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Welcome! We imagine you are working hard as you begin this unprecedented academic year. Please take a moment to read about this conference to determine if it is a good fit for you.

Theme

We want the focus of this conference to be on YOU as the clinician. The metaphor of putting our oxygen masks on first has always been important, and seems particularly important for this academic year. This is why we settled on the conference theme Caring for Ourselves (While Caring for Our Students) Amidst Challenging Times.

For the last decade counseling centers all over the world have been facing increasing demands. As we all know these last few months have brought on additional challenges with the pandemic, murder of George Floyd, and the growing awareness of the need for racial justice work. It is quite difficult to project what these next few months will entail with many schools and colleges re-opening, a presidential election, ongoing anti-racist movements, and uncertainty about how the virus will continue to impact our lives.

This half-day virtual conference will be a chance for us to gather, connect, share our experiences, bolster each other up, and critically think about our own well-being as we attend to the needs of our students and the challenges of our current world. It has been a long time since there has been a conference like this here Minnesota, and we believe now is the time to re-instate this type of event. We plan to practice bearing witness to each other’s struggles in a way that fosters empathy, increases hope, and helps you reconnect with feelings of energy and passion for college counseling center work.

Who should attend?

Minnesota counseling center professionals (directors, clinicians, trainees and practicum students, etc.). Registration is limited to 60 spots, and so we encourage you to register early.

When is it?

Half-day virtual conference on October 9, 2020 from 8:00am-12:30pm (Central Time)

Continuing Education

There will be 4.0 Continuing Education Credits available for people that attend all four hours of the conference.

This conference meets the continuing education requirements for the following licensing boards: Minnesota Board of Psychology, Minnesota boards of Marriage and Family Therapy (LMFT), Social Work (LICSW), and Behavioral Health and Therapy (LPC and LPCC). It may also meet the listed requirements from organizations like American Nursing Association (ANA), Minnesota Board of Medical Practice. Please check your own licensing board/organization to see if this program qualifies for CE credits.

How do I Register?

Scroll to the bottom of this page to enter your registration information.

Cost

The full ticket price is $85, and you can receive a Continuing Education Ticket for an additional $15.

We received a generous gift and now how a Scholarship Application available for BIPOC attendees. Please follow this link to complete the application if you self-identify as black, indigenous, or a person of color.

Presenters

We have several wonderful presenters that will help you attune to your self-care needs. These presentations will be highly interactive and involve small group breakout sessions, large group discussions, experiential meditation and breath-work, and time to create your own self-care plan for the academic year.

Nate Page, PhD, LP, CGP

Nate works full time at Carleton College Student Health and Counseling. He is a Certified Group Psychotherapist, and provides training to mental health professionals on group therapy. He is the owner of Group Therapy Central LLC and also directs the Carleton Phoenix Project. He has witnessed the damaging impact of burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral injury among far too many helping professionals and has committed a significant portion of their professional careers to helping “heal the healers” that are struggling these concerns.

Presentation Title: Identifying and Addressing Your Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Moral Injury in a College Counseling Setting

Description: Many college counselors quietly suffer from burnout and compassion fatigue and might not feel able to reach out for help within their organizations. This presentation will help you assess your current burnout and compassion fatigue levels, and then guide you in exploring appropriate prevention and recovery interventions that are feasible within the powerful systems and complex realities of your professional and personal life. We hope you leave this presentation, and conference, with a solid personal prevention and recovery plan for this academic year.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify symptoms of burnout syndrome and compassion fatigue within yourself (according to the domains of two research inventories and ICD-11 criteria).
• Differentiate individual versus systemic factors contributing to burnout and/or compassion fatigue
• Begin developing a personal burnout and compassion fatigue prevention/recovery plan for this academic year.

Saraswati Bhadri, PsyD, LP

Saras works full time at St. Olaf College Counseling center. She has been trained in yoga and meditation techniques and integrates these in her clinical practice. Promoting self- care and wellness has been an ongoing passion, and she has ran several mindfulness groups at St. Olaf.

