This class is oriented towards spiritual care providers—priests, clergy, chaplains, religious and community leaders—who provide emotional support to community members experiencing life difficulties: a pandemic, divorce, substance abuse, death of a loved one, domestic violence, job loss, etc.
All too often that human experience leads to emotional and psychological wounds that can stifle or disconnect us from our true nature.
Participants will learn skills and practices to support their community members effectively, ethically, and safely: to listen non-judgmentally, to practice good boundaries, to stay free of entanglements, to help their community members pay attention to their mental health.
This training also focuses on the well-being of the spiritual care provider: practicing good self-care, avoiding burn out and vicarious trauma, practicing informed consent, and recognizing their own limitations and making referrals when needed.
The ten-week class will combine lectures with role playing and behind-the-mirror training that PTI has pioneered since 1982.
Rev. Alyss Swanson, LMFT
Alyss is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, church deacon and spiritual director at United Methodist Church. She provides Pastoral Psychotherapy — working with others as they explore the inter-relationships between their faith and spiritual beliefs and psychology.
Kristen Bragg, LMFT
Kristen is a Master Process Trainer, who utilizes an eclectic approach to therapy as a way to meet the client where they are as well as gently introduce them to a variety of modalities where they can explore the aspects of self they wish to engage and strengthen.
Padmini Nagaraj, LMFT
Padmini is the Training Director at the PTI, where she trains, organizes events, and facilitates the consultation group for licensed clinicians. Additionally, she works with individual, couple, family and group clients in private practice in the East Bay and San Jose.
Some topic covered:
- Being and Doing: illuminating client processes in the here-and-now, while maintaining a connection to Self and the client
- Three realms of therapy: external, interpersonal, internal
- Working with process: identifying, selecting, enacting, tracking, deepening, resolving
- Working with client’s resistance: recognizing, navigating, and bringing awareness to client’s resistance
- Working with care providers’s resistance: recognizing counter-transference through mindfulness; identifying, transcending, and mindfully using these issues in working with others.
- Invite the client to their edge and to integrate their work: follow a process to completion and hold space for integration with the clients higher self
Objectives
At the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Become present and invite client(s) to the present moment
- Identify and work with processes as they show up in the room
- Hold clean, caring boundaries with clients
- Identify the realms and the modalities used
- Work with resistance, both the clients’ and care providers’
- Track and join client’s process
- Invite a client to their edges and follow through to resolution and integration