Workshops
Industry Leading Faculty, Current Topics
Caspersen workshop presenters are internationally-known speakers, authors, therapists and social workers practicing in a range of settings. Attend workshops online from anywhere or view a recording.
I Can’t See: Exploring the World of Blindness and Mental Health Through a Narrative Therapy Lens
Friday, October 4, 2024, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Ann Marie Wagner, Eric Ringham (Live Online from Minnesota)
Participate Live Online, On-Site at Caspersen or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Sept 30), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Alternative title:
Enhancing personal agency through conversations about messages, meanings, dilemmas, and preferred narratives with clients experiencing vision loss.
Description:
An estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide experience vision loss or blindness, and their numbers are expected to increase as people live longer. Chances are high that most mental health providers will at some point in their careers work with a client experiencing vision loss. Many therapists may feel unprepared and perhaps fearful of saying or doing the wrong thing. Whether sighted or not, all people have been exposed to societal messages and myths about blindness. Many people with blindness experience complex grief, anxiety and/or depression. They may seek therapy to adjust to their vision changes, but they may also seek therapy for reasons unrelated to vision loss. Therefore they would prefer a therapist not assume that their blindness should be the focus of the therapy.
In this Webinar, we will use Narrative therapy principles as a guide to explore messages, meanings, myths, dilemmas, and stories/narratives of people with vision loss as well as some experiences of sighted helpers. No single person can speak for all others, so the ideas presented in this Webinar are intended to foster contemplation and not to be viewed as hard-and-fast “dos or don’ts” when working with clients with vision loss. Use of narrative therapy principles, it is hoped, will help guide an experiential discovery of new meanings and ideas that therapists can carry forward to enhance their sense of confidence as well as the personal agency of the client, whether the work is about the blindness, not about the blindness, or a bit of both. The concepts reviewed in this Webinar may also apply to working with people experiencing other types of disability, though each client would ideally be asked what name they prefer to use for any given part of their experience. They may resonate with the word “disability,” or not.
Dr. Wagner wants to create a nonjudgmental, safe and supportive space and time to explore the complexities of this topic. Participants will be invited to be bold in examining implicit biases about blindness while understanding that all messages originally came from outside of self. It is hoped we can stand against shame and blame. Come join us and we will see what shows up, together.
Objectives:
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Differentiate among total blindness, legal blindness, and vision loss.
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Identify at least one message or bias about blindness that comes from broader culture and society such as movies, TV, or other sources.
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Describe at least one factor for people with blindness associated with complex grief, anxiety and/or depression.
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Describe some values associated with the dilemma of a sighted helper offering help to a person with blindness who did not ask for the help.
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Name at least one principle of Narrative Therapy that might be integrated into clinical work to enhance the personal agency of clients with vision loss.
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Experience enhanced learning by observing a demonstration of a conversation integrating principles of Narrative Therapy to explore messages and meanings related to blindness.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Ann Wagner is a Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist. She worked for 26 years on the PTSD Clinical Team at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System and has expertise in empirically supported interventions for the treatment of PTSD and other trauma-related problems. Though retired, she is professionally active as a consultant and invited guest speaker. She particularly enjoys presenting on topics related to vision loss; on Narrative-Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (N-IRT), a protocol for the treatment of nightmares she developed around 2006; and on integrating principles of Narrative Therapy and brief psychodynamic therapy. She is a fierce proponent of the importance of loving kindness and opening to core self, and likes to use the words “village moments” when two or more people sharing authentically can feel belongingness in the span of a moment. She treasures such moments.
Dr. Wagner is blind due to retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited eye condition known for progressive loss of peripheral and night vision. She has delivered local and national presentations for the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the American Macular Degeneration Foundation on the topics of grief and loss, anxiety, depression, and resiliency related to vision loss or serving in a helper role. She welcomes curiosity and questions about RP. Dr. Wagner finds joy in spending time with her husband, her dog, her grandson and other family members. Hugs and baking for others are some of her love languages.
