All Webinars

Chronic disease affects far more than just the body—it takes a toll on one’s mental health, emotional well-being, and daily functioning. As a mental health professional, you play a crucial role in helping patients navigate these challenges, yet traditional medical care often overlooks psychological and behavioral factors. This training equips you with the skills to recognize and address the emotional, psychological, behavioral, and even some of the physical barriers that impact chronic disease management. Learn to utilize a comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment, integrating physical, emotional, social, and environmental factors to develop more effective, patient-centered care plans.
 

Through this interactive session, you’ll discover at least three evidence-based interventions that improve coping, adherence, and quality of life. Gain practical tools to motivate patients in following prescribed treatment regimens and make sustainable lifestyle changes. Plus, familiarize yourself with the SBAR method for effective interdisciplinary communication, ensuring seamless collaboration between mental health and medical providers. Don’t miss this opportunity to expand your expertise and improve patient outcomes!

The practice of psychotherapy places significant demands on the practitioner. Clinical work requires advanced education and rests on a foundation of knowledge of the fundamental and advanced domains of clinical science and psychotherapeutics. Knowledge acquisition is a continual journey to advance one’s therapeutic effectiveness. Much attention is paid to traditional modes of knowledge acquisition for developing expertise and seeking mastery through structured and self-guided learning experiences, less guidance is available for other aspects of therapeutic development. While there is abundant research on the efficacy of various approaches to psychotherapy, there is some evidence to suggest that the therapist accounts for a significant degree of the variance that determines therapeutic results. The top therapists get better results and an estimated up to 40% do harm. Clinical expertise is greater than technical knowledge, as it requires advanced decision making and judgement. It is our belief that consistently positive results and the gratification that ensues is what can inoculate practitioners from burnout. In this seminar participants will explore their journey of self-development and ways of viewing the world based on a balance between the lenses of science and art. You will be guided by an early career and late career psychotherapist.

When we joined the ranks of helping professionals, one of the last things that probably crossed our minds was what, if any, risk we would face in our careers. Would our forensic patient who had killed their parents ever corner us in a room and try to assault us? Would our inpatient teenager ever cyber-stalk us online? Would our outpatient client ever try to kill us in our office? Daunting questions to think about; however, these are the very questions that we should be addressing while also helping our client population in need. This course looks back over the past decades to review where mental health treatment has come and what about those shifts may contribute to our vulnerability in our professions; it helps identify the vulnerabilities we should be addressing; and it offers suggestions of actions we can take to protect our work, our clients, our livelihood, and our lives. In addition to receiving the training and education we need to make us the best helping professionals we can be, we also need training such as this to help protect ourselves from any harm that could come in the course of our work.

"I really enjoyed Dr. McDuff's presentation style and was impressed with the clarity of his explanations."-Larry D., Psychologist, New Mexico 

Substance abuse is one of the most common clinical problems of patients who present for treatment.  These patients struggle with a life threatening, clinically complex problem that is subject to a variety of physiological and psychological factors.  This webinar will focus on treating people plagued by complex additions issues.  You will learn about the risk and protective factors related to addiction.  There will also be useful suggestions for assessing and treating addicted patients.  Adolescent addiction will be discussed.  There will also be material on motivational interviewing and effective stress control.

"I really enjoyed Dr. McDuff's presentation style and was impressed with the clarity of his explanations."-Larry D., Psychologist, New Mexico 

Substance abuse is one of the most common clinical problems of patients who present for treatment.  These patients struggle with a life threatening, clinically complex problem that is subject to a variety of physiological and psychological factors.  This webinar will focus on treating people plagued by complex additions issues.  You will learn about the risk and protective factors related to addiction.  There will also be useful suggestions for assessing and treating addicted patients.  Adolescent addiction will be discussed.  There will also be material on motivational interviewing and effective stress control.

“This is a solid and well presented program Good detail on how high achieving people acquire and maintain those skills and level of performance.” -Phillip B., Professional Counselor, Maryland

Although psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians interested in sports practice already have the necessary general skills to help competitive athletes deal with adversity and the multitude of emotions that sports can elicit, most typically they lack the sports-specific knowledge necessary to truly help these patients and clients. This seminar will provide mental health providers interested in sports practice with the necessary tools to improve life balance and achieve peak performance in athletes and other high achievers.  Using the expanding evidence-base from neuroscience and sports medicine and case studies from all competitive levels, eight core competencies as well as important dimensions of sports culture, team structure and function, and the shifting intensity and pressure of competition will be covered.

“This is a solid and well presented program Good detail on how high achieving people acquire and maintain those skills and level of performance.” -Phillip B., Professional Counselor, Maryland

Although psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians interested in sports practice already have the necessary general skills to help competitive athletes deal with adversity and the multitude of emotions that sports can elicit, most typically they lack the sports-specific knowledge necessary to truly help these patients and clients. This seminar will provide mental health providers interested in sports practice with the necessary tools to improve life balance and achieve peak performance in athletes and other high achievers.  Using the expanding evidence-base from neuroscience and sports medicine and case studies from all competitive levels, eight core competencies as well as important dimensions of sports culture, team structure and function, and the shifting intensity and pressure of competition will be covered.

Therapy with adults or couples with children frequently presents opportunities to help parents understand and improve parent-child dynamics. Parenting reveals implicit and unconscious expectations about raising children that are often culturally determined, and based on each parent’s own childhood experiences. This seminar draws on theories from systems, object relations and the parenting literature to show how unconscious factors get played out in the parent-child relationship. Therapists can help parents identify ways that their own childhood experiences, and aspects of the marital relationship, are played out in the parenting process. Through presentation of theory, and case examples, participants will be able to understand how to raise and explore parenting dynamics in the therapy session, and help parents find new ways of relating to their children and each other. This is particularly import in work with highly conflicted couples, even those who have divorced but have difficulty co-parenting.

Many clients who enter individual or couple therapy have difficulty managing emotions. This workshop will focus on the processes involved in emotional dysregulation, drawing on current findings in the fields of neurobiology and emotional memory research. Students will learn about universal triggers as well as ways to explore personal triggers that lead to poorly managed emotional reactions.
 

These findings will be translated to clinical interventions through the theoretical lenses of mindfulness, object relations and narrative therapies. Case presentations will demonstrate ways to apply these insights in individuals and couple therapy to demonstrate how clients can be guided to subdue strong emotions and generate more thoughtful and appropriate responses.

Most therapists recognize the power of the past as it is revealed in the way partners respond to each other. The therapist can be baffled by emotionally intense reactions that seem way out of proportion to the moment.  Repeated conflict themes also suggest that the ways partners interpret each other’s behavior can only be understood by exploring their individual lived experience. This seminar presents an overview of an object relations approach to working with couples, and describes dynamics that are unique to this clinical approach. You will understand how unfinished business from the past and each partner’s relational past can unfold in patterns and postures that work against intimacy. You will also be able to understand how extreme emotional reactions and black & white thinking create instability and specific relationship problems. The seminar will explain a range of techniques that can help couples acquire new ways of responding to each other and strengthening intimacy. You will also understand how the therapist’s intuition and reaction to partners is an important source of information that allows insight into the core themes and facilitates the partners ability to heal past wounds while forging deeper intimacy.