Fall Conference: Culturally Competent Trauma Treatment

This WSSCSW fall conference offers the opportunity to learn more about treating clients with complex trauma, through a lens of a strength-based, self-aware, culturally competent model of therapeutic relationship.

The presenter brings her vast experience working with survivors of childhood trauma together with her definition of cultural competence, to help therapists strengthen their understanding of themselves and their clients. She defines cultural competence as the therapist’s capacity to be self-aware in regards to her or his own identities and cultural norms, the therapists abilities to be sensitive to the nuances of the realities of human difference, and the therapist’s capacity to possess an epistemology of difference allowing for creative responses to the client. This model of cultural competence is inherently integrative in that it focuses on people, not theories, and on distress, dysfunction, strength, and resilience, not specific diagnoses.

In this framework, cultural competence does not consist of learning rules and algorithms about how to work with a particular group of people. It does require a therapist to own and analyze her or his own biases, and to accept the reality of bias as an aspect of being human. This definition does require therapists to understand and own their own experiences of privilege, and to work through guilt or shame about privilege so as not to bring those problematic emotions into the therapeutic exchange. Culturally competent therapists develop awareness of what they represent to their clients and what those clients represent to them in the context of inter-sectional identity.

Conference Objectives

• Understand how culturally competent practice enhances clinical effectiveness through improvement of the therapeutic alliance.
•  Develop enhanced awareness of culturally informed countertransference and transference dynamics as they play out in therapy, especially when different is non-obvious.
• Be able to utilize a variety of definitions of what can be traumatic, using a culturally competent lens for clinical practice.
  
• Understand how to use the ADDRESSING model in a trauma informed clinical practice.
  
  

About the Presenter
Dr. Laura Brown, a clinical psychologist in Seattle, has spent her career working with survivors of childhood trauma. A recipient of many awards for her work in trauma treatment and feminist therapy, she is the author of 11 books, including Feminist Psychotherapy, and dozens of articles and chapters. She founded the Fremont Community Therapy Project and is a therapist, trainer, consultant and supervisor.

CEU's Offered