interactive

workshops

All workshops are hosted live so you can ask questions and get customized actions specific to your circumstances. Please ask about available courses.

Relationship Workshop

Experience hope and healing for your relationship.

The Hold Me Tight Workshop is an educational and interactive event designed to help partners reconnect in relationships by building their emotional bond. It is based on Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) and attachment science that has proven highly successful in helping individuals build intimacy in their relationships. Couples learn how to move into engagement patterns where they can regulate their emotions and feel safe with one another. Individuals are welcomed to attend to hone their relationship skills. We suggest you bring a friend or family member for practice.

In this workshop, partners can learn to:

Get to the root of recurring issues.
Build intimacy.
Identify negative communication patterns.
Problem-solve and cooperate around important issues.
Learn to trust after betrayal or infidelity.

The practice component of the workshop will allow you to flow beyond the surface level of your interactions to discover and communicate your real needs to your partner.

The cost is $450 per couple for all four sessions. The sessions are based on Dr. Sue Johnson’s best-selling book “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” which you will be asked to purchase in advance.

Understanding the deep underlying messages that we wish to convey and being able to operate on that level is at the heart of this transformational practice.

No Diagnosis Needed and no Location Restrictions
This workshop is educational. It does not replace therapy and may be used in conjunction with therapy.

Privacy

You are not required to share in this workshop and will be able to hold private conversations with your partner with the opportunity for private feedback from an experienced couple’s therapist.

Schedule
Join us starting October 15, 2023 5:30pm to 8:00pm PST and each Sunday at the same time for the following three weeks for a total of four weeks.

Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark of Sue Johnson.

Highlights:

Any adult, and particularly those who are late-diagnosed or self-diagnosed can join.
You may be located anywhere in the world.
This group offers processing, guidance, support, education and the opportunity to feel connected.
This group is for Autistic & AuDHDer adults (18+)

This is an ongoing group with separated ‘cohorts’ so you can experience as many as you wish or take a break and resume later. We will connect virtually for 2-3 weeks in a row, with weekly breaks for integration and then resume weekly for 2-3 weeks and so on. Each cohort will be closed after registration as each cohort commences.

Click here if you would like additional information. REGISTER HERE if you are ready!

Adult Autistic & Audhd Support Group

This group is a here-and-now group for the issues that group participants may want to explore. This way the group is always relevant. Participants are encouraged to submit their queries ahead of the scheduled session. While subject matter will be influenced by participant interest which may vary from cohort to cohort, the focus will generally include identity, relationships, advocacy and neurodivergence.

My work is attachment/relationship based and I often draw from my background concentration in philosophy and lived experience that is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic as well as autistic. Topics will likely include:

Autistic burnout
Coming to terms with a late diagnosis
How to advocate effectively
Identifying and coping with pathologizing language and stereotypes associated with autism including double-empathy issues
Gender perspectives
Intersecting identities (sex, gender, race, neurotype)
Navigating neurodivergent relationships, (ND/NT; ND/ND)
Defining culture
Social justice

Group sessions are $35 each 75 minute session. Sessions are pay-as-you-go for each session. Submit your payment at least three days ahead of each scheduled group to confirm your place. Contact us if you are outside this window and would still like to attend.

Contact me here, if you would like additional information or to submit your suggestion for group.

I teach individuals, families, mental health providers and groups how to bring anti-oppression work to your homes, workplaces and everyday settings in a way that helps you repair broken relationships and build authentic connections.

Decolonizing Self-Care:

Navigating Self-Care From a Social Justice Perspective

Whether you are a practitioner or have experienced therapy as a client, or both, it’s likely that the training underlying theoretical approaches used for healing reflect and reinforce underlying power dynamics rooted in monocentrism and supremacy that perpetuate pathology.

The conditioning runs so deep, even with post graduate training centered on embodied practices, it’s hard not to slip in and out of conditioning that is rooted well within psychology practices, thinking and research.

Rather than a “to do” list to identify and prevent burnout, this online course available for your private viewing delves deeper to offer a way of transforming our lives so that we live attuned to our limits and resist tendencies that promote burnout. In so doing, we perform anti-oppressive work that redefines “normal” and what is acceptable.

Delve deep into self-care demonstrated from a BI&POC and Neurodivergent perspective. Experience liberation from exhaustion.

Decolonizing Mental Health Practice

Though the past few years have witnessed much discussion around systemic racism and colonial hegemony and its impact on healthcare delivery systems, when it gets down to the nitty gritty, many mental health practitioners are concerned about making mistakes, causing offense and how to put cultural awareness and insight into actual practice.

Over six weeks in a series of bi-weekly sessions online, we will deconstruct contemporary mental health practice to identify colonial hegemonic beliefs that are often internalized by practitioners and perpetuated by our training. We will address ways in which domination, discrimination and systemic oppression work in ways to minimize or erase BIPOC values and cultural practices and increase stigma around receiving therapy. We will also explore ways in which decolonization in mental health care can be more accessible for the individual practitioner.

How We Rest:

Preventing & Navigating Autistic Burnout

Burnout, chronic stress and fatigue are now common place topics among mothers, teachers and mental health providers among many others. Burnout is a particular concern compared to chronic stress because it is often accompanied by withdrawal and cycling emotions.

One of the main factors that distinguishes autistic burnout, is that it can ensue from just regular living in a world designed around neurotypical functioning. There’s often increased sensitivity and isolation in an attempt to recover.

Set-up for flexibility: You may select individual sessions alternating with or in addition to workshop attendance. Individual sessions are $75/hr.

Autistics can experience burnout on a completely different level from NTs. It can effect remembering, performing basic self-care, and thinking-many of the activities included in mainstream strategies for burnout. In this workshop, we not only learn but practice in a dynamic setting restorative and transformative practices. In addition, we identify the sources of burnout that to break cycles of behavior that continue to drain our reserves. Join us in six weeks of interactive community over three months as we experience liberation from exhaustion.

Co-Existing With Conflict & Difference

Many of the concepts that we absorb from our environment are rooted in theories of power and domination that have us fighting against ourselves and anything that doesn’t fit within this schema.

Does this sound a bit out there? Radical, perhaps? If you can relate to being on a treadmill moving very fast, but constantly hitting a wall or a ceiling that has you reconfiguring your goals only to get back on the treadmill, then you have lived what I’m talking about. Do you also sense collective despair, strife and increased intolerance in your communities? Amongst your clients? Do you feel victimized or isolated? Do you find yourself nostalgic for a bygone era of comity that was not so polarized politically?

Practice interacting with opposition over six weeks in bi-weekly sessions online in a compassionately priced training to make anti-oppression work accessible and transformative in a personalized way.

Cultivating Cultural Attunement

How Confident Are You Interacting in Exchanges About Inequality, Social Justice and Racism?

Chances are you may have an idea of what you would like these exchanges to be, but you might also have a reaction or image that reflects possibilities of polarization, dissension, distrust, antagonism, and in some cases, aggression. Do you find yourself not participating in such conversations for fear of being “cancelled” despite earnest desire to advocate for social justice?

In this workshop, I invite you to engage in dynamic interactive and collective thinking to co-create an attuned and affirming practice based on restorative and transformative strategies. I’ll help you develop concrete ways to be honest and direct in the face of conflict.

Autism Support Information Workshop

We know that much of the distress associated with autism comes from myths, late or incorrect diagnoses, misplaced expectations and lack of awareness, to name a few common causes shared by clients and those in the field providing services. Until quite recently, autism continued to be defined by presentation and neurotypical expectations of social norms regarding behavior and interaction as opposed to inside “lived” experience. This webinar is intended to demystify some of this experience particularly for those families or individuals experiencing a recent diagnosis. Specifically, we will discuss treatment options and resources and ways to center autistic voices.

In this “hands-on” workshop, I’ll help you learn therapeutically based strategies and techniques to better understand signs and symptoms of autism and strengthen family functioning and relationships.