Thrive Summit, Paris 2027
Session and Speaker Details
Friday, April 2, 2027
8:30-9:30 AM | Jamie Molnar, LMHC, RYT, QS and Olivia Pelts, LMHC
What You Carry Walks Into the Room: Therapist Story, Capacity, and Client Impact
Speaker Bios:
Jamie Molnar, LMHC, RYT, QS, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Qualified Supervisor, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the field. As the founder of multiple businesses, her work reimagines therapist sustainability by exploring the intersection of personal story, nervous system regulation, and the capacity to stay deeply present without carrying what isn’t theirs. She is committed to disrupting burnout as the norm, helping clinicians build embodied, resilient practices that transform the therapeutic relationship and expand what’s possible for client care.
Olivia Pelts, LMHC, is the founder of Sunshine City Counseling and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor specializing in codependency, attachment trauma, identity work, and counseling intensives. She integrates Tholáge® Neuropsychotherapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic approaches to help high-achieving adults create lasting change through immersive, trauma-informed care. She is a speaker, clinical supervisor, and educator passionate about helping both clients and clinicians build deeper resilience and authentic connection.
Session Description:
Long before we learn how to hold space, we learn how to survive. Every therapist enters the room shaped by a personal history—one that informs what we attune to, what we avoid, and how much we can truly hold. Our stories quietly set the limits of our capacity: to stay present with pain, to tolerate intensity, to set boundaries, and to remain grounded in the face of our clients’ most complex experiences.
What we carry does not stay contained within us—it enters the therapeutic relationship, shaping attunement, clinical judgment, and the depth of work clients are able to access. This session invites a deeper exploration of the therapist’s inner landscape as a clinical variable. Using a trauma-informed and somatic lens, participants will examine how personal story and nervous system patterns influence both therapist sustainability and client outcomes.
Through a combination of guided reflection, experiential somatic practice, and relational dialogue, clinicians will learn to recognize when they are overholding and develop tangible action steps to metabolize—rather than accumulate—the emotional weight of their work. Participants will emerge from this session with practical tools to expand therapeutic presence, strengthen the clinical relationship, and support a stronger sense of resilience for sustainable client care.
9:45-10:45 AM | Natalie Bunner, LCSW-BACS
The Hands That Hold Healing: Navigating Race, Racialized Trauma, and the Somatic Work of Repair
Speaker Bio:
Natalie Bunner, LCSW-BACS, is the founder of Thrive Therapy, a pediatric focused private practice in Lafayette, LA. As a trained clinician in EMDR and TF-CBT, a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and a Child/Youth Mental Health Specialist, she provides direct clinical intervention primarily to children/young adults ages 5–25. An international speaker, conference presenter, and expert contributor to articles and books across multiple journalistic and professional platforms, Natalie focuses on pediatric mental health, trauma, neurodivergence, and whole-child wellness.
Session Description:
The Hands That Hold Healing: Navigating Race, Racialized Trauma, and the Somatic Work of Repair explores race as a social construct that has relational, clinical, and embodied consequences. Grounded in concepts from Resmaa Menakem’s "My Grandmother’s Hands", this training examines how racialized trauma is carried through Black bodies, white bodies, and police/institutional bodies and the impact of unresolved harm on our bodies and minds. Participants will engage immersive somatic strategies that support noticing activation, moving through resistance, and expanding capacity to hold discomfort, resource, accountability, and repair.
10:45-11:15 AM | Coffee Break
11:15 AM-12:15 PM | Victoria D. Stubbs, LICSW, LCSW-C, RMT, CEC
Is It Too Late for Me? Supporting Clients' Through Their Identity Evolution
Speaker Bio:
Victoria D. Stubbs, LICSW, LCSW-C, RMT, CEC is the founder of Inner Truth Psychotherapy and Wellness and F.I.T. Coaching & Consulting. She has 25 years of experience as a social worker, educator, holistic practitioner and writer. Victoria is the author of Untangled: A Black Woman’s Journey to Personal, Spiritual and Sexual Freedom and co-author of Interracial Marriage: How Diverse Couples Navigate Relationships in a Divided Time.
Session Description:
This session addresses the unique clinical needs of clients who come out as LGBTQ+ later in life. Many individuals navigate identity development outside the expected adolescent timeline, facing distinct challenges rooted in years of familial, religious and cultural socialization, internalized messaging about sexuality and gender, and established life structures including marriages and families. This presentation examines how delayed identity exploration affects clients emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. Informed by the presenter’s own experience coming out in her mid-30s and her clinical practice with clients coming out later in life, key topics include grief processing, navigating mixed-orientation relationships, disclosing to spouses and children, gender identity exploration, and finding community.
12:30-1:30 PM | Lisa Turnbull - Psychotherapist Naturopath and PhD candidate
When Women Disappear from Themselves: A Psychotherapeutic Exploration of Midlife Identity Loss and Reconnection
Speaker Bio:
Lisa Turnbull is a psychotherapist, naturopath, and clinical supervisor, with over 25 years’ experience working in integrative health and mental wellbeing. She is a PhD candidate at Griffith University researching women’s midlife wellbeing through the lenses of identity, relational connection, psychotherapy, and health promotion. Lisa is the director of Meraki Wellness Centre in Australia and is passionate about bridging clinical practice, embodied healing, and evidence-informed approaches to women’s mental health.
