updated 5/11/26
Roxanne Grobbel, Certified EMDR Therapist, Consultant, and Trainer, Registered Play Therapy Supervisor and Trainer, and Infant Mental Health Specialist
The Playroom Without Walls: Play Therapy in Rural Communities
Play therapy doesn’t require a perfect playroom—it requires presence, flexibility, and connection. This training, The Playroom Without Walls, focuses on how to effectively use play therapy in rural and remote settings. Through a relational, attachment-based lens and case examples, participants will learn how to meet children where they are and support healing using the materials, culture, and environment around them.
Emphasizing the importance of relationship, regulation, and context, participants will learn how children communicate trauma through play and how clinicians can respond in ways that foster safety and connection.
This training will show you how to use play therapy beyond the traditional playroom—using what’s available, honoring culture, and building connection in environments where resources may be limited.
Learning objectives
1. Identify at least three unique challenges associated with providing play therapy in rural and remote settings .
2. Apply a play therapy interventions that can be adapted for low-resource or nontraditional settings using readily available materials.
3. Explain how cultural and environmental factors influence the use of play therapy in rural and Indigenous communities.
Calm Through Connection: Using Reflection to De-Escalate Crisis Situations
Calm Through Connection: Using Reflection to De-Escalate Crisis Situations is a practical, trauma-informed training designed for therapists, teachers, and support staff working with emotionally escalated individuals. Participants will learn how to use reflective communication to reduce defensiveness, increase emotional regulation, and create safety during high-stress interactions. Grounded in neuroscience, attachment theory, and crisis-response principles, this interactive course provides immediately applicable strategies, real-world examples, and experiential exercises to improve de-escalation skills across clinical, educational, and community settings.
1. Differentiate between reflection, problem-solving, and other communication responses commonly used during escalation.
2. Demonstrate the use of reflective communication techniques to reduce emotional intensity and increase felt safety.
3. Recognize common communication patterns that unintentionally escalate crisis situations.
Updated 5/7/26
Tessa Groshoff, LMHC, REAT, EMDRIA-Approved Trainer & Consultant
The Porcupine Within
An Expressive Arts Exploration of Vulnerability, Protection & Healing
The porcupine is one of the softest animals in the forest — yet its back is covered in 30,000 quills. In this experiential session, we explore how the porcupine's biology becomes a powerful clinical metaphor for the defense mechanisms our clients carry, the somatic responses that reveal hidden wounds, and the creative pathways toward healing.
This is not a lecture — it is an immersive, hands-on journey into metaphor, body awareness, and art-making.
● The Porcupine Teaching Story — a narrative framework for understanding defense without pathology
● Vulnerability & the Soft Belly — the tender places our clients protect and the quills they've grown
● The Somatic Flinch Response — tracking the body's pre-verbal alarm system in session
● Bully & Perpetrator Dynamics — understanding harm through a trauma-informed, compassionate lens
● A Three-Part Expressive Arts Project — create, explore, and release through hands-on art-making
● Guided Reflection & Integration — somatic grounding and clinician self-reflection
Threads of Light
Weaving as a Crisis Resource for Therapists
There are moments in our work when a client arrives trembling with something they cannot name. When the nervous system has taken over and the mind is somewhere far away. When talk; as powerful as it is, is simply not the right instrument.
In those moments, we reach for a thread.
Threads of Light is a 75-minute experiential training for therapists, counselors, and expressive arts practitioners who want to bring fiber-based resourcing into their crisis work. Rooted in the wisdom of Coast Salish weaving traditions and grounded in EMDR Phase 2 resourcing and crisis-informed care, this training teaches how to trust the bilateral rhythm of the weave; and the healing that lives in the motion of our hands.
No weaving experience necessary. Come with open hands.
Updated 5/5/26
Ashley Jensen, LMFT, MBA, Director, Clinical Practice & Training, Cohen Veteran's Network, Inc.
Wearing the Family Therapy Lens
This workshop introduces participants to a systems-oriented framework for understanding and treating children and families. Drawing on foundational family therapy theory, this training explores four core concepts—process, patterns, problems, and resistance—and demonstrates how shifting from an individual to a relational perspective transforms case conceptualization and clinical intervention. Through clinical examples, video illustration, and reflective discussion, participants will learn to identify interactional patterns, reframe presenting problems, and use resistance as meaningful clinical information.
Collaborating with Parents & Caregivers in Therapy
Working with parents and caregivers is one of the most important — and most challenging — aspects of child and adolescent therapy. This workshop explores how to build and sustain a strong therapeutic alliance with parents, from the very first session through ongoing treatment. Participants will examine the role of caregiver involvement in child outcomes, learn strategies for assessing family systems and parenting dynamics, and practice skills for setting expectations, delivering feedback, and navigating difficult moments. Grounded in research and enriched by experiential practice, this workshop equips clinicians at all levels to engage parents as true partners in the therapeutic process — not obstacles to it.
