Therapy with LGBTQIA Plus Clients (8 CE Hours, 2021)

Therapists often make mistakes treating your LGBTQIA clients? There is also misunderstanding about kinks and fetishes. Are you pushing them to “come out”? And if you are…you could be traumatizing your clients. Clients have a sexual, romantic and erotic orientation which may line up or not. My workshop and I will equip you with the right tools and up-to-date information you need in this rapidly changing population to more effectively counsel your lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning clients, and couples. You will also learn how to work with consensual non-monogamy, kinks and fetishes You will learn specific strategies to better treat the unique challenges your client may be facing such as:

Also, let me help you avoid the common mistake of believing, “a couple is a couple” and treating LGBTQIA couples the same as their heterosexual counterparts.Don’t be the straight therapist that is losing LGBTQ clients because of poor intake, assessment and treatment planning. Learn how to offer your clients a safe place for therapy.

Title: Applying Cultural Humility to foster connection with Queer Clients of Color

Description: As therapists, we are called to create secure containers for each client who shares our room regardless of cultural differences. However, due to our humanness and our own internalizations of systems of domination and oppression, we miss the mark. Thus, we create empathic failures and therapeutic disruptions, along the lines of identity and culture. This is especially concerning the mental health treatment of Queer Clients of Color, who due to inhabiting two oppressed identities often face higher rates of mood disorders, along with other social challenges when compared to their White counterparts.  In this workshop, we will utilize the cultural humility framework to support our work in re-humanizing and building deeper connection with our Queer Clients of Color. Consequently, realizing our commitment to diminish these structural and clinical gaps.

Hayden Dawes, LCSW, LCAS.: earned his Masters’ of Social Work degree from North Carolina State University in 2014. Following graduation, he provided mental health treatment and case management to diverse populations in various settings including inpatient, outpatient, and the community.  His practice experience includes hospital social work, mental health and addiction treatment, in addition to people involved in the legal system. In service to the profession, he has served as communications chair of the board of directors and vice-president to the North Carolina Society for Clinical Social Work. In August 2019, he began pursuing my Ph.D. in Social Work at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to further his research in examining the psychosocial challenges impacting people of color and LGBTQIA+ individuals, while seeking advanced methods to intervene on provider implicit and explicit biases.

Learning Objectives: