In recent years, we have heard a lot about self-care and the need for care givers to give care to themselves. Have you evaluated your self-care? Is it truly replenishing you? Are you noticing that sometimes you are left more drained than filled by your self-care times? This class proposes a shift from self-care to the need for soul-care for clinicians. The Greatest Commandment according to Jesus is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30-31). The path to rejuvenation and protection from compassion fatigue is found in this. To love our neighbor as we love ourselves, we first need to look at how we are loving ourselves. To love ourselves, we need to look at how we love and are loved by God. To understand how we share love with God, we need to be able to see and hear and know the God who calls us his beloved. In this class we will explore how to create rhythms of soul-care to use both in times of our own distressful emotional states as well as ongoing as a protective pattern of learning to love ourselves and have self-compassion to be better equipped to love and care for others.

The key focus of this class is to equip Christian counselors with an understanding of the cultural competence skills needed to provide effective, compassionate support to clients struggling with common mental health challenges like anxiety and depression in the post-pandemic context. As followers of Christ, we are called to minister to all people, regardless of their background or identity. To do this effectively, we must strive to become culturally competent practitioners.

Understanding a client's unique cultural context - encompassing factors like race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and more - is essential for building trust, identifying relevant needs, adapting counseling approaches, and promoting equity. Developing this cultural competence involves self-reflection, continuous learning, practicing humility, collaborating with clients, and advocating for systemic change.

Additional resources will be made available.

Christian counselors in our family of churches are routinely faced with the struggle of hearing spiritual trauma narratives that occasionally resemble their own faith experience. This can have the effect of skewing our perspective and compromising our objectivity as mental health clinicians. Elements such as shared spiritual trauma experiences, collectively held doctrines and lenses, and church culture dynamics can each undermine ethical and effective care, and can contribute substantially to occupational stress. This class explores these concepts, as well as the phenomena of transference, countertransference, and enactment, as they apply to the dual relationship of counselor-client and spiritual relative in Christ.

Combining science and biblical truths, we will look at “schemas” which are lifelong patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting; there are spiritual ones and unspiritual ones. Whichever you feed will grow.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety and depression has been proven to be a highly
effective treatment across diverse populations. For Christians, S-CBT, which integrates religious
beliefs and practices into treatment, has also been shown to demonstrate significant
improvements in symptom reduction, high remission, and low relapse rates. This training will
review foundational concepts of CBT and demonstrate how to apply concepts of Spiritually
integrated CBT, practical techniques, and ethical considerations when using S-CBT to treat
clients with anxiety and depression.

Challenges with mental health for either spouse will have an impact on the marriage. Most treatments are focused on individuals. This workshop will focus on how to support a couple to help them find the "us" in building a new relationship with anxiety, depression, and other challenges.

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When it comes to treating depression and anxiety, it can be equally effective to focus on positive psychology interventions as on those that reduce client deficits. God gives us great examples throughout the Bible of how He makes us resilient by building on the strengths we have. There is a close link between resilience and creativity as being creative can increase our resiliency. This two-part class involves 1) education on resiliency and creativity in its treatment of depression and anxiety, and 2) an experiential workshop using symbolic imagery and reflection to explore our own resiliency as clinicians. Clinicians will obtain tools to more adequately incorporate positive psychology interventions during treatment.

How do we recover from hurts we have suffered at the hands of other Christ-followers? No conference about getting "back to basics" in a church mental health context would be complete without addressing the wounds that befall Christians in faith settings. We have pulled together an expert panel of Christian counsellors to answer the title questions and tease apart both the intricacies and controversies of spiritual and religious trauma. Join us as we collectively consider God's greater purpose for our emotional and psychological wounds, as well as what steps we might take to recover.