Session Description:
Midlife is often framed through hormonal, behavioural, or symptom-based models of care, while the profound psychological and relational transformations many women experience remain underexplored. This presentation introduces a psychotherapy-informed framework for understanding midlife identity disruption, emotional exhaustion, relational disconnection, and the loss of self frequently reported by women during this life stage.
Drawing from clinical practice, psychotherapeutic theory, nervous system-informed approaches, and emerging doctoral research, this presentation explores how therapists can better recognise and respond to the complex identity renegotiations occurring in midlife. Particular attention will be given to high-functioning women who appear externally successful while internally experiencing depletion, invisibility, grief, and fragmentation.
Participants will be introduced to integrative therapeutic approaches that support reconnection to embodiment, meaning, relational authenticity, agency, and psychological wellbeing. The presentation aims to expand clinicians’ understanding of midlife beyond pathology and symptom management toward a more nuanced and relationally informed framework for therapeutic practice.
Saturday, April 3, 2027
Concurrent 2-hour CE sessions: guests may choose either Track A or Track B.
Track A | 2-Hour CE Session
8:30-10:30 AM | Dr. Melissa Terry, PhD, NCSP and Dr. Vinita Menon, PhD, NCSP
The Missing Piece (Peace): Parent Coaching as a Clinical Intervention for Improving Child and Family Outcomes
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Melissa Terry, PhD is a school and clinical psychologist and co-founder of Thrive Collective. Her background in community mental health, residential developmental disability services, and schools plus her lived experience as a mom make her uniquely qualified to help guide families through the confusing world of growing up. Dr. Terry loves helping parents finally connect the dots—turning overwhelming concepts into practical tools they can confidently use to support their child.
Dr. Vinita Menon, PhD, NCSP, a school and clinical psychologist and cofounder of Thrive Collective, draws on extensive experience from many educational, clinical, and leadership opportunities to design Thrive Collective’s therapy, evaluation, and training services. Dr. Menon serves her niche of neurodiverse people across the lifespan from the head and the heart. As the mother of a millennial daughter with ADHD, her professional expertise is deeply informed by a personal journey defined by both humor and hardship and this lived experience serves as the bridge where her career and her calling meet.
Session Description:
Do you have clients who are well-meaning but frustrated adults with parenting struggles that overlap with and exacerbate their own clinical challenges? Grad school probably taught you child development and therapy techniques, but it’s hard to be fully prepared for the real-life complexity of parent emotions, family systems, and high-conflict dynamics that are peppered throughout many of your sessions.
In this engaging and practical 2 hour presentation, Dr. Terry and Dr. Menon blend clinical expertise, relatable stories, humor, and real-world strategies to help therapists feel more confident and effective when supporting their clients in meeting the ever-changing demands of raising children. Attendees will learn how to coach and become calm, collaborative guides for their adult clients with families navigating anxiety, ADHD, autism, emotional dysregulation, and challenging behaviors.
This presentation will focus on how to help your clients build trust within their families, communicate compassionately, reduce defensiveness, and teach regulation-based parenting strategies while balancing empathy with clear clinical boundaries. Special attention will be given to helping therapists translate neurodevelopmental and executive functioning concepts into coaching techniques and language parents can actually use at home.
Attendees will leave with practical scripts, conversation tools, and increased confidence in their ability to coach parents with clarity, compassion, and effectiveness.
Track B | 2-Hour CE Session
8:30-10:30 AM | Jean Tidd, MSW, LISW-S, ADHD-CCSP, SAP; Beth Sertell, MBA, MSW, LISW-S; and Holly Mills, MSW, LSW
Reigniting Clinical Curiosity: RSD and the ADHD Brain You Thought You Knew
Subtitle: Illuminating the Path from Misdiagnosis to Clarity, Compassion, and Change
Speaker Bios:
Jean Tidd, LISW-S, ADHD-CCSP, SAP, is a clinician at Holistic Consultation and a coach with Badass ADHD Coaching in Columbus, Ohio. She holds an MSW from The Ohio State University and brings nearly 30 years of experience as a therapist, coach, published author, and national presenter on ADHD and emotional dysregulation. She currently serves on the CHADD Education Board and as a board member for the Society for ADHD, advancing systemic advocacy for neurodivergent individuals at the national level.
Beth Sertell, MBA, MSW, LISW-S, is CEO of Holistic Consultation and founder of Badass ADHD Coaching, a clinical mental health therapist, EMDR and Brainspotting practitioner, and business consultant with a unique blend of an MSW from The Ohio State University and an MBA from Texas Woman's University. She brings 15 years of experience developing clinical frameworks and professional programs that translate complex neuroscience into accessible, equity-informed care, while also coaching fellow clinicians on building sustainable, impactful practices. Her systems-level leadership and deep clinical insight are the infrastructure behind both practices and their shared mission to serve neurodivergent individuals and the professionals who support them.
Holly Mills, MSW, LSW, is a clinician at Holistic Consultation and a coach with Badass ADHD Coaching in Troy, Ohio, holding a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MSW from The Ohio State University. She brings 15 years of experience delivering programs for professional and community audiences across urban, rural, and underserved settings from elementary through collegiate levels. Holly serves as a guest speaker in the doctoral program at Ball State University's College of Education on interventions with children and adolescents, and has co-presented with Jean specifically on ADHD and RSD, offering a broad perspective on how these conditions present across the lifespan and across cultural contexts.
