Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT)

Developed by David Mars, Ph.D.

Offering therapist training programs designed to cultivate your capacity to help your couples become more stable, connected and free from replications of trauma-based reactivity. 

TCT Experiential Training Series

This live online course is being offered worldwide by the Center for Transformative Therapy

One free 3-hour introductory session will be offered on Tuesday, October 10th from 8 AM to 11 AM Pacific Time for you to experience this training with an invitation to apply to join the 8-session paid series below.

The first two hours of each session will feature clinical training videos of “unlikely transformations” with couples. You will witness them moving through complex issues on video, combined with teaching in the theory and practice of Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT). As a clinician, I imagine you know the experience of asking yourself: “How can I possibly help this couple to find a loving and stable contrast to how they have been living for years?” Answering this question productively is at the heart of our motivation for this new training series.

The third hour of each training session will focus on applying the skills you just learned into meaningful application with a live role-play couple. Each “couple” will emerge from within each participant group, which takes place in a Zoom breakout room with four members and coaching from a trained TCT Experiential Assistant.

Two TCT Certified therapists, one from Hong Kong and one from the US, join David Mars in teaching the course to show cross-cultural applications of TCT.

Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT) is an affective neuroscience and attachment-based method aimed at treating unresolved relational trauma.

  • This course will broaden your capacity to track and utilize moment-to-moment what you perceive, receive and express through the lens of seven channels of experience (Mars, 2011, 2017).
  • We will develop understanding of how dorsal vagal response plays a part in relational detachment with the resultant reactivity from the partner, who too often feels abandoned without understanding why.
  • Didactic presentations about affective neuroscience will show how the amygdala, orbitofrontal, limbic, insula, and anterior cingulate brain regions influence couple relating.

Approval pending for 22 CE

8 monthly 3-hour sessions 2025; TBA

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Meet the developer of Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT)David Mars Ph.D., MFT

Meet the developer of Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT)David Mars Ph.D., MFT

As a young therapist, Dr. David Mars went into couples therapy looking for help.

Unfortunately, he found that the models offered seemed to make matters worse by unnecessarily drawing out and evoking the vicious cycle of distress. He found that instead of offering help and support, most couples therapy sessions focused on what is wrong in the relationship instead of what is right.

This set into motion decades of dedicating himself to developing a couples treatment model that works to evoke and affirm the self-at-relational-best in each couple member starting in the first session.

TCT cultivates a virtuous spiral of love-based awareness and actions in daily living. With Dr. Mars’ method, therapists guide couples to tell each other what they long for and help them to experience the specific kinds of peace and stability they want on a daily basis.

In the 1980’s he brought forward an innovative treatment process using highly sensitive computerized biofeedback with couples to reveal their unconscious bodily responses. In addition, he has internalized moment-to-moment tracking for decades as an Authentic Movement group leader and practitioner.

David Mars, Ph.D. has presented workshops, courses, webinars, and online supervision worldwide transferring the skills he has learned to other couples therapists. He was a Faculty member of the AEDP Institute for eleven years and is the developer of AEDP for Couples (AEDPfC). All of his offerings of training, supervision, writing and innovation are based at the Center for Transformative Therapy of which he is the director and founder.