The Clinic
Deepen your practice at The Clinic, a series of specialized workshops designed to hone your skills and capacity as a practitioner. Inspired by the focused training methods used in sports clinics, these sessions are facilitated by seasoned practitioners who offer teaching on their modality of focus, bring these concepts to life with a live session with a client volunteer, and hold space for integration through honest discussion and group consultation.
Each clinic will focus on an approach to the work, providing you with advanced techniques, practical tools, and new perspectives to integrate into your work. Whether you’re looking to refine your approach, deepen your capacity to drop into the human experience of this work, or renew your imagination for what’s possible in the in between, these clinics offer a unique opportunity for growth and connection.
These learning spaces are human, messy, playful, and inspiring. We launched this series in our 2024-25 learning canopy and we’re so excited to return with season two!
Walking Each Other Home: The Art of Initiating Peer Support Groups
In this workshop Dr. Gitika Talwar introduces participants to the idea of “healer-initiated peer support groups,” a hybrid framework designed to equip practitioners and laypersons with the values and skills to create healing spaces and co-create an ecosystem for liberation.
This framework directly addresses the systemic lack of access to supportive communities due to stigma, polarization, systemic anxiety or the fear of a culturally clueless therapist. This framework also aspires to meaningfully disrupt the colonial mental health model that centered individualism to the exclusion of collectivism.
The workshop aims to discuss and demonstrate a sustainable, humane practice where access to care is not contingent on diagnosis, where growth is not reliant on professional therapeutic care and where wellness is not an individualistic pursuit. It aspires to sow the seeds of a practice to serve people looking to build community on the foundations of solidarity and humane values-alignment.
Through this workshop, participants will be able to:
Implement a Hybrid Framework: Learn to translate core therapeutic elements into a practical guide for building a collective that affirms each other's humanity. The training provides an open-access system by sharing knowledge about what happens "behind the curtain" of therapeutic practice. The hybrid nature of this framework comes from the presence and faded exit of the Initiator.
Establish a Liberatory Practice: Ground your group in values that center love, co-operation, generative conflict, inclusive and humane(a.k.a value that are anti-oppressive, anti-colonial, and trauma-informed liberatory work). The goal is to share the labor of collective witnessing, moving this responsibility from individual practitioners back into the community.
Develop Group Conditions: Acquire skills to facilitate "therapeutic containers", ensuring that group conditions support individual and collective healing. The training emphasizes creating spaces that are inclusive of the most marginalized individuals.
This workshop will address diversity and cultural ‘competence’ by offering ways in which practitioners can learn and facilitate learning from people whose voices are frequently marginalized in mainstream mental health education. Additionally, mental health trainings frequency focus on individuals and their unique contexts but doesn't sufficiently address the collective and values of collectivism, which are important in a range of non-European cultures. This training is designed to address that gap.
Container
This is a hybrid offering. We will gather in person at Shelterwood’s home base in Pioneer Square and virtually via Zoom. You’ll receive the link to join the morning of the offering
Exchange
Members — included in monthly membership fee
General Public — $60 with CEUs / $40 without CEUs
Authorization
Participation includes 2 health equity continuing education units. These CEUs are authorized and approved by the NASW Washington State Chapter. Our provider #1975-507. Licensed social workers, marriage and family therapists, and mental health counselors are eligible.
Gitika Talwar
PhD, Licensed Clinical Community Psychologist
She/they/We
Gitika is a first-generation South Asian immigrant, an activist-practitioner, and a recovering people-pleaser who recognizes (in the words of Affirmation Musician, Toni Jones) that “people -pleasing is not love, it's fear.” Gitika is on a lifelong journey to heal and facilitate healing while being in relationship with all elements of the cosmos - humans, animals, plants, minerals, earth, sky, fire, water….you get it.