Attachment, Regulation, and Repair: The Family’s Role in Trauma Care
Trauma impacts individuals within the context of relationships, families, and broader social systems. This workshop explores the essential role families play in both the development and healing of trauma across the lifespan. Using a trauma‑informed and family‑systems framework, participants will examine how attachment, caregiver functioning, and family dynamics influence regulation, recovery, and resilience. The workshop highlights evidence‑informed, family‑inclusive approaches and offers practical strategies clinicians can integrate into their work to enhance treatment outcomes while reducing caregiver blame and clinician burnout.
Updated 4/28/26
Adam Lesser LCSW, Deputy Director for Training and Implementation, The Columbia Lighthouse Project
The Columbia Protocol: A Public Health Approach to Reducing Suicide, Reducing Liability, and Redirecting Scarce Resources Across States and Nations, in Healthcare & Beyond
The Columbia Protocol (C-SSRS) is now widely recognized as a gold-standard, innovative suicide risk screening tool. It has been implemented in many systems across the US and abroad with tremendous benefit– identification of people who would have otherwise been missed while redirecting scarce resources. Evaluation in hospital-based psychiatric emergency departments when it is not necessary is costly, sometimes traumatic, and may be less effective in routing people into ongoing care. This workshop will review the development of the C-SSRS and its administration, covering its items predictive of increased risk. Participants will learn about how to administer the screening version of the tool and how to interpret results. Training will include didactic and video demonstration training techniques.
Waldo Winborn LPCC, RPT-S, RST-C/T
What Lives Beneath the Behavior: An Experiential Journey into Trauma, Meaning, and the Wisdom of Survival
In many settings, behavior is often the first and sometimes only thing seen. Yet beneath every behavior is a story shaped by experience, relationship, and survival. I invite you to move beyond surface level interpretations and into a deeper, trauma-informed understanding of human behavior.
Sitting in a developmental and relational lens, this session explores how nervous system states, attachment experiences, and intergenerational patterns shape the way we respond to the world around us. Rather than asking “What’s wrong?” we will begin to ask, “What happened?” and “What makes sense?”
Participants will engage in brief experiential moments that highlight how meaning is constructed beneath awareness, offering insight into the implicit processes that drive behavior. With reflection and shared experience, attendees will begin to recognize behavior as an adaptive expression of survival, not simply a problem to be fixed.
Designed with rural providers and diverse practice settings in mind, this plenary emphasizes practical shifts in perspective that can be applied immediately whether in clinical work, schools, or community based services.
This is not just a shift in how we understand others, but a shift in how we show up: with curiosity, humility, and a deeper respect for the wisdom that lives in survival.
The Stories We Carry: Exploring Inherited Beliefs, Identity, and Meaning Across Generations
We do not come into the world as blank slates we arrive shaped by stories, beliefs, and meanings that were formed long before us. Many of the thoughts we hold, the ways we see ourselves, and the ways we relate to others are influenced by what was taught, modeled, and carried across generations.
This experiential training invites participants to explore the often unseen influence of intergenerational beliefs on identity, relationships, and behavior. Using a trauma informed and developmental lens, we will examine how inherited narratives can serve both as sources of protection and as limitations that shape how we move through the world.
Participants will engage in a guided reflective process beginning with the prompt “I was taught…,” allowing personal and professional insights to emerge. With symbolic and visual representation, attendees will have the opportunity to externalize these beliefs, deepening awareness of how meaning is constructed and carried over time.
Rather than focusing on changing or correcting these narratives, this training emphasizes witnessing, curiosity, and honoring the adaptive role these beliefs have played. Often our efforts to change behavior before the client or therapist understands the protective/adaptive roots of the behavior can be ineffective and frustrating as we can miss its usefulness.
Participants will leave with practical, low-cost experiential strategies that can be integrated into clinical work, group settings, schools, and community-based environments especially in communities where storytelling and meaning making are central to healing.
This session offers a space to slow down, reflect, and recognize that the stories we carry are not just personal they are relational, historical, and deeply human.
Between Generations: Repairing Relational Ruptures Across Time
Relational patterns often extend beyond the present moment, shaped by experiences, attachments, and ruptures that unfold across generations. Many of the challenges individuals face in relationships distance, conflict, disconnection can reflect not only current dynamics, but also the legacy of what has been carried forward over time.
Grounded in the work of Violet Oaklander and expanded through the projective process as described by Karen Fried, this experiential training invites participants to explore intergenerational relational dynamics through both dyadic and symbolic approaches. When relational partners are present, repair can be explored directly within the dyad. When they are not, the projective process offers a pathway to access, express, and make meaning of relational experiences in a safe and contained way.
Using a trauma informed and developmental lens, participants will engage in a guided reflective process. Through writing and symbolic representation, attendees will externalize internal experiences, allowing relational patterns, emotional truths, and implicit meanings to emerge.
This training emphasizes witnessing, awareness, and the integration of disowned or unspoken experiences rather than correction or interpretation. Participants will learn practical, low-cost experiential strategies that can be adapted across clinical, school, and community settings, particularly in work involving trauma and intergenerational themes.
The Therapist as Instrument: Tracking Self in the Therapeutic Relationship
In many approaches to therapy, emphasis is placed on techniques, interventions, and models. Yet across modalities, one constant remains: the therapist is the primary instrument of the work. The quality of presence, awareness, and attunement a therapist brings into the room can shape the direction and depth of the therapeutic process.
