Training
Working in the healing professions requires perseverance, patience, a unique set of skills, and a deep well of hope. Our ability to find sustainability is constantly being challenged by the nature of the work itself, the demands of managed care systems, the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the significance of systemic injustices.
Our ability to find sustainability is further challenged when we are faced with clients who seek refuge from their suffering in self-harm, suicidal ideations, disordered eating, and addictions; who struggle to maximally benefit from offered care, often due to the impact of their trauma histories impeding their abilities to effectively ask for and receive offered help.
Available Trainings
Below are current offerings. Dr. B is open to creating new content for your specific needs. Contact Dr. B for more information.
Enhancing Competency
The greater mastery we have of our clinical skills, the more confident we are in our clinical decision-making and the better we are able to sleep at night. Dr. B’s trainings focus on building competency in working with high risk, difficult-to-treat, and interpersonally complex populations. She starts by reviewing research and theory to support a strong empirical understanding of the hows and whys different interventions are effective and when and how to use them. She then models nuanced applications that weave together the art and science of healthcare.
Expanding Self-Care
Self-care is more than bubble baths and scented candles (though sometimes that is quite lovely). Rather, self-care is learning about ourselves, our limits, our joys, what makes us tick, how we celebrate the wins, and our cues that we’re facing burnout, compassion fatigue, or moral injury, so we can then take the necessary steps to take a break, regroup, get support, and/or make needed changes. Dr. B provides recommendations and strategies for practicing such self-reflective work and identifying how to cope in the face of our post-pandemic, managed-care world.
Engaging in Community-Care
Western capitalist ideologies predicate that healing must be done at the individual level, by ourselves; that asking for help is a weakness and that maintaining productivity is primary. Meanwhile, we are not meant to do this work alone! Working in a healing profession takes a unique toll and we must come together to debrief, to process, to learn, to grow, and to heal ourselves. Dr. B proposes multiple ways of exploring community and strives to offer it in each of her trainings.
DBT Skills for Sustainable Practice: Validation, Boundary Setting, and Self-Care
Recommended Audience: HealthCare Professionals, Mental Health Professionals
3E Topics: Enhancing Competence, Expanding Self-Care, Engaging in Community Care
Modalities: Virtual, In-Person
Format Options: One or two hour didactic to multi-hour workshop
Description: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based therapy originally developed to treat Borderline Personality Disorder. It has also been shown to be highly effective for substance use disorders, eating disorders, PTSD, treatment resistant depression, and anxiety. Training staff in DBT skills has been shown to reduce burn-out across a variety of settings. Notably, this means that providers do not need to complete extensive DBT training, specialize in this modality, or be part of full therapeutic programs in order to benefit. This workshop will review the fundamentals of DBT, including key principles and assumptions. Validation, boundary setting, and self-care will be discussed at length to support sustainable practices, maintenance of compassion satisfaction, and high quality of care.
Working with Borderline Personality Disorder: Tips and Tricks for Sustainable Care
Recommended Audience: Mental Health Professionals
3E Topics: Enhancing Competence, Expanding Self-Care, Engaging in Community Care
Modalities: Virtual, In-Person
Format Options: Two hour didactic to multi-hour workshop
Description: This lecture is structured similarly to “DBT Skills for Sustainable Practice,” though focuses specifically on Borderline Personality Disorder. This lecture reviews the theoretical conceptualizations of BPD and specifically applies validation, boundary-setting, self-care to working with this population.
