THURSDAY – July 30, 2026

When Talk Isn’t Enough

Practical Tools For Working With Loss, Anger, And Emotional Stuckness
David Kessler
July 30, 2026 – 11:45am – 1:00pm
Room: Auditorium

Grief affects more than thoughts and emotions. It lives in the nervous system, the breath, and the body’s protective responses. In this immersive lunch session, David Kessler and Grief Yoga founder Paul Denniston blend grief theory with embodied practice to help participants work with loss, anger, and the places we get stuck. Together they explore how grief can tip into dysregulation, how to recognize when someone is in trauma physiology, and how movement, breath, sound, and grounding can support release, regulation, and connection. Participants leave with practical, trauma-aware tools they can use for their own grief and in professional settings to create safety, build resilience, and support meaning-making after the story has been told.

New Opportunities To Practice Across State Lines!
Counseling Compact Updates For LPCs

Barbara Melton, LPC, NCC
July 30, 2026; 11:45am – 1:00pm
(1.25 contact hours)

ROOM: TBD

Confused about when you can join the Counseling Compact and practice in multiple states without having to go through the independent licensure process in each state?  Get the latest updates and what the process currently is and will be for LPCs.  While the session will focus mainly on the LPC Counseling Compact, information on the compacts for social workers and psychologists will also be shared.

Beyond Medications

The Expanding Role of Interventional Psychiatry
Brittany Albright, M.D.
July 30, 2026 – 11:45am – 1:00pm
Room: TBD

Talk summary coming soon.

Small Group Conversation with Shi Heng Yi

We Will Run a Raffle Awarding 10 Seats to this Event for Attendees- Stay Tuned
Shi Heng Yi
July 30, 2026 – 11:45am – 1:00pm
Room: TBD

This is a small 10 person session to meet and engage in a conversation with Shi Heng Yi about his work and about any topics you would like to explore with him.  We will be launching a raffle in the spring to award the 10 seats so please stay tuned for the opportunity!  We will email an announcement about it for those who have already registered for the conference.

FRIDAY – July 31, 2026

Embodied Spirituality

An Exploration In Personal Transformation
Shi Heng Yi
July 31, 2026; 11:30am – 12:30pm
(1 contact hour)

ROOM: Auditorium

The ancient Shaolin tradition views pain, resistance, and inner conflict not as disruption, but as valuable raw material for personal transformation. Shaolin philosophy offers tools that promote inner stability and stress reduction, cultivating a state of presence and connection that promotes healing. The physical practice, combined with Zen teachings, allows us to penetrate to very deep levels of being.

We now want to explore the central question of how this wisdom can not only be understood, but also integrated into everyday life – in posture, movement, decision-making, and interpersonal interactions. We want to create an inner space in which clarity, focus, and inner strength can develop and grow.

Master Shi Heng Yi aims to demonstrate to the audience how body and mind can enter into a dialogue and become one. The audience will tangibly experience how these exercises open spaces to access deeper levels of consciousness. Through this, we no longer fight against old patterns, but rather consciously regulate and gradually integrate them. Through this mindful approach, deep-seated tensions, frozen stress responses, and inner blockages can dissolve.

Through the combination of movement, breath, and inner stillness, we enter a state of being fully present in the current moment, free from judgment and resistance. This is the moment when we gain profound insights, release emotional burdens, and experience healing on a fundamental level. Through this state and this connection to our essence, we can experience deep healing. We will explore three thematic areas with exercises designed to be relevant to everyday life and immediately applicable by the participants.

Area 1: Stress Reduction
Area 2: Cultivating a State of Presence
Area 3: Inner Stability

Self, Soul, And Spirituality In Healing Trauma

Practical Ways To Work With Meaning, Energy, and Repair
Frank Anderson, M.D.
July 31, 2026; 11:30am – 12:30pm
(1 contact hour)

ROOM: TBD

Trauma can disrupt a person’s sense of wholeness—shaping the nervous system around threat, straining relationships, and leaving people feeling disconnected from meaning, vitality, or inner steadiness. In this one-hour session, Frank Anderson, MD offers a grounded, integrative lens on meaning, energy, and repair in trauma healing—how these dimensions show up clinically, why they matter, and how to work with them in ways that are practical and respectful of each client’s beliefs and language.

Dr. Anderson will introduce a simple clinical map for orienting the work (stabilization and boundaries, mindful contact with protective strategies, witnessing what happened, and supporting repair and reconnection), then share a small set of brief interventions that can be used in-session or offered as between-session practices. These may include attention to breath and body cues, imagery, sound, and gentle “reset” practices aimed at supporting regulation and helping stuck energy begin to move—without making spirituality or meaning-making a requirement.

The session will also address common clinical questions: how to invite conversations about spirituality without imposing a frame, how to track “self energy” (e.g., calm, clarity, compassion) as a therapeutic signal rather than a doctrine, and how to approach themes like forgiveness and repair in a way that is paced, grounded, and clinically appropriate.

Emotional Inheritance

A Workshop on the Legacy of Trauma
Dr. Galit Atlas
July 31, 2026; 11:30am – 12:30pm
(1 contact hour)

ROOM: TBD

This interactive workshop will explore Dr. Atlas’s work on Emotional Inheritance and introduce a psychoanalytic framework and tools to help therapists listen to and work with patients’ intergenerational cycles of trauma and pain. It will offer new ways to unpack the ghosts of the unsaid and the unspeakable, family collusions and secrets, inherited trauma, survivor guilt, and more.

The Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences & Other Traumas In The Assessment & Treatment of Eating Disorders

Tim Brewerton, M.D.
July 31, 2026; 11:30am – 12:30pm
(1 contact hour)

ROOM: TBD

Eating disorders (EDs) are linked to adverse childhood experiences, especially child maltreatment, as well as other traumas and trauma-related disorders, including PTSD, complex PTSD, the dissociative subtype of PTSD, and dissociative disorders, all of which are associated with higher severity of illness, comorbidity and chronicity. Integrated treatment strategies that go beyond sequential approaches are required to adequately address the complexity of ED presentations. Although there are several published practice guidelines for the treatment of eating disorders, and likewise, there are several published practice guidelines for the treatment of PTSD, none of them specifically address ED+PTSD comorbidity. The result is a lack of integration between ED and PTSD treatment providers and programs, which often leads to fragmented, incomplete, uncoordinated and ineffective care of severely ill patients with ED+PTSD. This presentation will also provide an overview of the emerging concept of ultra-processed food addiction and its relationship to eating disorders and trauma-related disorders.