Imagining (and Finding) One’s Way in a Time of Catastrophe

Please join us for this creative, interdisciplinary and interactive workshop with Dr. Jennifer Schulz, PhD, American Literature and MA, Clinical Psychology. Dr. Schulz will explore how we navigate fear of catastrophic change while also fostering a sense of well-being in our everyday, and the opportunities that this reality affords us to create more existentially-grounded relationships with our clients.

This question is one that therapists have faced with clients long before the COVID-19 pandemic, as we directly encounter the consequences of climate change, systemic discrimination and violence against minoritized groups, economic inequality, and increasingly wide-spread viral threats. Indeed, the reality of a “catastrophic era” (in which we have been living for generations) has in recent years come to be on full display. In this workshop we will explore the opportunities that this reality affords us to create more existentially-grounded relationships with our clients.

More specifically, in the face of direct and immediate threats to our physical, psychological, social, and emotional well-being, diving into a shared exploration of loss, fear, and displacement invites us to show up for our clients increasingly in our full humanness, replete with contradiction and ambiguity but also with authentic curiosity. This stance of not-knowing, as opposed to claiming to know and hence offering prescriptive tools, may help mitigate our own anxiety as clinicians. It may also lend itself to new cognitive, emotional, and imaginative avenues for self-realization and connection with and for our clients, which are means to the experience of well-being.

Dr. Schulz comes to clinical work through a career as a literature professor and writer, and thus draws from literary texts and creative practices, in addition to phenomenological theories of well-being, to inform her encounters with her clients. In this workshop, Dr. Schulz will invite you in to some of these creative practices. In other words, this will be an interactive experience; so while specific outcomes cannot be predicted beforehand, this is some of what you can expect to explore together:

• How to address clients’ expectations for prescriptive approaches to mitigating their anxiety and depression or “achieving” well-being by reframing well-being as more than “positive subjective experience.”
• How to help clients explore the mutually constituting relationship between well-being and catastrophe, and, as such to reimagine their relationship with mortality.
• How to help clients shift their sense of timefulness so they can experience the past as always arriving, the present as a suspended presence, and the future that is calling.
• How we as clinicians can draw from literary and artistic sources to attune our selves to our clients’ embodied, emotional, and sensory experiencing and, thus, not get caught in their (or our) prescribed narratives.

This workshop will provide 2 continuing education credit hours to those who are interested.