We will accept a maximum of 15 participants to maintain the intimacy cultivated by WTCI clinical training. This virtual seminar provides 8.5 credit hours for qualifying practitioners*.
Fridays Weekly, February 28 to April 4, 2025, 9:00am-10:30am EST
General Admission Fee: $250.00 | WTCI Member Fee: $212.50
Event Description:
After forty years of critical and expansive thinking about the body, WTCI brings you the next iteration of our annual online seminar: Body Talk. This seminar for practitioners is made up of five dimensions: Nourishment, Embodiment, Technology, Illness, and Aging. Incorporating intersectional feminist theory and practice, we provide skills for helping clients develop a freer and more positive relationship to the body amid life’s vicissitudes. The importance of social location and identities are addressed throughout. The seminar will deepen participants’ understanding of bodies in the context of the personal, the public and the political.
We will accept a maximum of 15 participants to maintain the intimacy cultivated by WTCI clinical training. This virtual seminar provides 8.5 credit hours for qualifying practitioners*.
Class 1: Welcome: February 28, 2025
Introduction and Overview
Debra Kram-Fernandez, Ph. D., LCSW, 200- RYT and Marisa Mabli, LCSW
This first session includes an overview of WTCI and the seminar. We will share our hopes and dreams for the program, and learning the Social Location of the individuals who are taking the class with you.
Objectives:
1. Become familiar with the structure and expectations of the 6-week seminar.
2. Discuss and experience self-identities, others’ identities, and commonalities and differences among seminar participants.
Class 2: March 7, 2025, Nourishment
Reconnecting clients to their sense of attunement
Ruchi Amin, LCSW
Attunement can be interrupted by social and interpersonal dynamics, and this class will explore ways to support clients in reconnecting with their sense of attunement.
We will explore nourishment on two dimensions; the emotional and the physical, and the connections between the two. We will address the relational, social, and cultural forces that influence the development of eating problems and how to navigate this in the therapy room.
Objectives:
1. Understand psychoanalytic theory with feminist lens as it relates to working with eating problems.
2. Understand clinical interventions that can be utilized in the therapeutic space.
Class 3: March 14, 2025, Embodiment
Embodiment and Empowerment for All Body Colors
Valerie Coleman-Palansky, LCSW, MS Ed, LMT, Registered Jin Shin Do(r) Acupressure Practitioner
Embodiment and Empowerment for All Body Colors will focus on understanding embodiment in people inhabiting a body of color and the process of maintaining an empowered sense of self in the face of traumatic racism. We will examine the embodiment of racial trauma and related intersectionality for both POC and white therapists in our work with clients using early and current cisgender and queer, Black feminist/womanist theorists, artists, and writers for inspiration. Further, from our own embodiment of these prompts we will define and integrate our own inclusive practice model that encourages empowerment and Selfhood.
Objectives:
1. Identify how racial trauma is experienced in all bodies.
2. Apply an empowerment model that helps ourselves and our clients address individualized racial trauma.
Class 4: March 21, 2025, Technology
Physical Bodies and Virtual Bodies, the Body and Beyond, Somatic Countertransference: Bringing the Therapist's Body into Zoom
Andrea Gitter, MA, LCAT, BC-DMT
Our new normal of providing teletherapy via 2-dimensional platforms has raised challenges and presented new opportunities for embodied psychotherapy. We will explore therapists’ embodiment and its effect on treatment. We will focus on idiosyncratic posture, gesture, cadence, prosody, and other non-verbal/somatic “utterances” to unearth what they reveal and how they influence our patients’ treatment. Attention will be paid to how body/psyche develops, including how family history, gender and culture are written on and expressed through the body/self. Attention will also be paid to non-verbal/somatic signifiers and how this helps access viscerally experienced countertransference and facilitates kinesthetic empathy. What do we do when this information isn’t fully available because we’re not in the room together?
Objectives:
1. Learn to differentiate between the visual body and the visceral body and how they can reveal countertransference reactions.
2. Learn, through clinical examples, how to make use of these somatic manifestations of psychic structure, both their own and their patients’ and to implement interventions in this relational “dance” within an intersubjective framework.
Class 5: March 28, 2025, Illness
Psychology of Somatic Illness – how to work in psychotherapy with pain and the body?
Aleksandra Rayska, PhD
Somatic illness is often not considered a part of psychotherapy, but rather belonging in a physician's office. However, the impact of chronic illness or pain on mental health cannot be understated. In this seminar, we will explore psychological underpinnings of chronic illness and pain, and we will think together about how to address them in clinical work. We will deepen our interest in the meaning behind the physical symptoms and allow ourselves to be curious about the psychology of pain and chronic illness. Together we will explore the role of bodily communication and symptom development using clinical material.
Objectives:
1. Expand understanding of somatic issues in psychotherapy.
2. Explore psychological underpinnings of illness and pain and consider how to address it in clinical work
Class 6: April 4, 2025, Aging
Cultural Inequities /Constructs and the Aging Body
Debra Kram-Fernandez, Ph. D., LCSW, 200- RYT and Lela Zaphiropoulos, LCSW, ACSW
This seminar has considered the body across dimensions of nourishment, illness, technology, and embodiment. In all these dimensions, we/our bodies are aging. There is a cultural predisposition to ask the question, “What’s wrong with me /my body?” If we shift the question to simply “What’s wrong?” and look at aging against the backdrop of the social and cultural constructs as well as economic inequities in our current society, we allow for expansive thinking that engenders curiosity instead of depression about our changing physical bodies. We allow for exploration/celebration of lived experience instead of acceptance of invisibility, and we allow for tapping the wisdom of older people instead of devaluing their worth. This class addresses aging and the aging body, this universal experience, both personally and in our clinical work. (90 minutes).