This experiential training invites participants to explore the role of therapist self-awareness within the therapeutic relationship. Grounded in a trauma-informed and relational lens, the session examines how a therapist’s internal experience sensitivities, beliefs, emotional responses, and unresolved material can influence moments of connection, avoidance, permissiveness, or limitation within the work.
Participants will be guided to reflect on their own internal responses in clinical settings, learning to track shifts in sensation, emotion, and thought as meaningful information rather than interference. Through structured reflection and experiential exercises, attendees will begin to differentiate between what belongs to the client and what may be emerging from their own history or protective patterns.
Rather than striving for neutrality or perfection, this training emphasizes the ongoing process of self-awareness as essential to ethical and effective practice. By developing the capacity to notice and work with one’s own internal experience, therapists can deepen attunement, reduce unintended influence, and create space for clients to explore more fully.
When we, as clinicians, attend to our own emotional well-being, we offer ourselves the very experience we hope our clients find. Our ability to connect with ourselves and remain present in our own difficult spaces allows us to begin integrating the more uncomfortable parts of our work, reducing the long-term emotional toll it can carry.
Dr. Michele M. Mahr, PhD, CRC
The Benefits of Earthing: An Alternative Approach in Mental Health Counseling
When individuals connect to nature such as trees and forests, there are potential healing benefits (Merlo et al., 2025). This integrated workshop will highlight how earthing may be a positive treatment approach to assist individuals struggling with mental health concerns, including addiction and substance abuse. The presentation will explain the benefits of earthing and how these positive effects may be optimistically impactful for clinicians who are assisting individuals coping with mental health concerns, SUD, or just overall quality of life. From a pragmatic perspective, clinicians could suggest outdoor “barefoot sessions” to patients, with weather and conditions permitting. Ober et al. (2010) have suggested that going barefoot for a minimum of 30 or 40 minutes daily can significantly decrease pain and stress.
Earthing, or grounding, is a healing strategy that involves centering and relaxing the body by connecting our bare feet and skin directly with the earth (Hart, 2024). Earthing (grounding)
is associated with the basic activity of walking barefoot outdoors and/or working, sleeping, or relaxing indoors with having bare skin contact with conductive mats, bed sheets, body bands, and patches that replicates an individual being outside barefoot (Chevalier, 2015). The items are connected to the Earth via a special cord. One end of the cord snaps on to the product and the other end can be attached to a ground rod or plugged into the ground port of a grounded wall outlet, according to the authors of the Earthing book, Ober et al., 2010.
During this workshop, the presenter will demonstrate “earthing” for participants to observe how grounding is done with a grounding mat. There will be discussion questions and a brief grounding meditation before and after the session for participants to self-reflect on their own present moment awareness during this workshop.
Examining the Benefits of Ecotherapy: The Power of Nature
The purpose of this integrated workshop is to educate participants on the numerous positive effects of ecotherapy for all individuals, specifically, those who are coping with mental health concerns. The presenter will inform the audience on various strategies within ecotherapy that may be viable options for individuals who are interested in connecting with nature to improve their overall wellbeing. Unfortunately, the high stress of urban life and environmental pollution have facilitated people’s life pressure, leading to a series of physical and mental health issues (Chen et al., 2025). I propose that individuals who are eager to empower their own well-being can tap into an affordable and accessible resource to assist in dealing with life stressors: the connection with nature. This workshop will focus on forest bathing, yoga in the forest, grounding, and greenspaces, all of which are some examples of ecotherapy.
‘Ecotherapy (sometimes called green care) comprises nature-based interventions in a variety of natural settings. Ecotherapy initiatives usually consist of a facilitated, specific intervention’ (Bragg et al., 2013)
“Ecotherapy is a way of coming home, in the broadest sense, to ourselves as a part of nature.” (Berry, 2023)
Forest bathing is one form of ecotherapy. It has been documented in the literature to improve mental and physical health, not only by lowering blood pressure, improved sleep and increasing immunity, but also by assisting in depression, anxiety and stress. In forest therapy in the form of mountain climbing or hiking, the physical burden on the older adult and women is high, and monitoring safety management is required to manage potential injuries (Chen et al., 2025)
The forest itself is filled with plenty of elements that add to a sense of comfort, including beautiful scenery, fresh air, pleasant birdsong, plant antibacterial agents and negative oxygen ions. For example, practicing yoga in the forest is a holistic exercise and relaxation technique, which may reduce and prevent anxiety and depression, and also contribute for individuals to embrace environmental factors of the forest to harmoniously promote overall human health. Another example to support ecotherapy was in a recent article by Berry (2023). The author noted that a research study demonstrated that frequent visits to natural spaces over four weeks were all positively correlated with wellbeing, decreased experiences of mental distress and a lower likelihood of using medication for depression.
Lastly, the presenter will lead a mindfulness exercise within the presentation that can also be done in nature. Participants will learn about exercises such as “the sit spot”, “meditation in nature”, and “grounding in nature.” Their will be time throughout the workshop for comments, questions and discussions.