Session Description:
You know this client. They show up session after session carrying shame they cannot name and pain no one has explained, labeled too sensitive, too dramatic, too much. They have not been difficult to treat. They have been difficult to understand, and something has always been missing on both sides of the room. They are not the problem. The diagnosis is Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is a neurobiological feature of the ADHD nervous system that affects the majority of those with ADHD, remains absent from the DSM-5-TR, and is routinely misread as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or BPD. The cost is real: years of wrong treatment, compounding shame, and a client who has stopped believing they will ever be understood.
Drawing on Barkley's emotional dysregulation model, Gross's Emotion Regulation framework, lived-experience voices, and equity-informed research, this session reignites clinical curiosity about the brain you thought you knew. Designed for clinicians at every career stage, attendees will leave with diagnostic clarity, a three-phase intervention toolkit, and a renewed sense of what is possible for the clients who need us most. This session connects that foundational research base to the most current peer-reviewed findings on RSD, emotional dysregulation, and diagnostic equity.
10:30-11:00 AM | Coffee Break
Track A | 2-Hour CE Session
11:00 AM-1:00 PM | Dr. Miriam Engstrom, PsyD
Body, Story, and the Healing Arc: Integrating Creative and Somatic Modalities in Trauma Work
Speaker Bio:
Miriam Engstrom, PsyD, LP, is a licensed psychologist, EMDR Certified Therapist, and founder and Clinical Director of Evolve Therapy Network, a trauma-informed group practice in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, bringing over thirty years of clinical experience across private practice, group work, and international humanitarian service on four continents. Her training includes a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from The Michigan School of Psychology, a Master of Arts in Theatre from the University of Detroit, and advanced EMDR study with Bessel van der Kolk, MD, all of which inform her deeply integrative approach to trauma, story, and healing. A recipient of the U.S. Secretary of State Award for Outstanding Volunteerism Abroad, she has trained Peace Corps staff, counseled first responders during the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Kyiv, and created Women4Women, an original international theatre project using story as an instrument of healing and witness.
Session Description:
Trauma doesn't wait for language. It lives in the body long before it finds words, stored in sensation, image, and fragmented story that verbal processing alone often cannot reach. Yet most therapeutic approaches ask clients to narrate and analyze, engaging the very cortical structures that trauma has most effectively bypassed.
This presentation makes the case that creative and somatic modalities are not add-ons for artistically inclined clients. They are neurologically grounded primary pathways to trauma resolution. Drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory, and over three decades of cross-cultural clinical practice, participants will be guided through three clinically accessible doorways into trauma work: somatic awareness, narrative-imagistic processing, and expressive creative approaches.
Grounded in real clinical application from individual EMDR work to humanitarian trauma response across three continents, this session offers both theoretical foundation and practical tools therapists can bring directly into their work. Participants will leave with expanded frameworks for case conceptualization, concrete intervention strategies, and a renewed appreciation for the healing intelligence already present in the body and the stories it carries. The session will include brief experiential practices that invite participants to inhabit, not just understand, the material.
Track B | 2-Hour CE Session
11:00 AM-1:00 PM | Duewa "Kaya" Spicer, LCSW-S, CST
Naming the Erotic Edge: Understanding BDSM and Alternative Sexual Practices
Speaker Bio:
Kaya Spicer is certified sex and relationship therapist specializing in non monogamy, LGBTQ issues, gender and erotice diverisity. They are a speaker, educator and owner of a boutique private practice in Katy, TX. Kaya has been featured in several magazines and podcasts in the U.S and globally.
Session Description:
Most clinicians were never given a working language for kink, fetish, or alternative sexual practice. What they inherited instead was a pathology model that read difference as disorder and named desire as deviance. When a client speaks the word "kink" in the room, too many of us reach for assessment before we reach for understanding.
This session offers a different starting point. Before we can work affirmingly, we have to define clearly. Drawing on the GERD framework (Gender, Erotic, and Relational Diversity), this talk gives clinicians precise, depathologized definitions of kink, BDSM, fetish, and the broader landscape of alternative sexual practice, then situates those definitions inside a consent-centered, somatically grounded, and culturally humble clinical lens.
Participants will leave with shared vocabulary, a usable consent framework (SSC, RACK, and the 4Cs), and foundational for understanding alternative sexuality. We treat accurate naming as an ethical act, the way we refuse the shame that pathology built, and the place where pleasure becomes a form of knowledge rather than a symptom to be managed.
Sunday, April 4, 2027
8:30-9:30 AM | Kimberly Parker, LPC-S, LDCD, EMDR-Trained, PhD(c)
Why Clients Leave Therapy: How Culturally Responsive Care Improves Retention, Outcomes, and Business Growth
Speaker Bio:
Kimberly Parker, MS, LPC-S, LCDC, is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education and Supervision, founder of Revive to Thrive Wellness Center, and founder of The Healthcare GreenBook™, an equity-centered system designed to improve access to culturally affirming mental health care. She is a licensed therapist, clinical supervisor, and national trainer who speaks on culturally responsive care, clinician growth, and improving client outcomes. Kimberly has presented at universities, conferences, and professional organizations nationwide.
