Free Online Summit Working with substance use can become difficult when traditional treatment assumptions collide with the complicated realities people bring into therapy. The Harm Reduction Summit brings clinicians, advocates, researchers, authors, and community leaders together for a deeper look at addiction, trauma, harm reduction psychotherapy, public health, drug policy, and the lived realities surrounding…
Free Conscious Business Event There are moments in therapy, caregiving, and life when another person is facing fear, loss, illness, or change—and nothing you know can fix what they are experiencing. The Practice of Elderhood in Connected Community: Fully Embracing the Journey brings Paul Browde and Hedy Schleifer together for an exploration of presence, elderhood,…
Free Conscious Business Event You can be an experienced therapist, do meaningful clinical work, and still reach a point where your private practice feels stuck. Referrals slow down, fee decisions feel harder, and working more does not necessarily create a clearer path forward. John Howard, LMFT calls this the Private Practice Plateau: a common stage…
Free Conscious Business Event A person may communicate clearly, regulate emotions, and manage daily demands in one setting, then struggle to access those same capacities later. When those shifts are viewed only as behavior, important sensory, physiological, and environmental influences can be missed. This free webinar with BG Mancini introduces a Brain-Gut-Sensory Framework for exploring…
Free Conscious Business Event Wellness can begin as a source of care and possibility, yet it can also become another demand to keep adjusting, improving, and coping. That tension matters when the conditions producing exhaustion or distress remain largely unexamined. In “But Why Must We Be Well?”, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé invites you to slow down…
There comes a season of life when the old measures no longer quite fit. Achievement, productivity, and identity begin to loosen, and deeper questions about meaning, mortality, purpose, and love come closer to the surface. For many people, this threshold can feel both intimate and disorienting. And whether you are living it yourself or walking…
When trauma work gets complex, even seasoned clinicians can start to feel like every session is triage. You might see moments of hope and progress, and then the system swings back into shutdown, impulsivity, or a familiar cycle of self-criticism. There is often more intelligence in those patterns than we were trained to see. When…
You’re sitting with a client who’s doing meaningful work — and then, with courage, they share a pattern with substances or a compulsive behavior. Your stomach tightens. Your mind scans for the referral list. The session gets smaller. Many clinicians have been taught that “addiction” means a different door, a different specialty, a different therapist….
Trauma can cause individuals to fragment into different “selves,” each adopting a unique survival strategy such as fight, flight, freeze, submit, or attach. This fragmentation often leads to self-alienation, dissociation, and behaviors like self-criticism, emotional outbursts, avoidance, or even self-destructive tendencies. According to Dr. Janina Fisher, these responses are actually adaptive strategies that help individuals…
Trauma, once a relatively new concept in mental health, has undergone a remarkable evolution since it first became a DSM diagnosis in 1980. Back then, the path to effective treatment was unclear. Over the past four decades, the field of trauma therapy has expanded dramatically, thanks to groundbreaking research and clinical innovations. Each step forward…
