Like the other IEDTA International Conferences, we have a gala dinner on Friday night. So we hope you can join us on Friday, September 27th.
More details will be posted here as they become available.
There is an additional $100 fee for the dinner.
Performances
In addition to good food and great company, we are excited to be able to include two brief presentations that creatively demonstrate the power of psychotherapy, connection, and healing.
- Child psychologist and storyteller Susan Hurwit
- Poet Sunita Merriman
Susan Hurwit
Susan Hurwit is a child and adult psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts. Her specialties include play therapy with young children, parent guidance/attachment work, female adolescent development, and AEDP-informed adult psychotherapy. A graduate of Brown University and Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology/William James College, she continues to love (and be humbled by) her work of 30 years.
Her story, The Space between Human Beings, has moved audiences at Story Slams in the Boston area. She created the story as a response to people’s curiosity about what happens in play therapy. Dr. Hurwit is fascinated by the hidden, and often mysterious, relational strengths that atypical children (and lonely adults) sometimes bring to therapy. She is interested in the ways that attention and connection can unexpectedly transform people’s lives.
Sunita Merriman
Sunita Merriman is a graduate of New York University College of Dentistry and the founder of the New Jersey Dental Sleep Medicine Center in Westfield, New Jersey. For the past 25 years, she has been dedicated to treating her patients with the understanding that the mind, body and soul are connected.
As she embarked on a deeply personal journey to unmask, understand and defeat the darkness that was the legacy of developmental trauma, she wrote a collection of poems that translated the language and spirit of the unconscious. Stripping—My Fight to Find Me is her first published book.
Sunita is dedicated to bringing attention to the importance of attachment and mental health as the fundamental pillars of our existence and to sharing and promoting her belief in the infinite potential of the human spirit.
Davanloo’s ISTDP was an intense, scientific and spiritual experience for me. And a creative awakening for me as well. But ultimately, it is love that is the currency of healing.
The process of Davanloo’s ISTDP transformed my experience of myself and of the world. It also reconnected me to the creative process of writing and expressing myself. The poetry came about as my unconscious was activated and many poems came into existence way before I had accessed those experiences and parts of my life’s narrative in my therapy sessions.
My poems give a raw and honest account of how dark and lonely the world of attachment and transgenerational trauma is. And how resistant depression, anxiety and our defenses can be to our desire to get better. My work takes you through the fight that I had to fight to be free and whole . But there is success at the end. And that is why I share my poems. So others can find hope in my story. And seek treatment.–Sunita Merriman
By being open about my struggles, it is my goal to encourage others who may be suffering in silence due to the shame and stigma attached to mental illness to come forward and seek the care they deserve and are entitled to. And lastly, it is my hope that those who do not suffer from mental illness will read my book and get a better understanding of the pain and suffering of those who do. In that understanding lies compassion.”