The Therapy Room is Not Neutral – Free Training with Mariah Rooney
Trauma is often understood through an individual lens: attachment histories, relationships, nervous system responses, beliefs, behaviors, and symptoms. Yet clients do not experience trauma outside the social, cultural, and institutional conditions that surround them.
The Therapy Room Is Not Neutral: Bringing a Political Analysis into Trauma Care is a free webinar with trauma specialist and psychotherapist Mariah Rooney, MSW, LICSW, hosted by Academy of Therapy Wisdom. The training explores how culture, identity, power, systemic oppression, structural harm, and institutional experiences can shape suffering, survival, and the therapeutic process.
Rather than replacing an individual understanding of trauma, this webinar expands the context in which trauma is understood. Mariah draws on liberatory frameworks, somatic awareness, and the wisdom of communities that have long engaged in healing within conditions of ongoing harm.
You’ll explore how systemic oppression can influence what gets labeled as pathology, how structural harm can be expressed through the body and relationships, and how clinicians’ own positionality and training can shape what they notice in the therapy room.
Why Attend “The Therapy Room Is Not Neutral: Bringing a Political Analysis into Trauma Care”
Clinical training often focuses on what happens within the individual: symptoms, attachment, beliefs, behaviors, relationships, and nervous system responses. This webinar asks what becomes visible when the larger social and structural conditions surrounding a person are treated as clinically relevant too.
Mariah Rooney explores how systemic oppression can influence what gets defined as pathology and what gets called healing. She also examines how structural harm can land in the body and shape relationships, offering a wider context for somatic, relational, and trauma-informed practice.
The training also turns attention toward the clinician. By examining how identity, assumptions, positionality, and professional training influence perception, the webinar offers a framework for bringing greater awareness, accountability, and clinical rigor into the therapeutic relationship.
Who Should Attend
This webinar is for clinicians interested in understanding trauma within both individual experience and the larger social conditions that can shape safety, distress, relationships, and survival strategies.
It may be especially relevant for therapists who want to engage the social and political dimensions of trauma without losing clinical rigor, as well as practitioners interested in somatic, relational, trauma-informed, and liberatory approaches to care.
- Therapists who want to consider social and structural context alongside individual trauma histories
- Clinicians exploring how systemic oppression can shape distress and experiences of safety
- Practitioners using trauma-informed approaches who want a broader clinical framework
- Therapists interested in how structural harm can be expressed through the body and relationships
- Clinicians examining how identity and positionality influence the therapeutic relationship
- Practitioners interested in the assumptions embedded within clinical training and case conceptualization
- Therapists seeking language for discussing political dimensions of trauma with clinical rigor
What You’ll Learn
This webinar explores what trauma-informed care can look like when collective context is treated as clinically relevant. The focus is not on abandoning individual understandings of trauma, but on widening the frame through which clients’ experiences are understood.
You’ll examine the relationship between systemic conditions and clinical practice, including how oppression can influence definitions of pathology and healing, how structural harm can affect the body and relationships, and how a clinician’s own position can shape what becomes visible in the room.
Mariah also introduces language for engaging the political dimensions of trauma while maintaining clinical rigor, helping clinicians consider how liberatory frameworks, somatic awareness, and relational practice can inform a more contextual approach to care.
- How systemic oppression can shape what gets labeled as pathology and what gets defined as healing
- Language for discussing the political dimensions of trauma without losing clinical rigor
- How structural harm can land in the body and influence somatic and relational practice
- How your own positionality and training can influence what you notice in clinical work
- What trauma-informed care can look like when collective context is treated as clinically relevant
About Mariah Rooney, MSW, LICSW
Mariah Rooney is a trauma specialist and psychotherapist who has practiced in outpatient, community, hospital, and specialty care settings. She has served as a faculty member in the graduate Schools of Social Work at Winona State University and the University of St. Thomas, worked as a trauma-informed care consultant for the American Institutes of Research, and was previously a fellow at the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute.
Her clinical work with children and adults has addressed traumatic stress, attachment trauma, intergenerational trauma, and dissociation. Her research and writing have also focused on gender-related violence, sexual trauma, military trauma, trauma-informed embodiment practices, developmental trauma, and systems-level interventions.
Mariah also works as a trauma consultant supporting capacity-building and systems-change efforts within agencies, schools, federal and state agencies, statewide coalitions, and multi-agency collaboratives. She is Co-Founder of Trauma Informed Weight Lifting, a program of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment at the Justice Resource Institute.
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Join Mariah Rooney, MSW, LICSW, for a free webinar exploring how systemic oppression, structural harm, clinician positionality, and collective context can shape trauma-informed clinical practice.
- Oct 08 2026
- Expired!
- 8:00 am - 9:30 am
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Oct 08 2026
- Time: 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
More Info
- Worldwide
Organizer
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The Academy of Therapy Wisdom
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Website
https://spiritualgrowthevents.com/somatic-grief-work