Session Description:
Clients do not always leave therapy because they are unwilling to do the work. Often, they leave because the care they receive does not fully see them. When culture, context, and lived experience are minimized, even well-intentioned therapy can feel misattuned, ineffective, or unsafe.
This presentation examines how culturally unresponsive care can contribute to mistrust, early dropout, and weaker outcomes, particularly for clients from historically marginalized communities. Drawing from clinical practice, supervision, training experience, and emerging scholarship on culturally responsive and decolonizing approaches, Kimberly Parker invites attendees to consider the hidden cost of missed context in the therapy room—not only for clients, but for clinicians and organizations as well. When clients disengage early, the impact is both clinical and financial: disrupted care, reduced retention, fewer referrals, and lost revenue.
This session will focus on a few practical shifts clinicians can make to strengthen attunement, improve intake and case conceptualization, broach culture and identity with greater confidence, and reduce common forms of misattunement in care.
This is a bold, honest, and highly applicable conversation for clinicians who want to improve trust, retention, outcomes, and the long-term sustainability of their practice.
9:45-10:45 AM | Khara Croswaite Brindle, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT and Ashley Charbonneau, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT
The Resilient Therapist: Healing After Career-Altering Events
Speaker Bios:
Khara Croswaite Brindle, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Financial Therapist, and best-selling author residing in Colorado. As a consultant and Confidential Grief Specialist to therapists, she values creating safe spaces for clinician healing from client suicide, Adverse Psychological Events (APEs), Leadership Trauma, and money shame.
Ashley Charbonneau, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT is a therapist, evaluator, supervisor, consultant, and professor in Colorado. Her clinical expertise lies in working with individuals impacted by the criminal legal system, which is grounded in a commitment to survivor healing and offender accountability, with a restorative justice focus.
Session Description:
Too many clinicians carry their hardest moments in silence, but those experiences don’t have to dim the work you love. Even in the wake of Adverse Psychological Events (APEs) such as client suicide, violence, sudden loss, subpoenas, grievances, or professional betrayal, there is a path forward. These moments often shake our confidence and reshape how we see ourselves and our work, yet they can also become powerful turning points for growth, connection, and renewed purpose. In the spirit of reigniting the work that you love, this session brings these often-unspoken experiences into the light. Together, we’ll explore the impacts of APEs, practical strategies for healing, and ways to transform hardship into leadership and advocacy within our field. You are not alone, and you are not defined by your most difficult moments. By illuminating these experiences, we can strengthen resilience, support one another, and rediscover the meaning that first called us to this work.
10:45-11:15 AM | Coffee Break
11:15 AM-12:15 PM | David Fulton, LMFT
Slowing the Trauma Train: Why Depth Work Means Facing What Your Clients Are Up Against, Not Just Their Symptoms
Speaker Bio:
David Fulton, LMFT, is the founder of California Depth Therapy, a psychodynamic group practice in San Diego. A therapist for fifteen years and a patient for twenty, he credits the second number for everything he understands about the first. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two young kids, commutes by Vespa, and surfs one-to-two-foot waves with confidence and anything bigger with humility.
Session Description:
Every client arrives already in motion, shaped by family, culture, and the generations that came before them. The story was running before they had language for it, tracks laid by people they never met, carrying a momentum they did not build and cannot simply stop. This is the trauma train.
Meeting that kind of momentum asks us to reconsider some of therapy's most familiar assumptions. We are often taught not to work harder than our clients and to prioritize safety above all else. Yet clients shaped by significant trauma frequently arrive without the internal resources needed to slow the story on their own. The work is not to make therapy comfortable. The work is to create enough safety for something difficult and disruptive to happen. Slowing the trauma train requires a relationship strong enough to withstand the force of what has been set in motion.
Slowing the Trauma Train is psychodynamic therapy doing what it has always done: making the unconscious conscious within a relationship that believes the patient can change. The hopeful claim of this work is that even intergenerational trauma, momentum passed down across generations the patient never met, can be slowed in the room, enough that the patient finally gets a choice. Drawing on object relations, relational psychoanalysis, and his own psychedelic work, David walks attendees through the framework and demonstrates it in practice.
12:30-1:30 PM | Dr. Thea Wessel, PhD, LPC, LAC, MAC, NCAAC, ADS
Holding Light in Dark Places: The Inner Work of Helping Professionals
Speaker Bio:
Thea Wessel, PhD, LPC, LAC, is a clinician, educator, and speaker specializing in mental health and justice-involved populations. Licensed in Colorado and Oregon, she holds national certifications as a Master Addictions Counselor (MAC) and Adolescent Addictions Counselor (NCAAC). With over 15 years of experience, she is the founder of Nspire Today and is known for advancing meaningful, effective care through both clinical work and education.
Session Description:
Mental health practitioners are often asked to sit with the deepest layers of human pain—holding grief, trauma, and complexity day after day. Over time, this work can quietly dim the very light that brought them into the field, leading to emotional fatigue, disconnection, and a loss of meaning.
Through the lens of moral injury and existential strain, participants will explore how ongoing exposure to others’ suffering shapes identity, values, and presence in the therapeutic space.
This training moves beyond traditional burnout conversations, creating space to recognize the deeper fractures that can form when one’s values are strained, and offering pathways toward reflection, repair, and renewed engagement in the work.
