Annual Conference

Coping with the Stress and Trauma of COVID

Attendees will gain knowledge about the impact that COVID has on a systemic scale with clients, families, and the systems they operate in and how to identify potential trauma triggers for something of this scale.  The attendees will also gain awareness about cultural considerations for COVID and how to address those in a therapeutic setting.

Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis

Thema Bryant-Davis is a licensed psychologist, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, and director of the Culture and Trauma research lab.  She is a past psychology representative to the Unite Nations and a past president of the Society for the Psychology of Women.  Dr. Bryant-Davis has published and presented on the societal trauma of racism and anti-racism therapy.  She is author of the book: “Thriving in the Wake of Trauma: A multicultural guide” and  co-editor of the book Womanist and Mujerista Psychologies.  The California Psychological Association honored Dr. Bryant-Davis as Distinguished Scholar of the Year.

Self-Compassion and Empathy: The Superheroes of Fighting Shame in Family

Attendees will increase knowledge around shame triggers and how to educate families on self-conscious affects (shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment).  The participant will also learn how people can have unwanted identities and how those identities may affect family dynamics.  The attendees will also learn effective tools for moving through shame utilizing self-compassion and empathy.

Jamie Mosley, LPCC, CDWF, ACS

Jamie is a Certified Daring Way Facilitator, based on the work of Brene Brown.  Jamie has a long background in Head Start and then pursued her calling to be a therapist and is now the owner of Conscious Healing Counseling. Jamie is certified in EMDR and has worked extensively with clients that have experienced trauma or shame.    Jamie is also serving on the board of Minnesota Counseling Association.

Stay At Home Order, Not Safer for Some: Facts, Effects and Resources for Domestic Violence

The attendees will learn the basic facets of domestic violence including forms of abusive behaviors.  The attendees will gain awareness about how telehealth services might be impacted by domestic violence and vice versa.  Finally, the attendees will gain knowledge of resources and interventions that can be used with families that have experienced domestic violence.

Melanie Aleman, MA, LMFT, Rule 114 Qualified Neutral

Melanie worked as a therapist and the Men’s Program Supervisor previously at a domestic violence organization for three years.  The organization worked to serve the family in these complex situations while honoring client’s autonomous choices for relationships retention and worked toward holistic healing.  Most recently, Melanie began intervention programming in private practice to provide groups with individuals who have used abusive behaviors (male identified groups).  Melanie’s work includes strengths-based, trauma informed work that includes a restorative justice component.  Melanie has been working in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy with individuals who have used and experienced abuse and trauma over the last six years.

Getting to the Heart of It: Family therapy steps to convene difficult conversations between teens and parents in Pandemic Times

Attendees will take stock of their own observations of pandemic dynamics on family systems and examine how current realities are shaping their family therapy practice; increase their methods to enhance protective, nurturing and wisdom resources in teens and parents co-existing with COVID restrictions; gain narrative and experiential strategies to engage conflicted youth and their caregivers through push pull to relational reengagement, enlisting tools of Internal Family Systems and Attachment Focused Family Therapy; AND reflect on our fields’ call to be agents of change in this moment through reimagining self as a choreographer of “new dance steps” in essential family relationships during times that are uprooting the familiar and provoking adaptation.

Krista Nelson, LICSW, LMFT, Approved Consultant in EMDR

Krista Nelson is a family therapist and co-founder of Family Circle Counseling PLLC in St. Paul.  Krista is a specialist in trauma and attachment healing with individuals and families throughout the lifespan.  From 2001-2017, she led the Wilder Foundation’s Attachment and Trauma Training Program, creating training for residential and day treatment, foster care, and community mental health programs.  She is the creator of multiple MNADOPT parent workshops offered throughout the state since 2008.  In addition to choreographing teen-parent sessions each week, today Krista serves as Trauma Consultant for therapist teams within the Wilder Foundation, Volunteers of America, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare through the University of Minnesota.

Relational Ethics in the time of Global Uprising: De-Centering White Privilege in our Discipline and Practice

Attendees will understand and define relational ethics as they compare to legal ethics.  Attendees will also gain awareness about white supremacy culture and how that plays out in the social political and therapeutic settings, including the impact of the DSM structure on culturally inclusive therapeutic practices.

*Approved for 1.5 Ethics CEs

Amy DiGennaro, MFA, MA, ATR, LMFT

Amy DiGennaro is a professional artist and therapist whose primary studio art practice is drawing. DiGennaro was a 2005 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant; and in 2007-2008, was awarded the prestigious McKnight Visual Arts Fellowship. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally and has been teaching college art and art history since 1996.  She earned her BFA from Syracuse University in 1990; and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 1998. Between degrees, Amy completed the American Arts Course at Sotheby’s in New York City.  Although the primary focus of her art and education has been painting and drawing, Amy has also concentrated on art history, theory, and criticism, and has created work in printmaking, ceramics, performance, sound and video. She graduated in 2014, with an MA in counseling psychology, specializing in art therapy and narrative practice. DiGennaro has had an independent practice as a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Registered Art Therapist for the last six years. She has studied extensively with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs belonging to a group of advanced Narrative practitioners from across the country for the last ten years. In 2019, she took part in Galvanizing Family Therapy 2: a think tank of narrative, collaborative and dialogic therapists from Canada, Mexico and the US who seek to transform the practice of family therapy under neo-liberalism. Her work as a somatic art and narrative trauma therapist is radical, anti-pathologizing, justice-doing, solidarity work that seeks to stand against the Medical Industrial Complex and its effects and support people to deconstruct problem/failure stories and re-author alternative stories that support living lives in preferred (creative, life-giving) ways.