Lessons from the Pandemic: Making Meaning in the Aftermath of Loss
Friday, December 6, 2024, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Vanessa Jackson (Live Online from Atlanta)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85, Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
This workshop is an invitation for participants to explore the impact of loss, especially the multiple losses created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the continuing silence that compounds the grief that many of us feel to this day. What are our narratives of loss and how can we create healing conversation that will help us make meaning of our loss experiences and heal wounds/release constrictions? This workshop will be a space for us to share strategies, explore places of confusion and resistance and co-create healing interventions for ourselves and our clients.
Objectives:
1. Participants will identify at least three losses related to the Covid-19 pandemic and how they have impacted self/clients.
2. Participants will demonstrate knowledge of the Seven Healing questions and how they can be utilized to explore grief and loss issues with individuals and communities.
3. Participants will create/co-create one new innovative practice based on the Seven Healing Question and their own unique perspective on healing from grief and loss.
About the Speaker:
Vanessa Jackson is a Soul Doula, writer, activist and social worker based in Atlanta, GA. Her work focuses on power, social and economic liberation, African American psychiatric history and reclaiming traditional practices to support individual and community healing. Vanessa is the owner of Dudley’s Apothecary which offers healing sprays in the traditions of her root worker ancestors.
We Heal in Relationship: the Vital Role of Connection in the Therapeutic Process
Friday, February 7, 2025, 10 AM - 1:30 PM Central
Alex Iantaffi (Live Online from Minnesota)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85, Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
Therapy is becoming increasingly medicalized within Western dominant culture. At the same time, we are witnessing increased interest in somatic approaches to healing and more information on mental health is freely available to the general public on social media. It can be incredibly challenging for new and experienced therapists alike to navigate the pressure of providing “evidence-based interventions” to meet insurance requirements, while also staying up-to-date with new modalities and managing clients’ expectations, which are often based on colonial, capitalist and white supremacists frameworks. We might find ourselves asking for more interventions and tools in the hope they will help us feel more “effective” in the current challenging landscape within which we operate.
In this landscape, what does Narrative Therapy (NT) offer to providers, clients and our communities? In this workshop, we will explore how NT can provide us with vital tools to engage our clients in joining us as collaborative partners in their healing journeys and help us refocus on what we know is essential in this process: the therapeutic relationship. As well as going back to highlighting the importance of the therapeutic relationship, and how to nurture it, we will challenge the pathologizing paradigm that is inevitable within a medical context and practice how to engage with clients when they bring this paradigm into the therapy room.
You are invited to bring your curiosity, questions, skepticism, and a willingness to engage with both paradox and discernment as we explore why going back to foundational constructs, such as “joining”, “curiosity”, “externalizing”, and “exceptions to the problem”, might be more effective than we might be able to recognize in the current therapeutic terrain. Let’s re-member together the vital and healing role of connection within and outside the therapy room.
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
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Evaluate how current systems of power, privilege and oppression influence the therapeutic landscape;
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Understand the importance of therapeutic rapport;
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Identify key skills necessary to establishing and maintaining therapeutic rapport;
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List areas of change, growth and development within their therapeutic practice in order to better serve their clients through a Narrative Therapy approach.
About the Speaker:
Alex Iantaffi, PhD, MS, SEP, CST, CST-S, LMFT (they/he/lui) is an award-winning author, family therapist, WPATH certified gender specialist, AASECT certified sex therapist, Narrative Therapy certified provider, Somatic ExperiencingⓇ practitioner, and clinical supervisor.
Alex is currently President of the Minnesota Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (MAMFT) and Past Chair of the Trans and Queer interest network of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). They were the recipient of the 2023 AASECT Humanitarian Award, the 2019 MAMFT Distinguished Service Award, the 2013 Twin Cities Deaf Pride Community Organization Award, the 2012 Breaking the Silence Award at the University of Minnesota, and the 2000 Best Dissertation Award from the British Educational Research Association.