Session and Speaker Details
Friday, April 2, 2027
8:30-9:30 AM | Jamie Molnar, LMHC, RYT, QS and Olivia Pelts, LMHC
What You Carry Walks Into the Room: Therapist Story, Capacity, and Client Impact
Speaker Bios:
Jamie Molnar, LMHC, RYT, QS, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Qualified Supervisor, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the field. As the founder of multiple businesses, her work reimagines therapist sustainability by exploring the intersection of personal story, nervous system regulation, and the capacity to stay deeply present without carrying what isn’t theirs. She is committed to disrupting burnout as the norm, helping clinicians build embodied, resilient practices that transform the therapeutic relationship and expand what’s possible for client care.
Olivia Pelts, LMHC, is the founder of Sunshine City Counseling and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor specializing in codependency, attachment trauma, identity work, and counseling intensives. She integrates Tholáge® Neuropsychotherapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic approaches to help high-achieving adults create lasting change through immersive, trauma-informed care. She is a speaker, clinical supervisor, and educator passionate about helping both clients and clinicians build deeper resilience and authentic connection.
Session Description:
Long before we learn how to hold space, we learn how to survive. Every therapist enters the room shaped by a personal history—one that informs what we attune to, what we avoid, and how much we can truly hold. Our stories quietly set the limits of our capacity: to stay present with pain, to tolerate intensity, to set boundaries, and to remain grounded in the face of our clients’ most complex experiences.
What we carry does not stay contained within us—it enters the therapeutic relationship, shaping attunement, clinical judgment, and the depth of work clients are able to access. This session invites a deeper exploration of the therapist’s inner landscape as a clinical variable. Using a trauma-informed and somatic lens, participants will examine how personal story and nervous system patterns influence both therapist sustainability and client outcomes.
Through a combination of guided reflection, experiential somatic practice, and relational dialogue, clinicians will learn to recognize when they are overholding and develop tangible action steps to metabolize—rather than accumulate—the emotional weight of their work. Participants will emerge from this session with practical tools to expand therapeutic presence, strengthen the clinical relationship, and support a stronger sense of resilience for sustainable client care.
9:45-10:45 AM | Natalie Bunner, LCSW-BACS
The Hands That Hold Healing: Navigating Race, Racialized Trauma, and the Somatic Work of Repair
Speaker Bio:
Natalie Bunner, LCSW-BACS, is the founder of Thrive Therapy, a pediatric focused private practice in Lafayette, LA. As a trained clinician in EMDR and TF-CBT, a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and a Child/Youth Mental Health Specialist, she provides direct clinical intervention primarily to children/young adults ages 5–25. An international speaker, conference presenter, and expert contributor to articles and books across multiple journalistic and professional platforms, Natalie focuses on pediatric mental health, trauma, neurodivergence, and whole-child wellness.
Session Description:
The Hands That Hold Healing: Navigating Race, Racialized Trauma, and the Somatic Work of Repair explores race as a social construct that has relational, clinical, and embodied consequences. Grounded in concepts from Resmaa Menakem’s "My Grandmother’s Hands", this training examines how racialized trauma is carried through Black bodies, white bodies, and police/institutional bodies and the impact of unresolved harm on our bodies and minds. Participants will engage immersive somatic strategies that support noticing activation, moving through resistance, and expanding capacity to hold discomfort, resource, accountability, and repair.
10:45-11:15 AM | Coffee Break
11:15 AM-12:15 PM | Victoria D. Stubbs, LICSW, LCSW-C, RMT, CEC
Is It Too Late for Me? Supporting Clients' Through Their Identity Evolution
Speaker Bio:
Victoria D. Stubbs, LICSW, LCSW-C, RMT, CEC is the founder of Inner Truth Psychotherapy and Wellness and F.I.T. Coaching & Consulting. She has 25 years of experience as a social worker, educator, holistic practitioner and writer. Victoria is the author of Untangled: A Black Woman’s Journey to Personal, Spiritual and Sexual Freedom and co-author of Interracial Marriage: How Diverse Couples Navigate Relationships in a Divided Time.
Session Description:
This session addresses the unique clinical needs of clients who come out as LGBTQ+ later in life. Many individuals navigate identity development outside the expected adolescent timeline, facing distinct challenges rooted in years of familial, religious and cultural socialization, internalized messaging about sexuality and gender, and established life structures including marriages and families. This presentation examines how delayed identity exploration affects clients emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. Informed by the presenter’s own experience coming out in her mid-30s and her clinical practice with clients coming out later in life, key topics include grief processing, navigating mixed-orientation relationships, disclosing to spouses and children, gender identity exploration, and finding community.
12:30-1:30 PM | Lisa Turnbull - Psychotherapist Naturopath and PhD candidate
When Women Disappear from Themselves: A Psychotherapeutic Exploration of Midlife Identity Loss and Reconnection
Speaker Bio:
Lisa Turnbull is a psychotherapist, naturopath, and clinical supervisor, with over 25 years’ experience working in integrative health and mental wellbeing. She is a PhD candidate at Griffith University researching women’s midlife wellbeing through the lenses of identity, relational connection, psychotherapy, and health promotion. Lisa is the director of Meraki Wellness Centre in Australia and is passionate about bridging clinical practice, embodied healing, and evidence-informed approaches to women’s mental health.
