Friday

Workshops 9:15 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.

Teaching While Targeted: Lessons from a Duoethnographic Exploration

Mary Nedela, LMFT

Ken Shell, Ph.D., LPC, CAADC

This session explores a duoethnographic examination of counselor educators’ experiences teaching multicultural therapy and gender in a challenging sociopolitical climate. Grounded in Social Safety Theory, presenters analyze how threats to identity and belonging shape teaching, supervision, and relational dynamics. Participants will gain practical strategies to foster socially safe, culturally responsive learning environments.

Effects of Social Media Narratives on Family Systems

Kiara Cervantes, MS, AMFT

This workshop will examine how social media mental health narratives shape family systems, including risks of misinformation, polarization, and misapplied clinical language. The session will provide systemic, ethically grounded strategies for responding to client self-diagnosis and narrative-based labeling across couples, co-parenting relationships, and child-focused interventions.

Breaking Barriers, Building Access: Licensure Portability Advocacy

Patricia Barton

Amanda Darnley

Jessica Seelinger

This session provides an inside look at the Access MFTs portability effort through the voices of MFT advocates and staff directly engaged in the process. Through a combination of guided narrative and recorded reflections, participants will gain a clearer understanding of how portability policies are developed, the progress made to date, and what lies ahead. 

In addition to highlighting the initiative itself, the session will explore how core MFT competencies—such as relationship-building, systemic thinking, and reframing—play a critical role in effective advocacy. Presenters will demonstrate how these skills translate beyond the therapy room into legislative and regulatory spaces, empowering MFTs to influence change at multiple levels.

Beyond Self-Care: Fixing Workplace Systems to End Burnout

Tai Mendenhall, PhD, LMFT

Conventional (old) wisdom regarding the prevention and mitigation of burnout and compassion fatigue centers on individual providers’ engagement in self-care, only. In this workshop, the presenter will describe multi-systemic frames that integrate individual responsibility with team-based efforts and responsive workplace structures, paired with research showing how the purposeful combination and coordination of these frames is more effective than any one solution.

Paths to Permanency: Family Therapy for Youth in Foster Care

Ashley Landers, PhD, LMFT

Aimee Miley, M.S., MFT

An unfortunate number of children experience maltreatment and foster care each year. If untreated, child maltreatment and out-of-home placement in foster care can lead to significant distress and psychological difficulties. Often the intergenerational nature of child maltreatment and foster care placement poses significant problems for not only children and their families, but also for their future relationships and future parenting. Implications for family therapists working with maltreated youth in foster care and their families will be explored. Clinical experience, current research, and the application of family therapy models can offer guidance to C/MFTs to better serve maltreated youth and their families.

Workshops 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.

Making Intentional Telehealth Choices After the Pandemic

Jacob Priest, PhD, LMFT 

Rebecca Cobb, LMFT

Jennifer Sampson, PhD

Telehealth is now permanent in family therapy practice. This session reexamines telehealth through a systemic lens, helping clinicians make intentional post‑pandemic modality decisions that consider relational processes, equity, sustainability, and fit rather than default habits or technological momentum.

Medical Grief: A Relational Approach to Illness‑Related Loss

Jackie Williams-Reade, Ph.D., LMFT 

This workshop will introduce medical grief as a relational and narrative process, highlighting how illness-related loss disrupts identity, roles, and family stories. Meaning-making interventions will be explored to help clinicians support clients and families in adapting to ongoing uncertainty in the context of chronic or serious illness.

Parallel Realities: Co-Parenting in the Context of SUOAD

Bill Northey, PhD

High-conflict co-parenting is often driven by patterns of secrecy, trust rupture, and control linked to substance use, gambling, sexual behavior, and financial infidelity. This workshop introduces a systemic framework to understand these dynamics and offers practical tools to assess risk, disrupt escalation cycles, and implement structured, accountability-focused interventions that support stability and prioritize child well-being.

Beyond Apology: Accountability and Repair After Relational Harm

Amy Morgan, PhD, LMFT

Nevaeh Brown, BS

Chloe Guenette, BS

This session will introduce a restorative justice–informed framework for addressing relational harm in couple and family therapy. Participants will learn a structured process for facilitating accountability and repair, including specific therapist language and technique implementation strategies. Clinical applications, limitations, and considerations related to power and safety will be addressed.

Building CORE: Advancing Contextual Therapy Through Collaboration

Rikki Patton, PhD, IMFT-S

Samantha Hershey, MAMFT

Brittni Deadrick, MAMFT

This presentation will introduce the CORE Lab, an academic–practice collaboration designed to advance contextual therapy through operationalization and clinician engagement. Content will include development processes, collaborative strategies, and early implementation insights. Risks related to theory simplification and engagement will be addressed. Participants will learn strategies for translating relational ethics into accessible clinical practice.