Stand-Alone DBT Skills
Recommended Audience: Mental Health Professionals
3E Topics: Enhancing Competence,
Modalities: In-Person Recommended
Format Options: Multi-hour Workshop
Description: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a modification of cognitive behavioral therapy and teaches four skill training modules to engender more effective coping. The four modules are Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. In the full-DBT program, participants learn these skills in a weekly group spanning six months while concurrently receiving weekly individual therapy reinforcing skills and applying them to target behaviors. Many clinical settings are unable to support a full program, much less provide sufficient training for staff to feel competent in the full skills manual. Furthermore, a number of the skills build upon each other and thus can be daunting to attempt to learn on your own. That’s where this workshop comes in. A basic review of the DBT principles and framework will be provided. Then the modules will be introduced and at least one skill from each will be presented in the format they are taught in group (with clear limits to the training scope of the workshop), thereby allowing for modeling of how to teach the skills while learning them experientially. The selected skills are intended for clinicians to be able to implement in any type of clinical encounter, from a brief evaluation and management appointment to a full therapy session.
Understanding Suicide
Recommended Audience: Mental Health Professionals
3E Topics: Enhancing Competence; Expanding Self-Care
Modalities: Virtual, In-Person
Format Options: One hour didactic on theory alone to multi-hour workshop with role plays, vignettes, extensive Q+A on conceptualization, assessment, safety-planning etc.
Description: This training reviews key theory and research on understanding how and why suicidal ideations and related behaviors develop and are maintained over time. Participants will learn the importance of treating suicide as a core problem in and of itself versus a symptom of another disorder. This training will support increasing confidence in conceptualizing suicide, conducting risk assessment, and completing safety planning, while engendering a stance of deeply rooted compassion. The combination of confidence and compassion allows for sustainability, hope, and perseverance when working with high risk populations.
Coping with Compassion Fatigue
Recommended Audience: Healthcare Professionals, Mental Health Professionals
3E Topics: Expanding Self-Care, Engaging in Community Care
Modalities: Virtual, In-Person
Format Options: One hour lecture
Description: Compassion fatigue is seemingly ubiquitous among health care professionals in our managed-care, post-pandemic world. Since the pandemic, coping for many has meant changing their patient demographics or practice settings, leaving larger scale institutions, or leaving the field entirely. It has also looked like drudgingly putting one foot in front of the other and getting through the day with little to no satisfaction or joy in or from the work, feeling hopeless, detached, and struggling to connect with what called us to this work in this first place. This is compassion fatigue. How do we come back from compassion fatigue and reconnect with ourselves, our drive and sense of meaning, and even joy while still navigating the realities of the world today? This presentation will be calling upon the work of Victor Frankel, Robert Wicks, and Michelle Cassandra Johnson, to discuss the roles of logotherapy, self-reflection, and community healing in coping with compassion fatigue.
Preparing for a Sustainable Career: The Role of Mental Health
Recommended Audience: Veterinary Medicine Students, Early Career Veterinarians (can be modified for those established in their careers)
3E Topics: Expanding Self-Care, Engaging in Community-Care
Format Options: 1 hour didactic
Description: The field of veterinary medicine is facing a mental health crisis. Stressors include though are not limited to one of the highest professional income-to-debt ratios in the United States; insufficient support staff requiring practitioners to fill in the gaps of technicians leading to excessively longer workdays, and the need to function as grief counselors, financial consultants, and medical advisors. Unlike other medical professions, Veterinarians are uniquely positioned to both provide life-saving and life-ending measures often in the same day, and to navigate the moral injury of declining life-saving care when a client is unable to afford costly procedures. This lecture promotes veterinary medicine students and early career veterinarians engaging in mental health awareness and care to cultivate the resiliency and psychological wellness needed to support longevity in this invaluable profession. Burn-out, moral injury, compartmentalization, and compassion fatigue are reviewed and skills for self-reflection, self-care, and engaging in community-care are discussed.
Consultation
Dr. B also provides 1:1 consultation for independently licensed clinicians for professional development mentorship, psychoeducation on various treatment modalities, and staffing of individual cases.
She also offers individual and group supervision for psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and counselors working toward licensure in the state of Arizona. She is listed in the Clinical Supervisor Registry with the AZ Board of Behavioral Health Examiners.
Coming Soon
Dr. B’s On-Demand Trainings