Session Description:
Midlife is often framed through hormonal, behavioural, or symptom-based models of care, while the profound psychological and relational transformations many women experience remain underexplored. This presentation introduces a psychotherapy-informed framework for understanding midlife identity disruption, emotional exhaustion, relational disconnection, and the loss of self frequently reported by women during this life stage.
Drawing from clinical practice, psychotherapeutic theory, nervous system-informed approaches, and emerging doctoral research, this presentation explores how therapists can better recognise and respond to the complex identity renegotiations occurring in midlife. Particular attention will be given to high-functioning women who appear externally successful while internally experiencing depletion, invisibility, grief, and fragmentation.
Participants will be introduced to integrative therapeutic approaches that support reconnection to embodiment, meaning, relational authenticity, agency, and psychological wellbeing. The presentation aims to expand clinicians’ understanding of midlife beyond pathology and symptom management toward a more nuanced and relationally informed framework for therapeutic practice.
Saturday, April 3, 2027
Concurrent 2-hour CE sessions: guests may choose either Track A or Track B.
Track A | 2-Hour CE Session
8:30-10:30 AM | Dr. Melissa Terry, PhD, NCSP and Dr. Vinita Menon, PhD, NCSP
The Missing Piece (Peace): Parent Coaching as a Clinical Intervention for Improving Child and Family Outcomes
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Melissa Terry, PhD is a school and clinical psychologist and co-founder of Thrive Collective. Her background in community mental health, residential developmental disability services, and schools plus her lived experience as a mom make her uniquely qualified to help guide families through the confusing world of growing up. Dr. Terry loves helping parents finally connect the dots—turning overwhelming concepts into practical tools they can confidently use to support their child.
Dr. Vinita Menon, PhD, NCSP, a school and clinical psychologist and cofounder of Thrive Collective, draws on extensive experience from many educational, clinical, and leadership opportunities to design Thrive Collective’s therapy, evaluation, and training services. Dr. Menon serves her niche of neurodiverse people across the lifespan from the head and the heart. As the mother of a millennial daughter with ADHD, her professional expertise is deeply informed by a personal journey defined by both humor and hardship and this lived experience serves as the bridge where her career and her calling meet.
Session Description:
Do you have clients who are well-meaning but frustrated adults with parenting struggles that overlap with and exacerbate their own clinical challenges? Grad school probably taught you child development and therapy techniques, but it’s hard to be fully prepared for the real-life complexity of parent emotions, family systems, and high-conflict dynamics that are peppered throughout many of your sessions.
In this engaging and practical 2 hour presentation, Dr. Terry and Dr. Menon blend clinical expertise, relatable stories, humor, and real-world strategies to help therapists feel more confident and effective when supporting their clients in meeting the ever-changing demands of raising children. Attendees will learn how to coach and become calm, collaborative guides for their adult clients with families navigating anxiety, ADHD, autism, emotional dysregulation, and challenging behaviors.
This presentation will focus on how to help your clients build trust within their families, communicate compassionately, reduce defensiveness, and teach regulation-based parenting strategies while balancing empathy with clear clinical boundaries. Special attention will be given to helping therapists translate neurodevelopmental and executive functioning concepts into coaching techniques and language parents can actually use at home.
Attendees will leave with practical scripts, conversation tools, and increased confidence in their ability to coach parents with clarity, compassion, and effectiveness.
Track B | 2-Hour CE Session
8:30-10:30 AM | Jean Tidd, MSW, LISW-S, ADHD-CCSP, SAP; Beth Sertell, MBA, MSW, LISW-S; and Holly Mills, MSW, LSW
Reigniting Clinical Curiosity: RSD and the ADHD Brain You Thought You Knew
Subtitle: Illuminating the Path from Misdiagnosis to Clarity, Compassion, and Change
Speaker Bios:
Jean Tidd, LISW-S, ADHD-CCSP, SAP, is a clinician at Holistic Consultation and a coach with Badass ADHD Coaching in Columbus, Ohio. She holds an MSW from The Ohio State University and brings nearly 30 years of experience as a therapist, coach, published author, and national presenter on ADHD and emotional dysregulation. She currently serves on the CHADD Education Board and as a board member for the Society for ADHD, advancing systemic advocacy for neurodivergent individuals at the national level.
Beth Sertell, MBA, MSW, LISW-S, is CEO of Holistic Consultation and founder of Badass ADHD Coaching, a clinical mental health therapist, EMDR and Brainspotting practitioner, and business consultant with a unique blend of an MSW from The Ohio State University and an MBA from Texas Woman's University. She brings 15 years of experience developing clinical frameworks and professional programs that translate complex neuroscience into accessible, equity-informed care, while also coaching fellow clinicians on building sustainable, impactful practices. Her systems-level leadership and deep clinical insight are the infrastructure behind both practices and their shared mission to serve neurodivergent individuals and the professionals who support them.
Holly Mills, MSW, LSW, is a clinician at Holistic Consultation and a coach with Badass ADHD Coaching in Troy, Ohio, holding a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MSW from The Ohio State University. She brings 15 years of experience delivering programs for professional and community audiences across urban, rural, and underserved settings from elementary through collegiate levels. Holly serves as a guest speaker in the doctoral program at Ball State University's College of Education on interventions with children and adolescents, and has co-presented with Jean specifically on ADHD and RSD, offering a broad perspective on how these conditions present across the lifespan and across cultural contexts.
