We now know that when we work with traumatized clients to create synchronicity between their body and mind, we’re establishing a clear path for emotional wellness. Embodiment practices not only enhance our clinical toolkit but can help stabilize these clients, create self-awareness, and increase peace of mind. In this experiential workshop, you’ll learn several concrete interventions to apply to trauma stabilization work that draw from yogic, Buddhist, and somatic approaches. These techniques will support your clients in stabilizing and increasing their access to the window of tolerance for trauma healing. You’ll discover:

• What the latest research tells us about integrating embodiment practices into trauma therapy
• How to help clients best apply breathwork and simple yoga postures to decrease hyperarousal and create an immediate sense of calm
• Ways to incorporate Metta meditation as a tool for social engagement and increased heart rate coherence

Chances are you’ve come across the type of client who constantly puts others first out of guilt and loyalty, holding themselves back from their own self-development. Would it surprise you to learn that many of these clients grew up with emotionally immature parents? These parents often acted like children themselves in terms of their coping styles, affective instability, and disregard for other people’s rights and feelings. Many times, this leaves their children feeling anxious and powerless—even into adulthood. You’ll discover:  

• Common psychological impacts on children of emotionally immature (EI) parents 
• How to spot emotional coercion and pressures of moral obligation 
• How EI parents set up their children for relationship problems in adulthood 
• Best therapeutic techniques to repurpose anxiety and strengthen self-confidence 

Not everyone has had the opportunity to explore their thoughts and feelings about sex in a safe environment. Often, our understanding of our own sexuality and others operate beneath conscious awareness. In this workshop, you'll have a chance to get a glimpse into your sexual blueprint and find its relevance in both your personal and professional lives. Insights gained from this introductory Sexuality Attitude Reassessment (SAR) training can profoundly influence your professional practice by enhancing client outcomes, improving communication skills, and fostering inclusivity in addressing sexuality-related issues. Together you’ll discover how to:

• Create a supportive environment to openly discuss sensitive topics about sexuality for clients
• Raise awareness, challenge biases, and foster your understanding of diverse sexual behaviors and identities
• Cover critical points about the way we communicate about psychosexual issues and understand how our choice of words can influence therapeutic outcomes
• Unpack how cultural backgrounds and societal norms shape sexual attitudes.

It’s no surprise to anyone in our line of work: therapy is a demanding business. Recent studies show that nearly 40 percent of therapists say their workload has increased since the pandemic, and nearly half of therapists say they’re feeling burned out. But burnout doesn’t just affect us: it also affects those we help. In this workshop, you’ll learn perhaps the most vital ingredient in preventing burnout: establishing—and maintaining—proper personal and professional boundaries. You’ll learn how this optimizes your work and outcomes with clients as well as ways to implement these boundaries in multiple spheres: in creating your workload, in the moment with clients, and in establishing a healthy work-life balance. You’ll walk away with personalized, practical tools and strategies for increasing your professional longevity and maintaining overall well-being. You’ll learn how to:

• Manage feelings of activation or overwhelm when it arises in the middle of a session
• Recognize the early signs of professional burnout and boundary violations
• Use scripts for setting and enforcing professional boundaries with your clients
• Unlearn people-pleasing beliefs that keep you locked in “fix-it mode,” no matter the personal cost

Listening is built into our nervous systems, based on a biological imperative to socially engage with others. Luckily, there’s a new emphasis in our field on therapeutic applications in music and sound that have the potential to support cli​e​nts with complex psychophysiological conditions. In this workshop, you’ll learn to support and help regulate traumatized clients through sound. You’ll discover: 

• The most effective ways to integrate music-based interventions into your practice  
• How music impacts the brain and body—and can help your clients with a range of clinical issues 
• Tools and strategies to support regulation in your clients  

How many of your couples clients have ended up feeling like therapy isn't helping them? They go in week after week and find themselves frustrated that the skills they learn in session aren’t translating in their real lives. They know they shouldn’t yell and that it’s better to show affection and talk about challenges than it is to withdraw. Yet, at the end of a long day, they snap at each other or stumble down to the basement to avoid interaction, anyway. How can we help them—and help ourselves not feel like ineffective couples therapists? Before we teach them techniques, we need to address their stress. Our clients are suffering because there’s too much stress spillover into their relationships and they are too depleted to cope with it effectively. In this workshop, we’ll talk about how to identify it and what responding to stress can do to change the lives of your couples (and to make working with them feel less overwhelming). You'll discover:

• How to assess and address the stress spillover couples are experiencing physiologically, behaviorally, and psychologically
• How to use Dyadic Coping to help couples learn to cope with stress as a unit
• Tools that therapists can use in session to reduce physiological overwhelm and help each partner come back to a “safe and social” state
• A novel three-part system to help clients manage stress in their lives: shedding, preventing, and adapting

Treating trauma survivors can often feel like high-stakes work. Fortunately, the science behind attachment theory offers a clear roadmap for navigating it. In this workshop, using real-life case examples and other stories from the therapist’s chair, you’ll learn how to harness the power of emotion and the wisdom of attachment science, culminating in a simple, five-step intervention that can transform trauma into growth and resilience. You’ll leave this workshop with a proven, emotion-focused method for improving your clinical outcomes for treating traumatic stress and more. You’ll also learn:

