When

Friday, March 22, 2024 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM EDT
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Where

Wholesome Healing

770 Ritchie Hwy
Suite W-15
Severna Park, MD 21146

Contact

Quinn Smelser 
Maryland/DC Association For Play Therapy 
(512) 739-9426 
mddca4pt@gmail.com
  

MD/DC APT Spring In Person Workshop: 

Understanding & Transcending Compassion Fatigue in Play Therapy: Reigniting the Professional Spark. 

Please join the MD/DC Association for Play Therapy for our spring workshop on Friday, March 22, 2024 from 9:00am - 4:30pm EST. 


Workshop Fees with CE Cost Included

There will be 6 Contact Hours upon receiving course evaluation.

The Maryland/DC Association for Play Therapy is an APT-Approved Provider 17-522 and maintains responsibility for the program.

There will be a 60-minute lunch break and 15-minute break during the training.

  

Workshop Fees: 

$125 (Current MD/DC APT members will receive a special 5% discount with code MDDCMEMBER)  

Cancellation Policy: 

Due to the limited amount of registrants allowed, once registered and paid, there will be no refunds granted. 

Presented by: 

Vanessa Kellner is the owner of Wholesome Healing, a private practice specializing in play therapy, located in Severna Park, MD. She is an author, play therapist and play therapy supervisor, credentialed as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor™ (RPT-S™) through APT, and certified as a Child-Centered Play Therapist (CCPT) through NIRE and UNT. Vanessa has over 10 years in the field of counseling. She co-authored a book chapter on how supervisors can recognize and address compassion fatigue in play therapists. She is also a registered yoga teacher who brings her expertise and experience in yoga, to her clinical work. She is passionate about her roles as a play therapist, supervisor, and practice owner, but most importantly in her role as a mom of 3.
 
Workshop Description:
 
It's a lot. We know how much you love your work with children and their families. Providing play therapy is simultaneously rewarding and can be incredibly energy depleting. We all have heard the well-known quote by Wayne Dyer, "You can't give away what you don't have." As clinicians, it is our duty to ensure that we are of sound emotional and mental health, so that we can fully show up for clients. Ongoing learning to enhance clinical skills and expand knowledge of therapeutic models is necessary. Just as vital is ongoing learning about how to properly assess and attend to our own compassion capacity as clinicians. This foundation of emotional and mental wellness in the clinician is directly related to client outcomes. We know with children in play therapy, that they will only show as much as they sense their play therapist can see / tolerate. Therefore expanding our own awareness of self and continually checking in with our own functioning as clinicians, allows for clients to reach deeper levels of expression, growth, and healing. In order to be able to clearly see the experiences and needs of clients, we must first understand our own. This is not a one time phenomenon, but a practice that must be cultivated for ongoing awareness and growth in the clinician. 

In this unique and timely training play therapists will have the opportunity to identify and understand how and why the work of play therapy impacts us so immensely. Play therapy is unique in that the clinician not only hears about client's experiences, but often is witness to seeing (or even participating in) the experiences being played out. Being so close to client experiences in this way can ignite many feelings in the therapist. Not being aware of how the therapist's own feelings and experiences are being triggered by process the work of the client, can lead to many problems, including but not limited to: the therapist not seeing/ or misinterpreting what the child is showing them, lack of awareness around counter transference that occurs, and directing the play due to the therapist's own needs to take control of the external (instead of addressing their own internal processes that are occurring). In this presentation, we will consider how when working with children, we as clinicians must take into consideration our own experience of the work. Clinicians will learn how to be more aware of their own experiences, and how to attend to their own need for compassion and care, so that they can continue to show up for their child clients. 

Preventing compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma will be addressed through the lens of wellness so that play therapists gain a greater understanding of how their overall health and clinical stamina can be maintained and even improved so that they can keep doing their best work; focusing on helping children heal through play therapy. In this course, participants will have multiple authentic learning experiences. 

Learning Objectives: 

Participants will be able to:

1) Identify common triggers for compassion fatigue in the clinical work of play th erapy. 

2) Define compassion inequity and how this leads to compassion fatigue. 

3) Identify how compassion inequity occurs and how to identify its presence in self. 

4) Describe how play therapists can prevent compassion fatigue from occurring. 

5) Describe the difference between self-care and informed self-care. 

6) Identify at least two practices that can be used personally - to assess for the presence of compassion equity in self.