Session Description:
You know this client. They show up session after session carrying shame they cannot name and pain no one has explained, labeled too sensitive, too dramatic, too much. They have not been difficult to treat. They have been difficult to understand, and something has always been missing on both sides of the room. They are not the problem. The diagnosis is Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is a neurobiological feature of the ADHD nervous system that affects the majority of those with ADHD, remains absent from the DSM-5-TR, and is routinely misread as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or BPD. The cost is real: years of wrong treatment, compounding shame, and a client who has stopped believing they will ever be understood.
Drawing on Barkley's emotional dysregulation model, Gross's Emotion Regulation framework, lived-experience voices, and equity-informed research, this session reignites clinical curiosity about the brain you thought you knew. Designed for clinicians at every career stage, attendees will leave with diagnostic clarity, a three-phase intervention toolkit, and a renewed sense of what is possible for the clients who need us most. This session connects that foundational research base to the most current peer-reviewed findings on RSD, emotional dysregulation, and diagnostic equity.
10:30-11:00 AM | Coffee Break
Track A | 2-Hour CE Session
11:00 AM-1:00 PM | Dr. Miriam Engstrom, PsyD
Body, Story, and the Healing Arc: Integrating Creative and Somatic Modalities in Trauma Work
Speaker Bio:
Miriam Engstrom, PsyD, LP, is a licensed psychologist, EMDR Certified Therapist, and founder and Clinical Director of Evolve Therapy Network, a trauma-informed group practice in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, bringing over thirty years of clinical experience across private practice, group work, and international humanitarian service on four continents. Her training includes a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from The Michigan School of Psychology, a Master of Arts in Theatre from the University of Detroit, and advanced EMDR study with Bessel van der Kolk, MD, all of which inform her deeply integrative approach to trauma, story, and healing. A recipient of the U.S. Secretary of State Award for Outstanding Volunteerism Abroad, she has trained Peace Corps staff, counseled first responders during the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Kyiv, and created Women4Women, an original international theatre project using story as an instrument of healing and witness.
Session Description:
Trauma doesn't wait for language. It lives in the body long before it finds words, stored in sensation, image, and fragmented story that verbal processing alone often cannot reach. Yet most therapeutic approaches ask clients to narrate and analyze, engaging the very cortical structures that trauma has most effectively bypassed.
This presentation makes the case that creative and somatic modalities are not add-ons for artistically inclined clients. They are neurologically grounded primary pathways to trauma resolution. Drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory, and over three decades of cross-cultural clinical practice, participants will be guided through three clinically accessible doorways into trauma work: somatic awareness, narrative-imagistic processing, and expressive creative approaches.
Grounded in real clinical application from individual EMDR work to humanitarian trauma response across three continents, this session offers both theoretical foundation and practical tools therapists can bring directly into their work. Participants will leave with expanded frameworks for case conceptualization, concrete intervention strategies, and a renewed appreciation for the healing intelligence already present in the body and the stories it carries. The session will include brief experiential practices that invite participants to inhabit, not just understand, the material.
Track B | 2-Hour CE Session
11:00 AM-1:00 PM | Duewa "Kaya" Spicer, LCSW-S, CST
Naming the Erotic Edge: Understanding BDSM and Alternative Sexual Practices
Speaker Bio:
Kaya Spicer is certified sex and relationship therapist specializing in non monogamy, LGBTQ issues, gender and erotice diverisity. They are a speaker, educator and owner of a boutique private practice in Katy, TX. Kaya has been featured in several magazines and podcasts in the U.S and globally.
Session Description:
Most clinicians were never given a working language for kink, fetish, or alternative sexual practice. What they inherited instead was a pathology model that read difference as disorder and named desire as deviance. When a client speaks the word "kink" in the room, too many of us reach for assessment before we reach for understanding.
This session offers a different starting point. Before we can work affirmingly, we have to define clearly. Drawing on the GERD framework (Gender, Erotic, and Relational Diversity), this talk gives clinicians precise, depathologized definitions of kink, BDSM, fetish, and the broader landscape of alternative sexual practice, then situates those definitions inside a consent-centered, somatically grounded, and culturally humble clinical lens.
Participants will leave with shared vocabulary, a usable consent framework (SSC, RACK, and the 4Cs), and foundational for understanding alternative sexuality. We treat accurate naming as an ethical act, the way we refuse the shame that pathology built, and the place where pleasure becomes a form of knowledge rather than a symptom to be managed.
Sunday, April 4, 2027
8:30-9:30 AM | Kimberly Parker, LPC-S, LDCD, EMDR-Trained, PhD(c)
Why Clients Leave Therapy: How Culturally Responsive Care Improves Retention, Outcomes, and Business Growth
Speaker Bio:
Kimberly Parker, MS, LPC-S, LCDC, is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education and Supervision, founder of Revive to Thrive Wellness Center, and founder of The Healthcare GreenBook™, an equity-centered system designed to improve access to culturally affirming mental health care. She is a licensed therapist, clinical supervisor, and national trainer who speaks on culturally responsive care, clinician growth, and improving client outcomes. Kimberly has presented at universities, conferences, and professional organizations nationwide.
