Course Code : PT240301

Date :                 5 & 12 March 2024 (Tue)

Time :                9:30am - 5:00pm

Venue:              Room 906, 9/F, No.9, Shing Mun Road, Tsuen Wan

Trainer:             Mrs. Catherine Poon

Target:              Social Workers, Counselors, Clinical Psychologists and other helping professionals

Fee:                    Two persons​ or more enrolling together/Caritas Staff : $2,000 for each person

                           Early bird fee ︰ $2,200 (On or before 13/2/2024)

                           Original Fee︰ $2,400     

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Introduction:

As a helping profession, maintaining therapeutic presence is the most fundamental and essential foundation from which we can scaffold our therapeutic work in an effective way.  Presence is the pre-requisite for active listening, empathic attunement and making appropriate empathic responses.  Presence can enhance our ability to listen accurately and to make deep connection with our clients.  It is also the base for building up a collaborative working relationship with our clients.  With a strong bonding with our clients, the drop-out rate is drastically decreased.  Paradoxically, the more we can be present with our clients, the lesser risk of burnt-out we would have.  This workshop is aiming at giving a practical guide on how to cultivate our therapeutic presence so that we can build up a therapeutic relationship efficiently and effectively.  

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Empathic attunement is a continuous flow of moment-to-moment interpersonal experiences.  It is a mindful and bodily felt process supporting our capacity to communicate our empathic understanding accurately and to engage our clients in the process of deeper exploration.  This workshop would lay a solid foundation for further learning on other process-experiential approaches and emotion-focused interventions.
 

Objectives:

This workshop aims at:

1. mastering the skills of daily practice in cultivating therapeutic presence

2. equipping the skills in developing therapeutic relationship and alliance 

3. enhancing the ability of active listening and empathic attunement

4. promoting the interest, confidence, and skills in working with clients in an experiential way

5. laying a solid foundation for further learning on process-experiential approach of interventions

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Course Outline:

1. Cultivating therapeutic presence​

2. Barriers to therapeutic presence

3. Therapeutic relationship and alliance

4. Empathic attunement

5. Communicating empathy

6. Developing collaborative therapeutic alliance

7. Ruptures and repair

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Training Format:

• Didactic presentations

• Experiential exercises

• Micro process presentation and discussion

• Simulated practice of counseling sessions

 

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Language:   Cantonese supplemented with English

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Training materials: Mainly in English

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About the trainer

Mrs. Catherine Poon

B.A., M.S.W., M.BuddhStud.            

Personal and Marriage Counselor
Registered Social Worker            

Certified Counselor (HKPCA)
Associate Fellow (HKPCA)             

Approved Supervisor (HKPCA) 
Certified EFT Trainer (Individual Therapy) recognized by the 
International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (isEFT)
 

Mrs. Catherine Poon has worked with the Hong Kong Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (HKCMAC) for over 20 years as a marriage counselor.  She specializes her clinical work with clients of emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, and childhood attachment trauma, and couples with chronic physical/mental illnesses, addictive behavioral problems and extra-marital relationship.  Apart from clinical practice of individual and couple counselling, she has supervised social work students at different universities and family mediator trainees from different social service agencies.  She maintains a humanistic person-centered approach in her clinical practice and supervision.

Mrs. Catherine Poon has been trained in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) with Professor Leslie Greenberg since 2004. She has given presentations, provided skills coaching in the Module Workshops, and conducted monthly supervision groups in the yearly Training Programs in EFT (Individual & Couples) jointly organized by the EFT Clinic of York University and HKCMAC from 2007 to 2017.  Over the years, she has led hundreds of supervision group sessions.  She is recognized as a certified EFT individual trainer since 2016. 

She is currently in private practice.  She continues to provide individual and couples therapy, training workshops on EFT (Individual and Couples), Advanced Empathy and Mindfulness-informed clinical work, and EFT supervision for local practitioners.  She is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong since 2015, teaching Emotion-Focused Interventions and Marital Counseling for Master degree students of counseling and social work.

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