Mental Health Networking and CEU Workshop

with Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C DAPA

Monday, December 6, 2021

9am – 4pm (1/2 day optional)

Lisa is a recognized expert in the strengths-based, depathologized treatment of trauma and has been in private practice for 37 years. She has been an Adjunct Faculty member at University of Maryland School of Social Work, University of Baltimore at Maryland, University of Maryland Department of Family Medicine, and she is the Founder of The Ferentz Institute.* She was voted the “Social Worker of Year” by the Maryland Society for Clinical Social Work. Lisa is the author of Treating Self-Destructive Behaviors in Trauma Survivors: A Clinician’s Guide, now in its second edition, Letting Go of Self-Destructive Behaviors: A Workbook of Hope and Healing, and Finding Your Ruby Slippers: Transformative Life Lessons from the Therapist’s Couch.

Lisa will spend the morning with us providing a presentation on the pandemic and tele-therapy and how both have impacted clinicians and traumatized clients. In the afternoon Lisa will offer an ethics program centering around trauma-informed assessments in clinical practice. Both presentations will be virtual, and CEUs will be provided following attending a session virtually and upon completion and submission of an evaluation within 24 hours of the end of program.

  • 9 am – 12 pm – The Impact of Covid and Tele-therapy on Clinicians and Traumatized Clients (3 CEUs)
  • 12 pm – 1pm – Break for lunch
  • 1pm – 4pm – Trauma-Informed Assessments: Ethical Considerations in Clinical Practice (3 Ethics CEUs)

One Session (3 CEUs or 3 Ethics CEUs) = $75

Morning & Afternoon Program (3 CEUs + 3 Ethics CEUs) = $125

 Registration

*The Ferentz Institute, Inc. is an approved sponsor of the Maryland Board of Social Work Examiners for continuing education credits for licensed social workers in Maryland. CEU approval for all trainings is also granted to Psychologists, LCPCs and MFTs. In addition, reciprocity has been granted for clinicians in Washington, DC, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Institute also maintains full responsibility for all programming.

NO REFUNDS WILL BE PROVIDED. If you were unable to attend, you may request a receipt for a donation to the Safe Community Coalition after the event.

This CEU and networking event is sponsored in part by:

Past Mental Health Committee Networking and CEU Workshops

In addition to planning workshops for mental health providers to earn required continuing education units (CEUs), the SCC Mental Health Committee also sponsors a networking lunch for local providers to hear from our annual speakers prior to the evening events open to the public. Speakers typically share a more clinical version of their evening presentation and open up a dialogue with attendees.

THE GOOD ENOUGH THERAPIST: Futility, Failure, and Forgiveness in Treatment

About the Event:  The Good Enough Therapist will focus on the value of exploring, accepting and embracing our inescapable fallibility as clinicians in a way that promotes effective treatment, as well as personal growth.  By investigating and interrogating the creative tension between feeling sufficient and insufficient, doubtful and certain, graceful and inept, participants will begin to encounter a deeper recognition of their own, and their patients’, vulnerability, resilience, imagination and humanity.

Learning objectives:

  1. Explore your personal and clinical weaknesses and vulnerabilities with patience, intelligence and mercy, better enabling you to do the same with your patients
  2. Grieve for the necessary loss of your belief in your clinical omnipotence so that new pathways towards learning and growth reveal themselves to you and your patients
  3. Maintain your belief in effective treatment even when it inescapably stalls and founders at various junctures
  4. Forgive yourself and your patients for your respective insufficiencies and limitations and co-create a healing relationship that is necessarily imperfect and, as a result, meaningful and restorative

Lisa Ferentz spent the morning providing a program on ethics (The Slippery Slope of Clinical Practice: Processing Ethical Scenarios) and in the afternoon working with patients in trauma (Creative Strategies to Enhance Affect Regulation in Traumatized Clients).

Morning Learning Objectives: 

  1. Describe the ethical parameters of the client-therapist relationship and the red flags that represent the blurring of boundaries.
  2. Describe at least three counter-transferential reactions that put therapists on an ethical “slippery slope.”
  3. Explain the clinical rationale for ethically using self-disclosure in therapy: when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
  4. Identify the ethical grounds for transferal and termination.

All three hours will be devoted to processing case scenarios, exploring the potential ethical dilemmas and conflicts, and then discussing ethical solutions.

Afternoon Learning Objectives:

  1. Identify and implement at least two treatment strategies designed to teach traumatized clients how to modulate emotional arousal.
  2. Describe and implement at least two strategies to help clients with containment and the avoidance of flooding.
  3. Describe and implement at least three examples of somatic resourcing.
  4. Describe and implement at least two breathing strategies to navigate both hypo-arousal and hyper-arousal.

Ethical challenges arise in every clinical setting. They can arise because of the physical setting itself, or they can be created by the behaviors of others (including clients, non-clinical staff, or clinical colleagues). Ethical challenges can also originate in our clinical work (including diffcult issues about informed consent, boundaries, multiple relationships, confidentiality, and ethical-legal conflicts). Business practices can create ethical challenges (including those related to forms, record keeping, billing, electronic communications, social media, etc.). Finally, ethical challenges can be created by our own personal and professional issues (including those caused by overwork or burnout). Sometimes such challenges can be avoided with forethought and planning. Even the unavoidable ones can sometimes be lessened with forethought and planning. But sometimes we need the support of others to confront the challenges or to create the necessary changes in the setting or in ourselves. This workshop deals with the first step in the change process: Recognizing the ethical challenges in your own practice and setting.
Learning objectives:
  1. Name three ethical challenges that arise in my own practice setting.
  2. Describe some ways those might be avoided or resolved.
  3. Describe the support I might need for avoiding or resolving those challenges
Register Today!