PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

This workshop is an invitation for therapists to pause, reflect, and replenish.  The challenging times we face have tapped existing resources, pushed limits, and left many therapists feeling stretched thin or depleted.  Therapist resilience has waned with all of the massive change and uncertainty.

Our premise is that therapist self-nurturing is a vital part of compassion resilience and is essential to both therapist sustainability and client care.  The inherent wisdom found in the body and movement as well as contemporary findings from neuroscience offer opportunities to deepen self-awareness, self-compassion and self-nurturing.  

Participants will have the opportunity to connect more with themselves, assess their own compassion resilience, and explore ways to integrate more embodied and creative self-care into their own personal and professional lives.

Recognizing that dysregulation is disruptive to compassion resilience, we will use a trauma-informed framework to explore impacts of the pandemic and other significant communal issues such as social and racial injustices and political turmoil.  By recognizing that the fear and uncertainty of these experiences has elicited a great deal of individual and community trauma threat responses, we can begin to shift the nervous system state.  We can turn to more effective and enduring coping strategies and resources to care for ourselves and one another.

This workshop will be rooted in mindfulness and movement activities, helping participants to gain experiential knowledge of themselves and develop somatic resources that can be used in daily life and in client work.  It will include didactic presentation on concepts of mindful self-compassion and compassion resilience, emphasizing an embodied perspective.  Participants will have the opportunity to create a vision and plan for integrating workshop material into their own professional self-care practices.

Attendee Note: The workshop Restoring Compassion Resilience: Using Somatic Resources to Unwind from Difficult Times and Develop New Practices will include experiential exploration, including prompts for movement and reflection.  We also invite you to include writing, doodling, drawing or other art-making as they feel right for you.  In preparation for the workshop, you may want to gather some art materials such as paper, crayons, pens, pastels or any other supplies that would be relatively easy to use for brief activities.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. List 3 characteristics of compassion resiliency.

  2. Identify 3 beneficial elements of establishing regular mindfulness and movement practices for therapist self-care.

  3. Identify one practice that you would like to implement in your own professional self-care.
CONTINUING EDUCATION

1.25 ADTA CE, 1.25 NBCC CE, 1.25 NYLCAT CE
PRESENTER INFORMATION
Annabelle Coote, MA, LMHC, BC-DMT,  loves helping both clients and therapists harness the power of the creative process and the mind-body connection to deepen, enrich and transform life experiences and clinical practice. She is a licensed mental health counselor and board certified dance/movement therapist with over 25 years experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, supervisor and author. She is the founder and director of Movement Matters LLC, Integrative Psychotherapy and offers consultation and training at annabellecoote.com. 
   
Jennifer Ellyson, MA, R-DMT, received her Master’s degree in Dance/Movement Therapy and Counseling from Columbia College Chicago. Jennifer also received post-graduate certification in infant and child dance/movement psychotherapy in Dr. Suzi Tortora’s Ways of Seeing program. Her work brings her to many skilled nursing/memory care facilities and schools where she sees clients with Alzheimer’s/Dementia, Parkinson’s, Depression, Anxiety, Intellectual Disability, and Pervasive Developmental Disorders.  In addition to her work as therapist, Jennifer is an experienced movement educator, teaching and dancing with children and adults of all ages.