Presentation Title: Psychotherapists’ Self-Care Between Clients Sessions

Description: Saras will present some of her research findings on psychotherapists’ self-care practices in-between client sessions. She will lead us in discussions and activities to help us assess our own current self-care practices and identify personalized goals we can implement this academic year to maintain and improve our self-care while caring for students.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize helpful self-care strategies gleaned from research on psychotherapist self-care between client sessions
• Begin developing a personalized plan for self-care for this academic year

J. Phillip Rosier, PsyD, LMFT

Phil works full time at the University of St. Thomas Counseling Center, and has a long history of providing psychotherapy services and training for mental health professionals. Phil is one of the co-founders of Kenté Circle and has served as a member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, Minnesota Psychological Association and the Association of Black Psychologist. 

Presentation Title: Happy Counselor Happy Life

Description: As a field, positive psychology spends much of its time thinking about topics like character strengths, optimism, life satisfaction, happiness, well-being, gratitude, compassion (as well as self-compassion). Research in this area suggest that positive emotions increase creativity and expand our internal resources to address solutions. College campuses are becoming overwhelmed with uncertainty and unease. The social unrest, Covid 19 and the politically charged environment due to the upcoming election, undermines our positive attitude toward the future. Our hope with this training is to provide some strategies to help counselors maintain positive emotions during these stressful times.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize positive experiences like happiness, joy, inspiration, and love and use these experiences to re-create these experiences in your daily life
• Implement positive traits such as gratitude into a daily routine
• Discuss and Identify positive character traits of college campuses.
• Define and discuss the benefits of Positive Psychology
• Define and implement the Happiness Equation into life goals

Usha Radhakrisnan

Usha is Senor Faculty for the Art of Living Foundation and has been teaching yoga, meditation and breathing techniques for many years. Usha’s passion is to make meditation and breathwork easy to practice for everyone.

Presentation Title: Relax & Recharge: Powerful Techniques to Manage Stress

Description: This engaging workshop will incorporate techniques taught in the Happiness Program from the Art of Living Foundation. We will practice together the art of breathing and meditation in a way that reduces stress reduction, improves mental clarity, and fosters a deeper sense of connection and community.

Schedule:

Statement for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

As a community of counseling center professionals, we commit to bearing witness to marginalized students, families, colleagues and other members of our communities. We echo and amplify their voices. 

During this conference event on October 9, we will fostering a attitude of open-mindedness, compassion, and inclusiveness among individuals and groups. We will acknowledge the conglomeration of our identities, cultural upbringings, and current social norms/expectations. This conference will likely be a predominantly white, cis-gendered, and heterosexual space (as it is a group of counseling center professionals in Minnesota). We intend to name these realities and invite all involved to consider how these realities might be impacting us at the conference. As conference leaders, we plan to acknowledge our own identities, biases, and potential blind spots, which will hopefully model vulnerability and demonstrate openness and willingness to connect even through our differences. We will call attention to any recapitulations of power, privilege, and oppression as they arise in the conference. We will endeavor to be aware of any microaggressions, unconscious biases, and implicit reactions that could cause harm and then work towards reparative experiences. Ideally, we will have several corrective emotional experiences of practicing “Caring for Ourselves” (the conference theme) while attending to our similarities and our differences.

We also want to express that we strongly condemn and denounce racism, systemic oppression, injustice, police brutality, and hate in all of its forms.  We mourn the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others who have died as a result of state sanctioned race-based tragedies.

We urge action that clearly acknowledges racially motivated brutality and works to mitigate further injury through attempts to repair the lasting psychological damage and trauma such actions cause and to prevent their reoccurrence. 

We desire that this conference be a space where we can learn how you are fairing in your work amidst the challenges we are all facing this Fall 2020.

We believe this will be the first of many similar events for Minnesota University & College Counseling Centers professionals and so we invite your feedback to help us improve our ability to create a space that fosters Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.