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Maintaining an Ethical Balance:
The Unfinished Business of Our Childhoods, Healing the Helping Professional's Childhood Trauma and Attachment Wounds
Wednesday
Sept. 20th, 2023
8:30am MST - 12:30pm MST
Face to Face Event
3 Ethics Credits
Scroll to learn more and register!
Hosted and brought to you by the Borderland CEU Enhancement Social Work Committee in partnership with the Diversity and Resiliency Institute of El Paso (DRIEP), a program of the Borderland Rainbow Center.
This event is being offered to enhance knowledge and skills to maintain ethical standards while working within the context of a divisive climate. Come learn from legal professionals as well as local helping professionals on best practices and ethical implications for work with your clients!
Founded in 2017, our committee is made up of social workers from within the El Paso community. Our goal is to provide our local community of helping professionals the opportunity to attend meaningful and relevant workshops/conferences and obtain continuing education units for their professional licensure requirements. Come and learn from experts about these topics and network with other local professionals.
Event Details and Registration
When:
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
8:30 AM – 12:30PM - all times are Mountain Standard Time
Where:
EPCC Administrative Service Center
9050 Viscount, Blvd
El Paso, TX 79925
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Social Workers, LPC's, LMFT's, students and other professionals working in or planning to work in health & mental health care settings or any other human organization settings.
Maintaining and Ethical Inner Balance:
The Unfinished Business of Our Childhoods, Healing the Helping Professional's Childhood Trauma and Attachment Wounds
Presented by Adam McCormick, Ph.D., MSSW, BSW, Associate Professor of Social Work, St. Edward's University
This presentation will examine the ways in which the initial imprints of our earliest attachment and trauma wounds can manifest in our work and relationships as we help to heal the trauma wounds of others. In his seminal work, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, notes that "scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening." This presentation will give specific attention to the unique ways that helpers will often gravitate toward the most familiar and recognizable aspects of their childhoods. Participants will explore the ways in which qualities such as selflessness, people-pleasing, workaholicism, never saying, "no" and others that are thought of as reflections of our greatest strengths are often reflections of a disconnection from our authentic selves.
This workshop will present a model for healing that seeks to help participants to identify the trauma and attachment adaptations they developed in childhood and why they were necessary, honor those adaptations for what they did for us, explore how those adaptations show up in our current work and relationships, and learn to let go of those that have worn out their welcome or no longer needed and reconnect with the parts of their authentic selves that they had to disconnect from as children.
Objectives:
1. Examine the survival nature of early childhood attachment and trauma wounds and the lasting imprints that they leave in the relationships and work of helping professionals.
2. Explore the ways in which helping professionals often recreate the most familiar and recognizable dynamic of their childhood by recreating their attachment and trauma adaptations in their work.
3. Consider the ways that helping professions (often unknowingly and unintentionally) reinforce many of the most unhealthy and toxic dynamics of childhood.
4. Explore strategies for healing that seeks to help participants reconnect with those parts of their authentic self that they disconnected from in an effort to attach and/or survive as children.
For accommodation requests, to register and pay by check, or to request a PO,
contact Bianca Castrejon (bcastrejon3@utep.edu)