Embracing Countertransference

This 2-day workshop is designed to support clinicians in learning a step-by-step, self-counseling process that can be used when countertransference is interfering with the therapeutic relationship. It's a deep dive into the personal material that surfaces when we work with our clients. This workshop is a not a typical training in that it is both didactic and experiential. It is a warm invitation to bravely explore the shadowy side of our work without judgment.

Our clients act as mirrors, reflecting back to us unresolved issues in consciousness that result in us either over-identifying with the client or distancing ourselves from them. Countertransference is, in essence, our thoughts and feelings about our clients. It is our judgments about them AND about ourselves. These thoughts and judgments often show up as thoughts like, "I really hope she cancels," or "He's really intimidating," or "I have no idea what to do. I'm incompetent." We may feel afraid of, disgusted with, angry at, or worried about our clients. We may experience fatigue, headaches, or other body sensations in sessions with certain clients.

The good news is that this is all very useful information that is providing us an opportunity for our own healing, and iit provides clear insights into what the client needs from us in terms of intervention. What starts out as us feeling stuck and inadequate is actually the X marking the spot toward the intervention. Instead of avoiding countertransference, we can get excited that there is treasure to be mined!

Participants will learn to:

1) identify when counter transference is operating through a mindfulness process of noticing the thoughts, emotions, and body sensations.

2) use an EMDR process to target a painful experience in their lives that the client is mirroring.

3) use various clinical interventions (gestalt empty chair work, play therapy, internal family systems, family sculpting, art, etc) in a “healing of memories”, self-counseling process where the clinician intervenes on behalf of their own younger self who experienced the trauma.

4) use the insight experienced in the self-counseling to apply back to the client.

5) develop tools to work with any resistance, defensiveness, or dissociation that can arise as clinicians bring painful stories into awareness

6) increase sense of self-competency and capacity as a clinician as we broaden our lived experience of healing and growth.

7) offer and receive support from other clinicians in this community as we heal together as people and professionals.

Please come join this growing network of therapists and providers who are recognizing the value of owning and working with countertransference as a personal and professional growth tool. Help fight the isolation and burn out that so commonly affects clinicians by connecting in this healing process together. Let's divest from the systems and stories that make it hard for clinicians to reach out to one another for support.