It’s been a quiet couple of months on the practice front, at least directly. Client comings and goings have been steady ? always looking for new intakes! ? and my health is finally feeling mostly back to normal after a multi-month bronchial issue that made my early spring rougher than I would have liked. My colleague Laurie and I managed to get through our first-ever CRPO membership renewal process *AND* the College’s nascent QA pilot project for registered therapists, all of which is now in review and likely to yet be months before we hear what the reviewers further require of us. Any first-time process within a new governing body that covers thousands of members isn’t going to be easy; I don’t envy the admins and reviewers handing that particular adventure!
I’ve also been working on slowly developing my own professional support network, and making sure I maintain the checks and balances that help ensure I’m providing the best standard of care that I can. I meet monthly with several supervisors: from the Dalton Associates network in a group with other local Dalton therapists; with Judy Myers-Avis in Guelph in a small AAMFT-focused reflection group drawn from all over SW Ontario; and with Veena Kaur for AAMFT-focused dyadic supervision. In recent months I’ve also developed a more casual peer support group with a small number of lady therapists, several of whom are graduates of the same program at Laurier’s Lutheran Seminary that I am, some of whom we have met through other channels. We meet monthly to decompress and share both learnings and adventures in a different manner, and to support each other’s professional developments. Last month several of us visited a salt spa in Kitchener next month, one of our number is teaching us about Restorative Yoga. We share resources we’ve found, and we leverage each other’s connections through broader community networks to bring new and useful resources back to our own practices and clients, and it’s been a wonderful thing to be building.
June is also working out to be a month of my own professional development, as some interesting workshop opportunities have fallen into my lap. First of all, I’ll be spending this Friday in Creemore for a day-long seminar and worshop with Dr. Patricia de Young, instructor and author of “Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach”. Her work with chronic shame has had a direct impact on the shame-related work I already do with my own clients, and I’m looking forward to an opportunity to work with her more directly, even if only for a day. Later this month, the Region of Waterloo is sponsoring a two-day workshop for therapists on working with trauma and PTSD, to which I am *really* looking forward, given the increasing number of trauma/PTSD clients I’m seeing in my own practice, let alone the rising tide more universally. The Dalton AGM at the end of April also introduced us to experienced resources who provide training for working with the special kinds of trauma and issues prevalent in first-responders, a support issue near and dear to my own heart.
We’re heading into the summer months, and with it, changes in many people’s schedules. The kids will be home more, there are camps and family vacations to work around, and the return of warmth and long hours of sunlight for most people mean a degree of freedom from the pressures that seem to close in through the other three months of the year. Enjoy it! I thinkwe’ve all earned that break. My evening schedule will remain available for the duration; I don’t plan on taking any major vacations this summer (it will be plenty hot and exciting at home, I’m sure!) And I have a pile of resource links to share and think about, so hopefully I’ll manage to get some new blog posts rolling out soon… good thing the household wifi reaches to the hammock in the back yard! 🙂