Alex has researched, presented and published extensively on gender, disability, sexuality, relationships, and HIV. They are a trans masculine, nonbinary, bi queer, neurodivergent, disabled, Italian immigrant who has been living on Dakota and Anishinaabe territories, currently known as Minnesota (US) since 2008.
Alex is the author of "Gender Trauma: healing cultural, social, and historical gendered trauma", which was awarded the Nautilus award (gold category) in 2022 and the AASECT Book Award for Sexuality Professionals in 2023. They are the co-author of the books "How to Understand Your Gender: a practical guide for exploring who you are", “Life Isn’t Binary”, “Hell Yeah Self-Care: a Trauma-Informed Workbook”, “How To Understand Your Sexuality: a practical guide for exploring who you are” and the upcoming “How to Understand Your Relationships”, with Meg-John Barker, and editor of the upcoming “Trans and Disabled” anthology.
They also host the podcast Gender Stories. You can find out more about them at www.alexiantaffi.com or follow them on Instagram @xtaffi and @genderstories
Foraging for Stories: Walking Alongside Communities
Friday, March 7, 2025, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Raviraj Shetty (Live Online from India)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Feb 17), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
Community work in India has traditionally been driven by experts with institutional trainings believing that communities don’t know any better about their own health, rights or dreams. Our history of colonization from European oppressors, casteist control over knowledge production and industrial-medical complex subjugating lived experiences promote interventions that rob people of agency and locate problems in our rich practices of life.
In this workshop, Raviraj will share practices of centering community knowledges in trainings and interventions informed by everyday practices of living to hold space to practice agency over their language, bodies and dreams. He will demonstrate this through stories of partnership with a group of indigenous women and youth from rural India who are developing community led mental health interventions for their own people.
Using the metaphor of the mycelium network, the mushrooms and foragers, Raviraj will offer reflections on the symbiotic enmeshment of stories and communities and on the stance as trainers ‘walking alongside’ with communities as foragers of preferred stories of know how’s and histories of people’s movements that are always present under the oppressive stories and always pop-out in people’s everyday lives in undetermined ways like the masutake mushrooms in a human ruined forests.
Objectives:
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Learning to forage experience near languages
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Learning to raise gentle questions for reflecting on trainer’s social location
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Practices for centering community lived knowledges
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Engaging with the metaphor of mushrooms and mycelium network as a way to understand stories.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Raviraj Shetty is the co-founder and director of Narrative Practices India Collective. He is an occupational therapist, children's book author, supervisor, library educator and a teacher who believes that all the problems of this world are rooted in the structural systems of oppression rather than in communities or peoples bodies and identities. His work is informed by Narrative practices, sensory integration, accountability practices, queer writings, children's books, his mother’s cooking practices and his communities ways of living.
He has been consulting with communities, children, families, adults and organisations to discover and reauthor their preferred ways of being since the last 15 years. He is a teacher of Narrative practices and Early childhood development; and teaches in local and international workshops and diplomas. He supports the work of therapists and community health workers through supervision and consultation.
Raviraj works alongside people and communities responding to caste-based violence, sexual violence, young disabled children and families navigating an ableist world, indigenious community led health initiatives, well-being of frontline workers and leaders in not-for-profit sector. Raviraj has been instrumental in developing curriculums for community led mental health programs and Diploma’s in Anticaste mental health practices and Diploma in Children’s picture books and Mental Health.
Raviraj has published articles and is a peer reviewer for the Indian Journal of Occupational Therapy, Journal of Occupational Science and has also co-curated Jugaad, a little book of know-hows by young people with disabilities about mental health and conceptualised Our Jugaad, a handbook of know-hows by mothers of disabled children. He has peer reviewed articles for international journals including Journal of Occupational science. He is also a TEDx speaker. He is presently working on book projects to document Mad Stories ( stories of people with mental illnesses) and Book of Aspirations ( documenting the story of aspiration for the last five decades).
When not working you will find him dreaming about Unicorns, chatting away with friends, obsessing over a children's picture book, dancing garba to the tunes of Falguni Pathak, listening to a love song on loop or sobbing through a romantic film.