Many couples therapists find themselves returning to the same principles, the same interventions, and wondering why they keep hitting the same wall. Something is missing.
Dr. David Schnarch spent decades building something different. The Crucible® Approach is not a collection of techniques. It is a comprehensive framework for understanding human growth, sexual potential, and what it actually takes for people to change in the context of their most intimate relationships. Schnarch believed that relationships are not just where problems happen. They are where people become who they are capable of being. And that the therapist who understands this works at a completely different level.
This work is unlike anything else in the field. It is demanding. It is transformative. And for the couples sitting in front of you, it can be life changing.
Since Dr. Schnarch’s passing in 2020, this is the first training designed to introduce clinicians to the Crucible® Approach: what it is, what it looks like in the room, and why therapists who encounter it rarely want to work any other way.
An international crucible therapy education center training
Introduction to Crucible® Therapy
This is a five-session online training that gives clinicians a working understanding of this approach. Participants will learn what a Crucible therapist sees, how they think, and what they do in the room with a couple who is stuck.
Is this training for you?
Are you frustrated with mainstream models that fall short with your most challenging couples?
Are you brand new to Schnarch and curious what all the fuss is about?
Have you read the books but want to see how the ideas actually translate into clinical practice?
Have you had some exposure to the approach but want to fill in the gaps and build a more solid foundation?
If you answered yes to any of these, you are in the right place.
By the end of this training participants will:
See couples differently.
You will have a framework for understanding what is actually happening in the room, beneath the conflict, the distance, and the desire problems couples bring through your door.
Think like a Crucible therapist.
You will leave with a working vocabulary and a clinical lens that you can begin applying immediately, and that will deepen with every training and consultation that follows.
Know what this work looks like in practice.
Through clinical video and case illustration, you will see seasoned Crucible therapists doing this work, not just talking about it. You will see clearly what sets this approach apart.
Have a resource you will use for years.
The Crucible® Introductory Manual and comprehensive glossary you receive is the first of its kind, drawn from years of direct training with Dr. Schnarch and the colleagues who learned alongside him.
Inside the Training: What You Will Experience
Each session builds on the last, taking you deeper into the approach and closer to thinking like a Crucible therapist. Here is what we will cover.
Day 1: What is Crucible Therapy?
We begin where every good therapist begins, with a framework for seeing. You will be introduced to the Crucible® Approach, the man who created it, and the foundational idea that relationships are not just where problems happen but where people grow. We will explore what it means to do therapy that talks to the best in people, and what it takes to make real contact.
Day 2: What Does Therapy Actually Look Like?
On Day 2 we get into the room. You will see how the Four Points of Balance shape every clinical decision a Crucible therapist makes, understand a collaborative alliance and why it matters, and learn how mind mapping can make process work so much easier and sharper.
Day 3: Seeing What Is Happening in Front of You
The heart of Crucible work is the ability to see clearly: the relationship dynamics, the sexual dynamics, and the moments that matter. We will explore how to map what you are observing, understand fusion and desire discrepancy, and recognize the elicitation window when it opens.
Day 4: How People Grow
Growth in the Crucible® Approach is not comfortable and it is not accidental. This session explores gridlock, the growth versus comfort cycle, and what it means to hold the heat when clients want to run from it. Drawing on Schnarch’s framework of waking up and swimming toward the surface, we examine what it actually looks like when people begin to change.
Day 5: The Cutting Edge of Crucible® Therapy
Schnarch spent his final years pushing the approach into new territory. Crucible® Neurobiological Therapy brings interpersonal neurobiology into the heart of the clinical model. This session introduces you to his most recent and most exciting contributions to the field.
The Crucible® Introductory Manual and Glossary
Dr. Schnarch was not a man who handed you a manual. He taught through pressure, through clinical demonstration, through the heat of the room. What his students learned, they learned by being in it with him.
This manual represents the first attempt to bring that body of teaching together in one place: the concepts, the language, the framework, organized and accessible for clinicians who are stepping into this work for the first time. It includes live clinical vignettes and dialogue written in right brain language, the kind that lands in the body not just the mind.