• How EFIT (Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) offers an attachment-science-based lens that improves our understanding of how trauma recovery happens
• An easy-to-follow, five-part roadmap to guide your client through each step of their healing journey
• How to reframe client symptoms using the attachment-based language of emotion
• How EFIT helps clients create new cognitive narratives—and anchors those narratives using an emotion-focused approach

Second-generation immigrants often struggle to balance their heritage with the dominant culture in which they live. They may be pulled toward Western individualism, for example, while their families’ collectivist ideals live on in their homes. This kind of bicultural straddling can result in emotional dysregulation, physiological complaints, and confusion in differentiation of self.  Unfortunately, when therapists lacking in cultural competence misinterpret certain cultural practices and family dynamics as repressive, or even pathological, it can lead to greater harm for the client. In this workshop, we’ll explore the common experiences of second-generation clients, and discuss how therapists can best support them with tools and strategies that bolster their identity development. You’ll discover:

• How to address second-generation immigrants’ specific challenges and unhealthily coping mechanisms
• How to apply a trauma-informed lens while navigating complex cultural landscapes in the therapy room
• Ways to approach gendered expectations and cultural norms around emotional expression
• How to identify and challenge biases around second-generation and bicultural clients

There’s no escaping the dire reports about the high rates of anxiety and depression in teens and young adults. Regardless of what you attribute the cause to—the pandemic, social media, parenting, or the state of the world in general—there’s plenty to worry about. We therapists surely want to step in, but is what we’re doing really working? Are our methods and common ways of treating depression and anxiety in young people helping, or are we inadvertently reinforcing the problem? In this workshop, we’ll challenge current trends around treating anxiety, and explore some surprising approaches for bolstering young adults’ mental health. You’ll discover how to develop clear treatment goals for young adults and offer effective therapy that involves actionable steps, psychoeducation, and building connection. You’ll also learn how to:

• Avoid common pitfalls that can make anxiety and depression worse for kids and young adults
• Use social media to help develop critical thinking in teens around mental health
• Interrupt commonly overlapping patterns of anxiety and depression in clients
• Shift harmful mental health paradigms using research, curiosity, and homework

How many of your couples clients have ended up feeling like therapy isn't helping them? They go in week after week and find themselves frustrated that the skills they learn in session aren’t translating in their real lives. They know they shouldn’t yell and that it’s better to show affection and talk about challenges than it is to withdraw. Yet, at the end of a long day, they snap at each other or stumble down to the basement to avoid interaction, anyway. How can we help them—and help ourselves not feel like ineffective couples therapists? Before we teach them techniques, we need to address their stress. Our clients are suffering because there’s too much stress spillover into their relationships and they are too depleted to cope with it effectively. In this workshop, we’ll talk about how to identify it and what responding to stress can do to change the lives of your couples (and to make working with them feel less overwhelming). You'll discover:

• How to assess and address the stress spillover couples are experiencing physiologically, behaviorally, and psychologically
• How to use Dyadic Coping to help couples learn to cope with stress as a unit
• Tools that therapists can use in session to reduce physiological overwhelm and help each partner come back to a “safe and social” state
• A novel three-part system to help clients manage stress in their lives: shedding, preventing, and adapting

Though sex seems to be everywhere in modern life, keeping the spark alive in our romantic relationships remains a challenge and runs us up against a lot of tropes and misconceptions. When working with clients who present with desire issues, therapists often find themselves stepping into a powerful matrix of identities, attitudes, and assumptions. Not only must they navigate the complex landscape of a clients’ relationships with their bodies, beliefs, and intimate partners, but with desire itself. In this workshop, you’ll be invited to reframe problems of desire not as a dysfunction to be fixed, but as opportunities for deeper connection and embodiment. We'll explore innovative approaches to help clients tune into their bodies and rediscover pleasure amidst life's demands, moving beyond the pressure of sexual performance to a more holistic understanding of eroticism and desire. You’ll learn:

• How to put clients at ease when discussing topics related to sex and desire
• Strategies to help clients explore their true desires and communicate them effectively
• Interventions to address libido and desire discrepancies in therapy
• Approaches that help clients step into desire as a path to embodiment and connection

The stories people tell themselves—and their therapists—are powerful. They can keep clients stuck, but they can also galvanize change. Although our culture often reinforces stories of personal deficit, rather than resilience and resourcefulness, narrative therapy effectively helps clients reauthor their stories within a broader context, revealing deeper truths about their lives and identities. In this workshop, you’ll explore a range of practical tools for engaging your clients in this work, including how to help them creatively remember empowering storylines after they leave a session. You’ll discover how to help clients:

• Re-evaluate, reimagine, and revise negative identity conclusions.
• Remember critical conversations that can shift their view of themselves and their relationships
• Engage with evocative Narrative Therapy questions that help contextualize their problems in a new, enlivening way
• Practice therapeutic letter writing to help alter disempowering, limiting narratives