Objectives:
1. Demonstrate a greater understanding of the social-cultural constructions/constrictions about aging and the body.
2. Discuss the commonalities and differences between our aging bodies, our clients’ aging bodies, and clinical implications.
About the instructors
Ruchi Amin, LCSW
Ruchi Amin is a clinical social worker who works at the New School University as a supervising clinician and maintains a private practice in the West Village. Additionally, she does clinical social work consulting for corporations. She received her master’s degree at New York University. Ruchi has completed postgraduate training with WTCI and The Washington Square Institute. She became interested in the rapidly shifting social, political, and media landscape that often creates barriers to wellness in individuals and in maintaining healthy communities. Her practice is informed by incorporating socio-political, racial, cultural, and normative gender roles in considering wellness of individuals and communities. She is a former WTCI Board member and sits on the Diversity Committee and the Educational Committee for WTCI.
Valerie Coleman-Palansky, LCSW, MS Ed, LMT
Valerie Coleman-Palansky is a retired NYC public high school Social Worker. Valerie is also a registered Jin Shin Do® BodyMind Acupressure® practitioner. Along the way she attended the Embodied Psyche training program at WTCI. Valerie blends all skills in her private practice specializing in treating trauma and living a quality life. For fun she enjoys pottery, knitting, spinning, and reading romance novels.
Andrea Gitter, MA, LCAT, BC-DMT
Andrea Gitter is on the Board and faculty of WTCI. She has a master's degree in dance/movement therapy from New York University. Her graduate training, along with her postgraduate training and practice in feminist relational therapy, influence her work integrating psyche and soma with an awareness of how cultural prescriptions become written on and expressed through our body/psyches. She has a particular interest in somatic countertransference. She has a specialty in working with eating and body issues and is the co-author of Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model and several articles on the subject of eating and body.
Debra Kram-Fernandez, PhD, LCSW, MS-DMT, 200-RYT
Debra Kram-Fernandez obtained her PhD in Social Welfare from the City University of New York Graduate Center/Hunter College School of Social Work after obtaining her LCSW-R. She also holds a MSW and MS in Dance-Movement Therapy from Hunter College. Dr. Kram-Fernandez is a graduate of WTCI’s postgraduate training program. Her areas of expertise include understanding serious mental illness, group work facilitation, and diversity in human services. She is currently an Associate Professor at SUNY Empire State University and has a small private practice.
Marisa Mabli, LCSW
Marisa Mabli is an alumna of WTCI’s postgraduate training program. She completed her Master's in Social Work at Simmons University and had additional training in Spirituality and Social Work from New York University. She has worked in college mental health, currently part time at the New School and previously at Barnard College. In her private practice, she specializes in women's issues, particularly in emerging adulthood and life transitions, gender, and sexual identities, and eating and body issues. She is a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and offers clinical support around climate change anxiety. In previous roles, she has worked with adolescents, people who struggle with substance use issues, and women experiencing homelessness. She also facilitates clinical supervision with social work and psychology trainees.
Aleksandra Rayska, PhD
Aleksandra Rayska graduated with a degree in clinical psychology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai. Dr. Rayska completed additional postgraduate training at WTCI. Prior to finding her home at Mount Sinai, she completed her predoctoral internship at Manhattan Psychiatric Center. Drawing on her previous professional life as a dance movement therapist, she writes about the relationship between the mind and the body and works with patients to strengthen their awareness and experience of this connection. She has expertise working with patients impacted by trauma and emotion regulation, as well as body image and eating issues. She also works with patients to explore and address the psychological underpinnings of psychosomatic disorders and issues related to chronic pain.
Lela Zaphiropoulos, LCSW, ACSW
Lela Zaphiropoulos, psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice for over 35 years working with individuals, couples, groups, is a WTCI Board and faculty member as well as co-director emeritus of the postgraduate training program. She leads didactic, experiential workshops on issues of aging and mortality.Prior to private practice she worked at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital and at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. She completed postgraduate training at The Institute for the Study of Psychotherapy. She is co-author of Eating Problems: A Feminist, Psychoanalytic Model (1995), and of Kids, Carrots, and Candy: A Practical, Positive Approach to Raising Children Free of Food and Weight Problems (revised 2012). She is a founding member of Endangered Bodies NY, a global initiative that challenged the industries that promote body insecurity.
Participants should be prepared to join with audio and video. This is an interactive workshop. Please contact WTCI at admin@wtci-nyc.org if you require accommodations.
*Qualifying practitioners: WTCI has been recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for NYS licensed mental health counselors #MHC-0102 and creative arts therapists #CAT-0018, by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Workers as an approved provider of continuing education for NYS licensed social workers #SW-0361, and by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0049.
*Refund policy: Recipients who give notice of cancellation two weeks or more ahead of the date of the event will receive a full ticket-price refund. Recipients who give notice of cancellation one week to thirteen days ahead of the date of the event will receive a refund of 50% of the ticket price. Except in the case of dire emergency circumstances, to be determined by Administration, refunds will not be permitted if notice is given in less than a week of the date of the event start date/time. Service fees will not be refunded.