Therapy starts with the therapist!
Join us for a weekend of self care at our annual conference on November 8th and 9th at Water’s Edge Resort and Spa. This year’s topic is you! The keynote and all workshops will surround topics of self care, self of the therapist, and professional growth. We want to celebrate you and all your offerings to the mental health field. Don’t miss your chance to earn up to 12 CEUs, including ethics, cultural competency, and veteran credits.
Date: November 8th and 9th
Location: Water’s Edge Resort and Spa, Westbrook, CT
Topic: Self as a therapist
Friday, November 8th registration opens at 11:30 am followed by workshops and networking events until 7pm.
Saturday, November 9th registration opens at 8:00 am followed by keynote speaker and workshops until 6pm.
Friday Schedule
Registration begins at 11:30 and will be followed by a welcome by the CTAMFT Board
12:30-2:30
Helping the Helper, with Ebony Dunigan, MFT
This workshop focuses on those in the helping profession and is designed to assist the helper in finding peace during everyday normal interactions. This workshop stresses the idea that self-care is a daily, intentional action and helps attendees understand some of the unknown ways they are already using self-care. It also helps attendees learn more about burnout and how to recognize when they are experiencing the early stages of burnout. In addition, the workshop focuses on various area of coping in the area of Self as the Therapist.
Self as the Therapist Through an Adoption Lens, with Moses Farrow, LMFT
This workshop allows participants the opportunity to engage in a conversation-style presentation that highlights problematic areas commonly experienced with adoption. Aimed to help participants explore their own beliefs, perspectives, biases, opinions, and judgments. Using adoption as a springboard to having an exploratory discussion that moves from self-awareness to applying in sessions with clients.
Moral Injury, with Georjean Lubus, MS, LPC, LADC
This workshop addresses the complex soul wound that many of our veterans suffer. This workshop focuses on the effects that moral injury has on veterans. It will address the symptoms of PTSD and Moral Injury. Additionally, the workshop will explore how PTSD and Moral Injury they are different and how they overlap. Treatment considerations will explore how veterans will respond to treatment and how clinicians will respond to veterans with moral injury. The importance of working through secondary trauma will be explored.
3:00-5:00
How to Foster Safe Spaces of Healing for Vicarious Trauma Amongst Therapists, with Dani Moye, Ph.D., LMFT
In the recent era of systemic discourse, it has become imperative that we honor the truths of one another as therapists. By living in the same world as those who we serve, sometimes we too are exposed to painful realities. Even though we are therapists, supervisors, and interns, we still play a part in creating safe spaces of healing for ourselves. This workshop will help therapists understand the impact of vicarious trauma on their role, while providing them with ways to refuel and maintain self-preservation.
Mastering the Efficacious and Effective Use of Self as an Ethical Therapist, with Jeffrey White, Ph.D., LMFT
It has long been understood that resolving personal issues frees a therapist to make a richer use of self. Recently much of the discussion regarding self of the therapist attends more emphatically to how the therapist brings the self to the therapeutic process, particularly to the existential reality of specific therapeutic encounter. Participants will explore how self-of-therapist issues manifest themselves in their interactions with others and how these issues can impact their ethical therapeutic work within clinical settings.
An Introduction to Reiki & Energy Healing Practices
Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that promotes healing based on the premise that there is a Universal Life Energy in all living things. It is a simple and natural method of spiritual healing/self-improvement. In this introductory workshop we will review and experience the history, basics and benefits of Reiki and energy healing practices.* following this workshop there are limited slots for a Reiki 1 Certification course (additional fees apply)
Following Friday’s workshops, please join us for a Networking Event with drinks and snacks!
Saturday Schedule
Registration begins at 8:00
8:30-9:30
Office Yoga and Self-Care, with Kathleen Fisher, BS, Energy Medicine Practitioner
As staff members become the change they desire to see, they translate into powerful and inspirational role models. In this class, participants will practice yoga poses, including chair yoga, deep breathing exercises and mindfulness meditation to destress and restore themselves. When participants model and share these benefits with their clients, they can have a lasting positive effect. The benefits of chair yoga and self-care at work will also be discussed. No mats are necessary. Wear comfortable clothing.