The comprehensive glossary gives you the vocabulary you need to continue learning, seek supervision, and engage more deeply in further Crucible training. It is a living document, born out of years of direct study with Dr. Schnarch and the colleagues who trained alongside him.
This training is a beginning, not an endpoint. The Crucible® Approach requires sustained growth, and there are clear pathways to continue developing your skills.
1. Join a Consultation Group
Apply what you are learning to your actual cases with guidance from experienced Crucible therapists. ICTEC offers consultation groups for clinicians at various levels of experience. A consultation group is one of the most effective ways to develop your Crucible thinking between formal trainings.
2. Crucible® Fundamentals
Take your foundation deeper with Lacy Stump’s Crucible Fundamentals training, offered through ICTEC in the spring. Building on the vocabulary and framework you develop here, this training moves you further into the clinical application of the approach.
3. Person of the Therapist Retreat
Barbara Fairfield’s Person of the Therapist workshop offers an experiential deep dive into the differentiation challenges that Crucible therapists face in their own work. It is widely regarded as some of the most personally and professionally significant training available through ICTEC.
4. Attend a Clinical Practicum
ICTEC offers new trainings and workshops annually across a range of clinical topics and experience levels. Visit the ICTEC Trainings and Workshops page to see what is coming.
“The therapist is not the teacher. Life is the teacher. Life is much more elegant than most of us are willing to accept. Getting people to the point that they are strong enough to embrace life on its own terms is what the Crucible is all about.”
Dr. David Schnarch, from a live professional training presentatioN
Training Details
Dates:
Wed., Sept. 2, 9, 23, 30 & Oct, 7, 2026
Time
3:30 to 6:30 PM Central Time
Format
Online Live via Zoom
Sessions
5 sessions, 3 hours each (15 hours total)
ce credits
Pending: AASECT and NBCC
instructor
Amy Fuller, PhD, LMFT-S, LPC-S, CST-S
Tuition
We want this training to be accessible. Tuition is tiered by licensure level.
Participants are expected to have read both Intimacy and Desire and Living at the Bottom of the Ocean prior to attending.
Payment is made at the time of registration. Alternative payment may be made via Zelle to amy@amyfullerphd.com or by check to: 4545 Bissonnet #289, Bellaire, TX 77401.
Dr. Fuller trained in the Crucible® Approach with Dr. David Schnarch from 2012 until his passing in 2020, with Dr. Ruth Morehouse from 2016 to 2024, and has participated in group consultation with Barbara Fairfield and Grace Whitman since 2017.
The Crucible Approach is central to her clinical practice, her teaching, and her supervision of therapists and sex therapy candidates. She is committed to furthering the approach and training the next generation of Crucible therapists.
Dr. Fuller earned her Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from Abilene Christian University in 1998 and her PhD in MFT from St. Mary’s University in 2006. Dr. Fuller practices in Houston specializing in couples, trauma, and sex therapy (amyfullerphd.com). She is the founder of Fuller Life Family Therapy Institute, established in 2012, a nonprofit organization providing intensive training for therapists and accessible therapy to underserved communities across Houston (fullerlifefamilytherapy.org). Since 2018, she has served as the Sexuality Specialization Director in the doctoral program in Professional Counseling at Kairos University, which prepares students for AASECT certification as Certified Sex Therapists.
She is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Supervisor, Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor, and a Certified Sex Therapist and Approved Supervisor through the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), and an AAMFT Approved Supervisor.
What is the Crucible® Approach?
Developed by Dr. David Schnarch, the Crucible® Approach is unlike any other model in the field. Here is what sets it apart.
The Crucible: A Different Way of Seeing
Marriage is a people-growing machine, not a problem to be solved.
Anxiety tolerance, not anxiety reduction. Treatment occurs at a higher level of intensity by design.
Presenting concerns are not pathology.
A brain to brain therapy. The goal is to create genuine moments of meeting that facilitate change and raise functioning.
The person of the therapist is critical to the model.
Differentiation, not attachment, is the goal.
