Conference
Clinical Reflections
Saturday, February 22, 2020, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm (3 CEs) ~ Silver Spring Civic Building at Veterans Plaza, Silver Spring, MD
Please join your friends and fellow ICP+P members to hear them share their scholarly, creative and clinical work with the community. This year we’re proud to present speakers with cutting edge work. Shoshana Ringel will share her work with a patient suffering with relational trauma using telehealth as the main modality. Dana Harron will share her experience of writing and publishing a book about eating disorders. Martha Gibbons will present a moving portrayal of her internal process in the face of a loved one’s journey into end of life. Each session will have a Q & A period allowing for a collaborative process and community engagement.
Shoshana Ringel will describe a video assisted treatment with a patient who presents with a history of childhood trauma, shame, and dissociation. She will explore with participants the ways in which the absence of embodied intersubjective experiences between patient and therapist variously hinder and facilitate a deeper therapeutic process.
Dana Harron will discuss the book publication process as she experienced it and will outline the steps involved in using this method to bring your message to the larger community.
Martha Gibbons will discuss how terminal illness provokes not only the individual who is dying, but challenges those most affected by the impending loss as well. The hallmarks of maturation and development over the course of life – empathy, humor, transience and wisdom-are studied within the framework of a relationship that has endured forty years and is threatened by imminent expiry. The exploration examines the impact of these concepts on both the individual who will die and the one who will be left behind. Celebrating the power and possibility of life, the journey leads to a discovery of the ways in which dying is a gift to both members of the relationship.
At the conclusion of this conference, participants will be able to:
- Discuss the pros and cons of video assisted treatment with survivors of childhood trauma.
- Explain the purpose, nature and components of a book proposal and the steps involved in the book publication process. Also explain how to communicate your message most effectively to the public in the book format.
- Describe four of the traits that Lachman identifies as the hallmarks of successful maturation and development over the course of life.
- Embody and identify particular limitations imposed by a terminal illness (ALS) through an experiential exercise.
This conference is appropriate for mental health professionals at all levels of experience and offers 3 CEs.
Suicidality: Changing the Narrative
with Simone Jacobs, MSW, LCSW-C and Joanne Zucchetto, LICSW, LCSW-C
Friday, February 14, 2020, 10:00 am – 1:15 pm (3 CEs) ~ ICP+P Office, 4601 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 8, Washington, DC 20008

America is in the midst of a suicide crisis. Last year, the Center for Disease Control released statistics showing that the rate of suicide increased by 33% between 1999 and 2017. Since 2008, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for all ages. That rate only increases when there is a history of childhood abuse and neglect. Most therapists received little, if any training, about how to manage a suicidal crisis. Most of the training that is available focuses on ‘fixing’ the problem of suicide through prediction and prevention techniques.
In this presentation we will ask our participants to re-consider current understanding of suicidal behaviors as the problem, and demonstrate through case examples, how suicidality holds meaning for our clients, that requires exploration. We will present techniques to help clinicians work through the many emotional, practical, and ethical problems that can arise from an acute or chronic suicidal crisis. We hope that clinicians will leave with a new language and tools for a new kind of conversation about suicide, one that leaves both survivor and therapist with a sense of hope, in what has traditionally been a hopelessness inducing experience.
Integrative Psychotherapy with Autistic Children and Their Families, Emphasizing Neurodiversity Principles
with Tom Holman, PhD
Sunday, March 1, 2020, 1:00 – 4:15 pm (3 CEs) ~ ICP+P Office, 4601 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 8, Washington, DC 20008

This short course will feature discussion of neurodiversity, psychotherapy, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The course will begin with a brief background on ASD and neurodiversity. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences with neurodiversity and neurotypical privilege.
Therapeutic work is illustrated in the treatment of a moderately-functioning 10 year old boy. The patient had two family members with ASD, and neurodiversity was extremely important to the family.
The therapist’s subjective experiences are emphasized, particularly since the patient insisted that he hated the therapist throughout the treatment. The meanings of his avoidance, meltdowns, and concrete demands, as well as therapeutic responses to these, will be discussed. The therapist’s mistakes and recovery will be discussed. The evolution of patient-therapist relatedness through largely nonverbal means is emphasized. The necessity of the therapist’s relatedness, engagement with, and learning from the parents is also illustrated. We will discuss the need for more than one type of data and more than one theoretical approach.
