I currently offer three highly interactive full day trainings. They are:
- Treating Trauma in Teens: Core concepts, meaningful metaphors, and field-tested strategies
- Mindfulness With Teens
- When Teens Won’t Engage: Clinical strategies for overcoming resistance
Descriptions can be found below. These trainings provide six CEUs each. They’re typically scheduled to run 9:00am to 4:30pm, with an hour lunch break and two 15-minute breaks. Due to their highly interactive design, these full day trainings are offered in-person only. For more details or to schedule a workshop, contact me today.
TREATING TRAUMA IN TEENS: CORE CONCEPTS, MEANINGFUL METAPHORS, AND FIELD-TESTED STRATEGIES
Two-thirds of all Americans experience some form of trauma by age 16. If left untreated, this can lead to a variety of emotional, behavioral, and developmental concerns — including increased mental health challenges, substance-related issues, school failures, and a variety of behavioral concerns.
In this highly interactive daylong training, we’ll examine useful ways to conceptualize trauma among teens, identify the active ingredients for successful trauma therapy, and explore core clinical strategies for understanding and treating trauma in teens. Inspired by motivational interviewing, narrative therapy and the latest trauma research, these strategies are sure to increase engagement and improve treatment outcomes.
Learning Objective 1: Attendees will deepen their understanding of common trauma impacts, with a focus on how these impacts affect important developmental tasks among teen survivors.
Learning Objective 2: Attendees will identify the four Active Ingredients of effective trauma therapy. They will also explore developmentally appropriate strategies related to each Active Ingredient.
Learning Objective 3: Attendees will examine a variety of vivid field-tested metaphors that help reinforce important trauma concepts, the use of parts work with teen survivors, and other field-tested strategies for working with teen survivors.
Learning Objective 4: Attendees will examine Surviving Mode, the idea that teen survivors often engage in maladaptive coping strategies developed in an effort to manage trauma impacts and related distress. Attendees will also consider practical ideas for integrating this concept into their therapeutic work with teen survivors.
MINDFULNESS WITH TEENS
Research shows that practicing mindfulness can be extremely helpful to teens challenged by trauma, depression, anxiety, ADHD, substance use disorders, and more. In fact, mindfulness is an essential component of several evidence-based practices, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention.
However, the abstract nature of mindfulness can make it challenging to teach in ways that are meaningful and translate into the daily lives of many teen clients. In fact, those clients who would find mindfulness the most difficult to practice — due impulse control issues, extreme hyper-vigilance, or chronic chaos-making — are generally the ones who would most benefit from it.
Our task as helpers, then, is to present mindfulness in ways that are concrete, accessible and provide obvious value. This workshop focuses on strategies for doing just that, as well as presenting over a dozen teen-tested mindfulness activities. Along the way, we’ll also develop a deeper understanding of mindfulness, review the evidence supporting clinical applications of mindfulness, and explore the importance of trauma informed approaches.
Learning Objective 1: Attendees will review the research for the clinical application of mindfulness when treating trauma, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and impulsive behaviors.
Learning Objective 2: Attendees will develop practical skills for integrating mindfulness into both individual and group sessions, including participating in over a dozen teen-tested treatment-appropriate activities that help make mindfulness concrete, accessible, and effective.
Learning Objective 3: Attendees will explore the importance of integrating trauma-informed strategies when utilizing mindfulness with teens.
WHEN TEENS WON’T ENGAGE: CLINICAL STRATEGIES FOR OVERCOMING RESISTANCE
Let’s just admit it! Most therapists are ill-prepared to counsel teens. As a result, therapists often treat teen clients like big kids or little adults—and then wonder why they don’t engage. That doesn’t mean teens are resistant, though. It means they don’t want to be treated like big kids or little adults. It also means they don’t want to talk about their feelings with a stranger, learn shrink-wrapped coping skills, or identify measurable treatment goals. What teen would? However, acting resistant isn’t the same as being resistant. In this workshop, we’ll unpack this very important idea.
We’ll start this by reframing this so-called resistance using three alternate perspectives:
- A Developmental Reframe: Adolescence is a discreet developmental stage with predictable tasks to complete. We’ll review those tasks, explore ideas for being developmentally savvy therapists, and consider what can happen when tasks go undone.
- An Attachment Reframe: Attachment styles impact every therapeutic interaction. With that in mind, we’ll explore ways attachment shows up in sessions, strategies for navigating insecure attachments in teens, and how our own attachment styles matter, too.
- A Trauma Reframe: We’ll deepen our understanding of trauma, including common impacts of untreated trauma exposure, differences between trauma-informed and trauma-specific therapy, and ways trauma adaptations can masquerade as resistance.
These reframes help us look beyond a teen’s apparent resistance and engage with them more effectively. Often, that’s all it takes for treatment reluctance to disappear. Other times, though, we discover clients are stuck. In other words, they simply won’t or can’t engage—because change seems too hard, risky, or pointless. We’ll explore this Stuckness—including the role of risk avoidance, learned helplessness, and stalled identity formation. Along the way, we’ll consider a variety of field-tested strategies for helping these teens get unstuck.
Multiple studies show that effective therapeutic alliance is essential for engagement, retention, and positive outcomes. However, cultivating these alliances with treatment reluctant teens can seem daunting. With that in mind, we’ll identify practical approaches for overcoming these obstacles by increasing our trustworthiness, nurturing connectedness, and embodying empathy. Along the way, we’ll explore the role of self-disclosure, strategies for engaging teens with insecure attachment styles, and more.
Packed with practical strategies, stories from the field, and maybe some laughs, this highly interactive, full day workshop will transform your clinical work with teens.
Learning Objective 1: Attendees will examine treatment resistance among teens using developmental, attachment, and trauma perspectives. This includes identifying practical clinical strategies for improving engagement, willingness, and treatment outcomes.
Learning Objective 2: Attendees will explore the idea of Stuckness, including the role of risk avoidance, learned helplessness, and stalled identity formation. They will also consider relevant ideas from existential psychotherapy.
Learning Objective 3: Attendees will consider the role of therapeutic alliance in overcoming treatment reluctance. They will also identify and practice several field-tested approaches for cultivating rapport with treatment reluctant teens.