Sex is a vehicle for intimacy and human growth, not just a behavior to be treated.
Can treat personalities that fail in other approaches.
Differentiation: The Core Concept
The ability to hold onto yourself while staying meaningfully connected to someone who matters deeply to you.
The more important the partner, the higher the level of differentiation required.
Differentiation is not individuation. It is about becoming your best self in close proximity to another person.
Most relationships function on other-validated intimacy. The Crucible® Approach works toward self-validated intimacy.
Fusion is emotional dependence where two people borrow functioning from each other and avoid what needs to be addressed.
The Four Points of Balance
The operational definition of differentiation. Where attachment models aim for safety, Crucible therapy aims for human development.
Solid Flexible Self: knowing who you are even under pressure to conform.
Quiet Mind and Calm Heart: the ability to self-soothe and contain your own reactivity.
Grounded Responding: proportionate responses rather than reacting to your partner’s reactivity.
Meaningful Endurance: the willingness to tolerate discomfort for growth.
Everything a Crucible therapist does is designed to increase clients 4 points of balance.
A Collaborative Approach to Human Development
A collaborative alliance begins with self-confrontation.
In Crucible Therapy, clients focus on their own behavior and impact rather than the other person’s.
The collaborative alliance is not about feeling supported. It is a shared commitment to growth that sometimes requires the therapist to say what no one wants to hear.
Many people have only experienced collusive, combative, or no alliance at all.
The therapist must restore collaboration without losing intensity or becoming combative.
Mind Mapping: A way to Work with Process
The brain’s hardwired ability to track what another person thinks, feels, wants, and intends. Mind Mapping is a survival function reveals desire and deception.
Traumatic mind mapping occurs when reading another person’s mind is itself traumatic.
Antisocial empathy occurs when mind mapping ability is used not to connect but to harm. People with antisocial empathy know exactly where another person is vulnerable and use that knowledge deliberately. It is far more common than most therapists are trained to recognize.
Normal marital sadism is very common and almost never addressed in conventional couples therapy.
Regressions: The Mariana Trench Model
A sudden drop in functioning when anxiety exceeds a person’s window of tolerance. It can look like yelling, blaming, crying, confusion, numbing, or many other presentations.
Steady-state regressions are long-term and often invisible to the person living inside them.
Reactive regressions are a sign of progress. When you begin to wake up, you start feeling things that are hard. Getting better can make things harder before they get easier.
Raising functioning is a central goal. Higher functioning means greater capacity for intimacy, integrity, connection with one’s self and genuine care for others.
What a Crucible Therapist Does
A Crucible therapist:
Moves toward what is happening, makes it overt, and holds the heat collaboratively from the best in them.
Helps clients see there is no way around their two-choice dilemmas, only through them.
Speaks to the integrity of the client, not their fears and anxieties.
Attends to their own development. A therapist cannot bring clients to a higher level of differentiation than they have personally reached.
Uses gridlock as one of the most powerful levers for growth available in couples therapy rather than trying to resolve or reduce it.
Sex and Desire
Sexual desire problems are among the most common and most misunderstood reasons couples seek therapy.
Schnarch called them normal. They are also the very ground on which growth becomes possible.
Sexual potential increases with age and development. The best sex of your life is not behind you.
Sex is one of the most honest windows into the relationship and the person. What happens in bed tells you everything about where people are developmentally.
The high-desire and low-desire dynamic is not about who wants sex more. It is about who controls the relationship, and knowing this is where the clinical work begins.
How People Grow
Most people come to therapy wanting relief from the pressure. The Crucible® Approach uses that pressure to promote a more solid self.
Survival mechanisms developed in childhood show up in adult relationships as regressions, avoidance, and reactivity. What protected us then limits us now.
Most people avoid what is challenging, which leads to boredom, detachment, and unresolved issues. Growth requires risk and is always made unilaterally.
Schnarch describes a common human pattern of living asleep. The Crucible® Approach is designed to wake people up and help them stay that way.
People marry at the same level of differentiation. Growth in one partner pressures the other to rise or resist.
