi-generational attachment deprivation and treating unresolved trauma and deprivation that underlie through the three versions of insecure attachment: preoccupied, avoidant and disorganized. Evocative clinical teaching sessions will combine with vital teaching points to provide new and valuable skills through incorporating Transformative Couples Therapy® into your current ways of working.
Hands-On Application: The third hour of each session is where the magic happens. You’ll apply what you’ve learned in a live role-play with couples, guided by a skillful and kind Experiential Assistant. These interactive sessions in small breakout groups allow you to progressively integrate new skills in a supportive, safe environment.
Impactful Methods: You'll learn techniques like accessing the Seven Channels of Experience™ and facilitating healing portrayals, empty chair parts work and more methods that help couples build and maintain a stable, deep and lasting felt experience of love. This organizing experience of love comes to guide parenting as well as long term relationship with the primary adult partner.
Earn CE Credits: Twenty-Two Continuing Education Clinical have now been approved by CAMFT with additional CE approval pending.
New and essential topics for 2026 include:
Working with divorced couples who come together to co-parent their child who is struggling from the divorce and the destructive conflict that preceded it
Premarital therapy and long-term therapy with cross-cultural couples
Helping couples work through the serious illness of a child
Treating couples who are struggling with one partner who has an active and persistent narcissistic injury
Long term follow-up treatment sessions with past couples who have received TCT to further their ongoing journey toward earned secure attachment
Who Should Attend?
This series is ideal for clinicians who want to build their capacity to treat couples in a somatically rich, attachment research informed and mindfulness-based method. A background in AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, EFT, are helpful, but not required. If you're passionate about helping couples transform and thrive, this training is for you: Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Licensed Professional Counselors, Psychotherapists, MFT's, Social Workers, Registered Clinical Counselors and Pastoral Counselors
Spaces are limited—don’t miss out on this opportunity to expand your expertise and make a lasting impact in your couples therapy work.
SESSION CALENDAR
Sessions begin February 24th, 2026
Enrollment due date before January 2oth, 2026.
Eight monthly three-hour sessions
Tuesdays 8am-11am PST
$125 per three-hour session, total cost $1000
$950 if paid in advance
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February 24, 2026
March 24, 2026
April 21, 2026
May 19, 2026
June 16, 2026
Summer Break
September 8, 2026
October 6, 2026
November 3, 2026
TRAINING OBJECTIVES
At the end of this program, participants will be able to:
Identify two ways to help establish a secure base in treatment.
Describe two ways to regulate emotional reactivity in both couple members.
Define how to detect the healthiest aspects of each couple member.
Describe two methods for couple members to process emotional experience to completion.
Define why affirmation of the value of the self and the other is important in couple treatment.
Explain how couple members can learn to melt defenses of intellectualization.
Describe how to process warded-off emotional experience.
Describe how to conduct meta-therapeutic processing after couples have reparative experiences.
Define the value of the core effect of surprise.
Define what is important about helping couple members develop skills to show more demonstrations of valuing in daily life.
Define three early signs of dorsal vagal response.
Describe two ways to regulate dorsal vagal response.
Specify how the frequency of incidences of dorsal vagal response can be reduced in treatment.
Distinguish three methods for engaging avoidantly attached patients in treatment.
Explain why a state of mindful awareness helps both couples and therapist in treatment.
Explain the value of increased awareness of bodily states in couple members.
Define what transformance striving is and how to identify it.
Describe the value of sensation in being aware of internal state.
Define two ways a therapist can use their vision to identify tension in couple members.
Define ways that awareness and skillful expression about energetic states can be helpful.
Course DETAILS
This course is designed for beginning and intermediate learners. The course will be conducted in the delivery format of live online learning. Interactions will be by recorded clinical video, role play, and group discussion. Review videos will be sent for all non-clinical portions of each training session.
Special Needs - If you require ADA accommodations please contact our office 30 days or more before the event. We can only ensure accommodations with adequate prior notification.
Cancellation policy: You may end your enrollment at any time and receive a refund for the remaining sessions of the course. Questions or concerns may be communicated by email to davidmarsphd@gmail.com . If you have a need for ADA accommodation, please contact davidmarsphd@gmail.com
David Mars, PhD, the presenter for this course, holds a PhD in Psychology and has taught Transformative Couples Therapy® to couples therapists and psychotherapists since 2008. He is the developer of the method and taught it as a faculty member of the AEDP Institute for eleven years. He is the director of the Transformative Couples Therapy® Institute has been treating couples in private practice for over forty years. Click here for a more complete bio.
There are no conflicts of interest or external commercial support related to this course or any course offered by the Transformative Couples Therapy® Institute.
MEETING Agenda
ALL TIMES ARE IN PACIFIC TIME
8:00-8:10am: Orientation and opening three-minute Channels of Experience meditation.
8:10-8:20am: Check-in and discussion of a few participant’s responses to the meditation.
8:20-9:00am: Didactic presentation and discussion of a slide deck about the TCT method and its application by David Mars, PhD or Lisa Gardner LCSW. Information will include details on how to use the TCT Fidelity Scales to guide clinical application of the method.
9:10-9:50am: Presentation and discussion of captioned clinical video. During the clinical video sharing, the instructor will reinforce examples shown in the didactic portion described above. Moments that highlight the use of the Seven Channels of Experience™ will be emphasized to enhance participants capacity to track bodily indicators of moment-to-moment tracking to enhance the therapist’s and the couple members growing whole-body attunement.
9:50-10:05am: Break
10:05-10:55am: Preparation and transition into Breakout rooms for the Experiential Exercise to apply what you have learned. Participants will choose to become role-play couple members, role-play therapist or witness. With the support of the Experiential Assistant, all participants gain a direct experience of applying the method.
10:55-11am: Regathering, closing discussion.
COURSE COMPLETION REQUIREMENTS:
Participants must complete sessions to be awarded CE. Or as an alternative, CE can be applied for and awarded after each session by prior arrangement via Heisel and Associates. Contact for details.
Cameras on Zoom must be left on, with only brief exceptions. An evaluation must be completed prior to CE being awarded. Attendance will be taken and documented each session. Reading the course materials is a key to full participation. These materials will be sent out before we meet each session. Any questions can be addressed to davidmarsphd@gmail.com or lisagardnerlcsw@gmail.com. To attend this live, interactive course you must have access to a working computer, a room with sufficient privacy to protect the confidentiality of couple members whose clinical work is shown and internet connectivity sufficient to maintain a stable connection to Zoom.
At the end of the whole course, CE from CAMFT can be applied for via this link. This course is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for MFT’s, Social Workers and LPCs. Credits.Education Provider # 103282 maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content.
As an alternative, you can receive CE for each session individually as you go along by using this this link to register with Heisel and Associates. Just establish an account and then you will be ready to go forward as the course proceeds.
Heisel and Associates, Provider Number 1253, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organizations, not individual courses, are approved as ACE providers. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. Heisel and Associates maintains responsibility for this course. ACE provider approval period: 5/3/2023 to 5/3/2026.
Heisel and Associates has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP #6603. Programs that do not quality for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Heisel and Associates is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
This course has been approved by Heisel and Associates, an NAADAC Approved Education Provider, for educational credits. NAADAC Provider #111326, Heisel and Associates is responsible for all aspects of the programs.
Heisel and Associates is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Heisel and Associates maintains responsibility for these programs and their content.
As an alternative to the above, register an account with Heisel and Associates, by going to this link:
https://transformativecouplestherapy.heiselandassoc.com
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “here” to register.