Workshops 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Using Signals in Teletherapy: Implications for LGBTQ+ Populations

Amanda Veldorale-Griffin, PhD, LMFT-S

Therapists’ visual cues in teletherapy can enhance comfort and strengthen relationships, especially for LGBTQIA+ youth facing barriers and non-affirming family environments. With fewer nonverbal cues online, collaborative communication signals become essential. This presentation offers practical strategies, examples, and ethical considerations, helping clinicians create safer, affirming spaces and develop tailored signaling systems to support client safety, trust, and engagement.

Strengthening Couples Through Transitions in Perinatal Care

Ashley Jackson, DBH, LMFT, CCTP-II, PMH-C

This presentation examines how perinatal transitions impact the couple relationship, often increasing strain and disconnection. Clinicians will learn practical, relationship-centered interventions across support, communication, intimacy, and trauma to help couples strengthen connection and foster growth during this critical period.

Privilege and Confidentiality

James Punelli, JD

Joe Lynn Cooperstein, JD

This session will explore the essential ethical and legal principles of privilege and confidentiality in the practice of marriage and family therapy. Participants will examine the distinctions between confidentiality and privileged communication, therapist responsibilities in protecting client information, and common exceptions to confidentiality, including mandated reporting, duty to warn, and court involvement.

Making the Implicit Explicit: Autistic Clients and Families

Ki Ip, LMFT

This one-hour workshop will help clinicians improve therapeutic fit with autistic clients and families. The session will contrast responsive adaptation with making key parts of therapy more explicit from the start, and will offer practical guidance across four domains: expectations, pacing, communication norms, and negotiation.

When Faith Meets Family: Understanding Patterns before Marriage

Latonya Stephens, PhD, LMFT

Individuals typically struggle with personal identity within their couples’ relationship due to the lack of information known about their families.  A second challenge is the breakdown of communication between generations that contributed to unhealthy behaviors and family patterns.  To help minimize post-marital distress, reviewing family histories and genograms with premarital clients can provide insight, health awareness, improve communication, maturity and healing.  Visuals can help explain a story that may never be understood.

Workshops 4:15 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.

Let's Talk Dirty: Therapists Using AI

Angela Skurtu, LMFT

AI is rapidly shaping therapy. This session explores how to use it as a clinical support tool—enhancing insight, efficiency, and client care—without replacing clinical judgment. Learn practical applications, ethical considerations, and real-world lessons from both effective and problematic uses.

In-Session Change Episodes: The Lost Art of Engagement

Guy Diamond, PhD

One hallmark of family therapy is enacting and challenging family interactions in the session. Attachment-based family therapy creates corrective attachment experiences where youth discuss attachment ruptures, and parents provide support and validation.  This workshop presents a conceptual model and specific techniques to facilitate this conversation. Lectures, slides, and videos demonstrate how to create profound conversations about rupture and repair.

Reconceptualizing Trauma in Disability Contexts

Manasi Shankar, Ph.D., MS, NCC, LPCC

Breakout Sessions 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Learning as Relationship: A Systemic Approach to Teaching MFT

Danna Abraham, PhD, LMFT

Monica Whitlock, PhD, LMFT

This presentation introduces a systemic approach to teaching in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) that understands learning as a relational process rather than an individual outcome. Grounded in dialogic and social constructionist traditions, it invites participants to consider how knowledge emerges between students and educators through interaction, uncertainty, and shared inquiry.
Contrasting monologic teaching with dialogic practices, the session draws on critiques of the banking model to examine how traditional approaches can limit participation and meaning-making. Examples from MFT training illustrate how centering students’ experiences and lived contexts can deepen engagement and relational awareness, alongside creative and reflective practices that move beyond performance.
Attention is given to the ethical and political dimensions of teaching, recognizing how educational practices shape how therapists understand themselves and others within relational, cultural, and institutional contexts. Classrooms are reimagined as spaces of co-creation where learning unfolds through process.

Feeding Within the Family System for Early Eating Disorder Prevention

Samantha Congdon, LMFT

Alex Aldeborgh, MS, RD

This presentation introduces a family-centered, prevention-focused model that reframes early feeding challenges as relational processes within the family system. The Mindfull Method integrates Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, mindfulness, intuitive eating, and nutrition science to support parents in navigating mealtime dynamics such as pressure, control, and power struggles.

Participants will learn how parental thoughts, emotions, and behaviors influence children’s eating patterns and self-regulation, and how to intervene using practical, evidence-based strategies. The session emphasizes early childhood as a critical window for prevention, helping clinicians support families in building structured, low-pressure feeding environments that promote autonomy, trust, and emotional regulation.

This approach expands eating disorder prevention beyond individual treatment to early, systemic, and developmentally informed care.

When Reality Shifts: The MFT's Role in Early Psychosis

Chainé Mabray, LMFT