Session Description:
Clients do not always leave therapy because they are unwilling to do the work. Often, they leave because the care they receive does not fully see them. When culture, context, and lived experience are minimized, even well-intentioned therapy can feel misattuned, ineffective, or unsafe.
This presentation examines how culturally unresponsive care can contribute to mistrust, early dropout, and weaker outcomes, particularly for clients from historically marginalized communities. Drawing from clinical practice, supervision, training experience, and emerging scholarship on culturally responsive and decolonizing approaches, Kimberly Parker invites attendees to consider the hidden cost of missed context in the therapy room—not only for clients, but for clinicians and organizations as well. When clients disengage early, the impact is both clinical and financial: disrupted care, reduced retention, fewer referrals, and lost revenue.
This session will focus on a few practical shifts clinicians can make to strengthen attunement, improve intake and case conceptualization, broach culture and identity with greater confidence, and reduce common forms of misattunement in care.
This is a bold, honest, and highly applicable conversation for clinicians who want to improve trust, retention, outcomes, and the long-term sustainability of their practice.
9:45-10:45 AM | Khara Croswaite Brindle, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT and Ashley Charbonneau, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT
The Resilient Therapist: Healing After Career-Altering Events
Speaker Bios:
Khara Croswaite Brindle, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Financial Therapist, and best-selling author residing in Colorado. As a consultant and Confidential Grief Specialist to therapists, she values creating safe spaces for clinician healing from client suicide, Adverse Psychological Events (APEs), Leadership Trauma, and money shame.
Ashley Charbonneau, MA, LPC, ACS, CFT is a therapist, evaluator, supervisor, consultant, and professor in Colorado. Her clinical expertise lies in working with individuals impacted by the criminal legal system, which is grounded in a commitment to survivor healing and offender accountability, with a restorative justice focus.
Session Description:
Too many clinicians carry their hardest moments in silence, but those experiences don’t have to dim the work you love. Even in the wake of Adverse Psychological Events (APEs) such as client suicide, violence, sudden loss, subpoenas, grievances, or professional betrayal, there is a path forward. These moments often shake our confidence and reshape how we see ourselves and our work, yet they can also become powerful turning points for growth, connection, and renewed purpose. In the spirit of reigniting the work that you love, this session brings these often-unspoken experiences into the light. Together, we’ll explore the impacts of APEs, practical strategies for healing, and ways to transform hardship into leadership and advocacy within our field. You are not alone, and you are not defined by your most difficult moments. By illuminating these experiences, we can strengthen resilience, support one another, and rediscover the meaning that first called us to this work.
10:45-11:15 AM | Coffee Break
11:15 AM-12:15 PM | David Fulton, LMFT
Slowing the Trauma Train: Why Depth Work Means Facing What Your Clients Are Up Against, Not Just Their Symptoms
Speaker Bio:
David Fulton, LMFT, is the founder of California Depth Therapy, a psychodynamic group practice in San Diego. A therapist for fifteen years and a patient for twenty, he credits the second number for everything he understands about the first. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two young kids, commutes by Vespa, and surfs one-to-two-foot waves with confidence and anything bigger with humility.
Session Description:
Every client arrives already in motion, shaped by family, culture, and the generations that came before them. The story was running before they had language for it, tracks laid by people they never met, carrying a momentum they did not build and cannot simply stop. This is the trauma train.
Meeting that kind of momentum asks us to reconsider some of therapy's most familiar assumptions. We are often taught not to work harder than our clients and to prioritize safety above all else. Yet clients shaped by significant trauma frequently arrive without the internal resources needed to slow the story on their own. The work is not to make therapy comfortable. The work is to create enough safety for something difficult and disruptive to happen. Slowing the trauma train requires a relationship strong enough to withstand the force of what has been set in motion.
Slowing the Trauma Train is psychodynamic therapy doing what it has always done: making the unconscious conscious within a relationship that believes the patient can change. The hopeful claim of this work is that even intergenerational trauma, momentum passed down across generations the patient never met, can be slowed in the room, enough that the patient finally gets a choice. Drawing on object relations, relational psychoanalysis, and his own psychedelic work, David walks attendees through the framework and demonstrates it in practice.
12:30-1:30 PM | Dr. Thea Wessel, PhD, LPC, LAC, MAC, NCAAC, ADS
Holding Light in Dark Places: The Inner Work of Helping Professionals
Speaker Bio:
Thea Wessel, PhD, LPC, LAC, is a clinician, educator, and speaker specializing in mental health and justice-involved populations. Licensed in Colorado and Oregon, she holds national certifications as a Master Addictions Counselor (MAC) and Adolescent Addictions Counselor (NCAAC). With over 15 years of experience, she is the founder of Nspire Today and is known for advancing meaningful, effective care through both clinical work and education.
Session Description:
Mental health practitioners are often asked to sit with the deepest layers of human pain—holding grief, trauma, and complexity day after day. Over time, this work can quietly dim the very light that brought them into the field, leading to emotional fatigue, disconnection, and a loss of meaning.
Through the lens of moral injury and existential strain, participants will explore how ongoing exposure to others’ suffering shapes identity, values, and presence in the therapeutic space.
This training moves beyond traditional burnout conversations, creating space to recognize the deeper fractures that can form when one’s values are strained, and offering pathways toward reflection, repair, and renewed engagement in the work.
