It’s Complicated: Navigating Infidelity and Consensual Nonmonogamy in Couple Therapy

It’s Complicated:

Navigating Infidelity and Consensual Nonmonogamy in Couple Therapy

with Jean Malpas, LMHC-D, LMFT-D and Michele Scheinkman, LCSW

Friday, February 28th, 2025 3:00pm-7:00pm at ICP

Approved for 4 CE Credits!

All couples navigate a delicate balance between freedom and loyalty in their relationships. Decisions about sexual fidelity and loyalty, whether explicit or implicit, are shaped by each partner’s temperament, vulnerabilities, identities, family legacies, cultural norms and, sometimes, by fractures that arise in the primary relationship. Impasses often evolve in these situations. This workshop integrates Michele Scheinkman’s approach to infidelity, the Vulnerability Cycle, and Jean Malpas’ integrative framework on gender and sexual complexity to provide therapists with effective tools for addressing these challenges. Participants will explore key conceptual dimensions and interventions designed to help couples move beyond reactivity toward mutual understanding, negotiation and deeper connection. Through theoretical presentations, video demonstrations, and group discussions, clinicians will gain:

• A non-moralistic understanding of impasses related to monogamy and non-monogamy;
• Greater sensitivity to intersectional factors, including intrapersonal dynamics, multigenerational legacies and cultural influences;
• Practical skills to interrupt destructive interactional cycles and work compassionately with both partners to promote repair and agreement.

The workshop will start by presenting Michele Scheinkman’s Vulnerability Cycle and Multi-Level Approach as well as conceptual and clinical approaches to gender diversity and consensual nonmonogamy in couple therapy. It will review the tenets of intersectional integrative couple therapy, including the understanding of individual and couple’s dilemmas through the lenses of familial, contextual and cultural experiences of self, relationship, belonging and inclusion. A couple of case vignettes will be presented through hybrid case summary and videos, emphasizing effectively dealing with affairs, desire inside and outside the relationships, as well as exploration of non-monogamous arrangements. The clinical material will be used to demonstrate the therapeutic frameworks as well as specific couple therapy skills, including tracking a vulnerability cycle, identifying intrapsychic conflicts and motivations as well as the impact of sociocultural dynamics on the couple’s impasse and dilemmas.

About Presenters: 

Jean Malpas, LMHC-D, LMFT-D, is a queer-identified psychotherapist and trainer in private practice in New York City. He founded of the Gender & Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family and co-founded the Couples & Intimacy Project with Peggy Papp and Michele Scheinkman. Jean has presented nationally and internationally on topics of gender, sexuality, couples and nonmonogamy for the past 20 years. His work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and nonbinary individuals, couples, and families has been featured in numerous books, journals and media appearances, including the TEDx Talk “The Gift of Gender Authenticity.” Jean’s work has been recognized by the Stonewall Community Foundation 2016 Visionary Award and the American Family Therapy Academy Social Justice 2018 Award.

Michele Scheinkman, L.C.S.W., is a faculty member at the Ackerman Institute for the Family where she founded the Couples & Intimacy Project with Peggy Papp and Jean Malpas. She is a private practitioner in Manhattan where she offers individual, couple, and family therapy in English and Portuguese. Michele has taught couples and family therapy for over 40 years in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. During her years in Chicago she was Director of Couples Therapy Training at the Chicago Center for Family Health and a faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Michele has written extensively about couple therapy on topics of impasses, infidelity, intimacy, jealousy and sexuality. Her work has been recognized by the American Family Therapy Academy with the Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy Award in 2018.

For any questions, including those about accessibility or to request accommodations, please contact Daniella Ortiz at facts@icpnyc.org.

An important note about CEUs: ICP is an approved provider of continuing education credits for social workers, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and psychoanalysts through the New York Department of Education. If your license is from a different state, please contact your state’s licensing board to find out if they will accept CE credits from New York State. If your license is from another state, please enter your license number with your state in parenthesis, ie 54321 (CA).