Deepening Psychodynamic Clinical Engagement: Reflections on Contemporary Models of Transference and Countertransference
with Elizabeth M Carr, APRN, MSN, BC & Ruth Migler, MA, MSW
Sunday, March 29, 2020, 2:00 – 4:00 pm (2 CEs) ~ ICP+P Office, 4601 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 8, Washington, DC 20008
We will begin by exploring how participants think about transference and countertransference. What importance does a focus on these phenomena play in their clinical work? Although both concepts are considered to be foundational aspects of a psychodynamic approach, therapists may feel uncertain about how to apply them clinically as psychoanalytic theory has evolved and changed. We will share a contemporary model which views these concepts as fundamentally related to subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In this, transference is viewed as the patient’s subjective experience of the therapist and countertransference as the therapist’s subjective experience of the patient.
We will focus very carefully on the myriad ways the patient’s experience of the therapist is expressed in ongoing clinical interactions. We will provide a range of clinical vignettes that illuminate how to identify and work with the patient’s subjective reactions to the therapist. We see these implicit and explicit moments as pivotal to the process of deepening the exploratory work of psychodynamic therapy. On a parallel track, we focus on the therapist’s ability to face intense personal responses as they emerge in the heat of clinical encounters. We will illuminate the clinical practices associated with listening for, recognizing, and wearing the patient’s attributions. Our approach calls for the therapist to be authentically open—open to one’s own subjective reactions as well as to how these reactions may influence or be influenced by that of the suffering patient.
Through participation in this short course, we hope to expand participants’ capacities for understanding complex clinical interactions through an intersubjective lens and to come to realize deeper engagements with themselves and with their patients.
2019-2020 ICP+P Training
- February 14, 2020, Short Course: “Understanding the Paradox of Surviving Childhood Trauma: Techniques and Tools for Working with Suicidality and Dissociation” with Simone Jacobs, LCSW-C and Joanne Zucchetto, LICSW, ICP+P Office, 10:00am-1:15 pm, 3 CEs. Register Here
- February 22, 2020, Conference: “Clinical Reflections” with Shoshana Ringel, PhD, Dana Harron, PsyD, and Martha Blechar Gibbons, PhD, APRN, BC, Silver Spring Civic Building, 9:00am-12:30pm, 3 CEs. Register Here
- March 1, 2020, Short Course: “Integrative Psychotherapy with Autistic Children and their Families using Neurodiversity Principles” with Tom Holman, PhD, ICP+P Office, 1:00-4:15 pm, 3 CEs. Register Here
- March 29, 2020, Short Course: “Deepening Engagement in Psychodynamic Therapy: Reflections on Contemporary Models of Transference & Countertransference” with Elizabeth Carr, APRN, MSN, BC and Ruth Migler, MA, MSW, ICP+P Office, 2:00-4:00 pm, 2 CEs. Register Here
- May 1, 2020, Pre-Conference: “Misogyny, Hatred and Envy” with Adrienne Harris, PhD
- May 2, 2020, Conference: “Gender Fluidity and Gender Fixed: Contemporary Intersectional and Psychoanalytic Models of Gender and Gender Development” with Adrienne Harris, PhD. Georgetown University Conference Center, 9:00 am-5:00 pm.
- May 2020, Short Course: “Self Psychology & Aggression: Keeping Culture in Mind” with Marie Hellinger, LICSW and Elizabeth Carr, APRN, MSN, BC, ICP+P Office.
- September 26, 2020, Conference: “The Use of Somatic Approaches to Augment and Deepen Psychodynamic Psychotherapy” with Amy Gladstone, LCSW, PhD, 9 am to 12:30 pm.
- Saturday, November 7, 2020, Short Course: “It’s OK to act it out: Exploring our counter-transference with psychodrama techniques” with Monica Meerbaum, PhD, 1:00 -4:15 pm
- December 5, 2020, Conference: Bruce Wine Conference on Ethics with the Red Well Theater Group, Silver Spring Civic Building, 9 am-12:30 pm.
- February 6, 2021, Conference: “Imagination, Mentalizing, and Metaphor” with Robert Benedetti, PhD and Team, Silver Spring Civic Building, 9:00 am-12:30 pm.
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