10:00
Welcome by the CTAMFT Board and Keynote Speaker – Kristina Hallett, Ph.D. - The Power of Connection: How Self-Aware Leaders Succeed in an Ever-Changing World
Lunch (provided)
1:30-3:30
A Beginner's Guide to Marketing your Private Practice, with Moses Farrow, LMFT
Broken into two parts, the first part is a presentation-style on the steps from developing the mindset to establishing your marketing plan. The second is a structured conversation-style Q&A with questions previously submitted either on the day of or through social media leading up to the conference. Demonstrations and walkthroughs of website platforms, social media platforms, Google Ads may be offered.
Destress Lessons for Wellness Teachers, with Kathleen Fisher, BS Energy Medicine Practitioner
Healthcare providers who use destress tools such as mindfulness, yoga, creative play, guided imagery, and meditation to center, balance, and rejuvenate are Wellness-educatied. In addition to being less stressed and more effective, they present themselves to clients as refreshed, alert, confident, receptive, and patient. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn the 5 core competecies of wellness education. Come and learn integrated, self-care techniques to maintain positive energy flow, strength concentration, restore emotional stability, improve self confidence and promote empathy. The destress tools demonstrated in this workshop cane be shared with clients in group settings or individual sessions. No mats necessary. Wear comfortable clothing.
Self of THIS Therapist: Unblending and 'Reclaiming My Time'(with gratitude to Congresswoman Maxine Waters for the phrase “Reclaiming My Time”), with Lauren Pederson, LMFT
This workshop is interactive and experiential. Lauren will share her own experinces of vicarious trauma, workplace trauma, career success, life imbalance and the evolution of her self as therapist, mentor, professor, boss and business owner. Participants will learn how to identify and unblend thier own parts that get triggered in response to work related scenarios to then understand how to better care for thier own Self. Conversations and questions are welcomed, as Lauren has come to believe that interactive and experiential sessions are the most rewarding and impactful.
4:00-6:00
#undeniabletruth: A Self-Leadership Approach, with Erica Cuni, LMFT
Between 2014 to 2015, Erica experienced the darkest period of her life. She was in a serious car accident, a long-term romantic relationship ended, and she was fired from her job- to name just a few events. The #undeniabletruth workshop is based on her comeback from burnout and stress to her true Self. Through her story, hands on exercises, and knowledge from her career as a therapist, Reiki Practioner, and Graduate Professor, she shows how to start living in a more mindful, conscious, and intentional way so that you can become the best version of you in 12 simple steps. This isn’t therapy where we analyze the events of the past. This is a way of life from this point forward.
Substance Abuse | Boundaries, Strategies, and Empowering the Therapist, with Ashley Nadeau, LMFT
Substance abuse clients face life and death each day in active addiction. This heightens the urgency for intervention, therefore increasing the intensity of the therapeutic relationship. Given the epidemic in our country, the numbers of substance abuse clients continue to rise and these clients are arriving in our offices albeit a family member or the client themselves. As Marriage and Family Therapists, it is important that we are prepared from the onset of therapy through termination with the best strategies, interventions, family and community resources, and boundaries to ensure we are helping the client and remaining aware and considerate of our own self-care. In this course you will learn: Strategies for assessing, identifying, and exploring substance abuse history in the initial contact and joining phase, when and how to determine the appropriateness of the level of care, how to utilize the supports systems around the client in a positive manner to promote safety and boundaries, what resources we have to call upon and how to address this with the client, when and how we navigate our own responses to this intense subject matter
Art as Self-care For Those in Helping Professions, with Amanda Lupfer, LPCA
Tired? Stressed? Feeling close to burnout? Come experience how art therapy can relieve stress and help process the complex emotions experienced when being a therapist! This workshop is an introduction to Art Therapy. It will include information about the risk assessment for burnout, the benefits of using art as a tool for self-care, and teaching/engagement in the art therapy technique of Process Painting. No artistic skills necessary. Leave with a new-found calm and a unique piece of art!