LIVE TRAINING: APRIL 28TH | 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
3 CEUs


Presenter Bios: Becca Manthe, MA, LAMFT, ART-P (she/her) received her Master of Arts in Counseling at Adler Graduate School in MN in 2023. Becca is pursuing full licensure in Marriage and Family Therapy and Art Therapy. She is a musician, artist, writer, teacher, group facilitator, and mental health practitioner. She has formal education in mental health services, fine arts, industrial design, Classical violin, and Irish fiddle. Becca has completed Nature-Based Expressive Arts for Trauma and Grief and Climate Aware Psychology training. She serves children, adolescents, adults, families, and couples outdoors, indoors, and online at Intuitive Therapy & Consulting in Golden Valley, MN.

Presenter Bios: Becky Krenz, MA, LMFT (she/her) received her MA in Marriage and Family Therapy from Appalachian State University in 2007. She is a licensed MFT in WI and MN and sees adult clients at Minneapolis Nature-Based Therapy, both indoors and outdoors. Becky has provided ecotherapy sessions for clients since beginning her career. She completed her certification in Ecotherapy from the Earthbody Institute in August 2024, focusing on integrating embodied activism into clinical work with nature.
Description:
Clients and providers alike are increasingly entangled in uncertain ecological, political, and cultural circumstances. This workshop calls on MFTs as systems therapists to acknowledge the impact of the dominant culture on mental health, and to restore wholeness and humanity to ourselves, our clients, and wider human-built and Earth systems. To do this, we will explore three case vignettes of populations directly impacted by the environmental, political, and cultural effects of climate change and the current polycrisis.
This three-hour, vignette-driven virtual workshop works toward decolonizing therapy and is presented with neurodivergent-affirming methods. Participants will be introduced to specific environmental, cultural, emotional, and systemic challenges within the spotlighted populations. Issues such as intergenerational conflict and trauma, the impact of colonialism, gender conflicts, marital crises, environmental degradation, future planning, ecological disasters, and more will be explored. Each vignette provides experiential learning of therapeutic interventions that ignite creativity, emotional stability, perspective-taking, cultural humility, resensitization, and ecological well-being.
If you strive to bolster your professional practice through ecotherapy methods, nature-based therapy interventions, creative arts expression, climate awareness, and polycrisis acceptance, this workshop will support your efforts. According to Joanna Macy, this is the work of The Great Turning. “The shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. It is, [Joanna Macy] believes, the third major revolution of human existence, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This one, though, has to unfold much more quickly” (Hawken, 2024).
Objectives:
1) Develop an introductory awareness of how the field of Marriage and Family Therapy is situated within larger structures founded on the idea that humans are separate from the natural world around them.
2) Develop an introductory understanding of several frameworks that expand your professional orientation towards climate-aware, polycrisis competency.
3) Explore three case vignettes of populations presently impacted by the environmental, political, and cultural distress of climate change that include experiential learning of interventions you can use to work with symptoms.
4) Increase an understanding of the value of reorienting to new ways of viewing our role as systems therapists to address mental health from a more connected and compassionate approach to therapy informed by nature.