San Diego's Core Training in ISTDP

The Format: Four 3-day modules per year, over 3 years 

• Didactic teaching, clinical video, PowerPoints, required readings, and theory integration
• Application: Group supervision using your own session videos and watching clinical video
• Practice: Role plays to enhance clinical thinking, counter-transference, and integration
• Group process time, reflection, and learning integration

 Each training block will deepen your understanding in:

1. The Metapsychology, Theory, and Practice of ISTDP
2. Applying the Central Dynamic Sequence with the Standard Format of ISTDP
3. Applying the Graded Format of ISTDP for Capacity Building Efforts as needed

You will learn to see through the lens of ISTDP’s rich metapsychology, developing the capacity to:

• Accurately psychodiagnose by assessing a patient’s capacity
• Understanding the Central Dynamic Sequence
• Apply inquiry, pressure, bracing, recapping, gentle challenge, challenge, and head-on-collision interventions grounded in accurate psychodiagnosis and capacity building
• Form and strengthen the Conscious Therapeutic Alliance
• Recognize the patient’s core conflicts and the ways these are enacted in the transference
• Identify defenses and understand their emotional and relational costs
• Work with defenses as they shift from syntonic to dystonic
• Assess and track unconscious anxiety pathways
• Monitoring unconscious anxiety thresholds when on, near, or over threshold, and how and when to use bracing and recapping interventions to both build capacity and work at the patient’s highest capacities using the graded format
• Recognize transference enactments and how to identify them
• Recognize and skillfully follow the rise of complex transference feelings
• Listening and following the Unconscious Therapeutic Alliance — the innate healing force within each patient — to facilitate breakthroughs into the unconscious
• Support the patient with the working-through process, leading to integration, a more open and fluid consciousness, and lasting change.

In this approach, we honor both the technical foundation of ISTDP and the heart-centered, relational presence needed to awaken the healing force within each person. The training is not only about skill acquisition, but also about developing therapeutic presence, courage, flexibility, sensitivity, attunement, and precision. In doing so, we will help you to invite patients to experience the deepest levels of truth, and to transform their lives through in-depth character change.