Participating in Hamm’s training program can be rewarding, engaging, and profoundly valuable. Trainees learn a lot about themselves as they are developing their clinical skills in an environment of learning and growth-oriented clinicians.
Find currently posted openings on our employment opportunities page here.
Training Aims
- Trainees will learn to conduct culturally-responsive, trauma-informed, relational diagnostic assessments and treatment with adults. This includes developing the collaborative, empathic, attuned relationships necessary to facilitate healing and growth.
- Trainees will learn to provide intentional care to meet specific treatment goals that are collaboratively created, measured and evaluated. Trainees will seek guidance to ensure treatment effectiveness.
- Trainees will learn how to improve all aspects of health (psychological, physical, emotional, spiritual, and cultural) by working closely across disciplines.
- Trainees will learn to engage in client-centered care, focused on healing and resilience, and to respond to the whole person in the context of their lived experiences.
- Trainees will strive to ensure their practice promotes equity, increases access, challenges injustice, and critically examines power and privilege.
Clinical trainees develop clinical competency through didactic instruction, experiential practice, consultation, and supervision. All trainees participate in an intensive, multi-day Orientation at the beginning of the training year, and other onboarding activities continue well beyond Orientation. A few of our core learning activities are described below.
Seminar Series
A core learning activity in our training program is a weekly seminar series that prepares clinicians for outpatient practice. It prioritizes training on relational psychodynamic psychotherapy, anti-oppressive/anti-racist practice, trauma-informed care, interdisciplinary care, and deliberate and reflective practice. Hamm Clinic staff clinicians and guest speakers serve as faculty, bringing their practice wisdom into the classroom.
The seminar series begins in the fall and runs through the spring. Each seminar is designed to appeal to multiple learning styles. Sessions include a combination of didactics, skill practice, and case consultation. All seminar sessions will include at least 30 minutes of active practice through participant application of material via role plays, treatment planning, case studies with discussion questions, activities and clinical/client interventions done with the participants themselves (e.g. mindfulness, art, play), and case conceptualization.
Reflective Practice Supervision
Reflective Practice is a model of supervision that emphasizes reflection in consultation. We use this model at Hamm Clinic because it facilitates trainee growth through self-awareness, slowing down, holding an observing self, and attending to the impact of self on our work with clients, supervisors, teams, within organizations, and within larger systems. It is especially powerful for supporting providers working with clients with high levels of risk, experiences of trauma, ongoing oppression and systemic/institutional violence, and enhancing provider cultural responsiveness and anti-oppressive practice. It is also extremely supportive of processing secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, and moral injury effects on the provider.
Consultation Team
Trainees participate in a weekly, one-hour multidisciplinary Clinical Consultation Team, which includes staff and trainees in psychiatry, psychology, and social work. In this consultation team experience trainees are exposed to a range of mental health issues that are managed in an outpatient psychotherapy setting. They participate as a team member, support team members, and gain experience with seeking professional consultation in their role as a therapist.
Clinical staff model the use of case consultation to support their work. Trainees are expected to present their clinical work, and become familiar with seeking feedback from others to help navigate challenging clinical issues that arise, ethical concerns, transference/counter-transference, and individual and cultural diversity. In addition, trainees are exposed to the work of a diverse range of professional and theoretical points of view.
The trainees gain experience as consultants to the members of the team. Trainees contribute their current and advanced academic training in clinical or counseling psychology for constructive clinical purposes. Trainees are expected to take an increasingly active role as a consultant as their training progresses. Trainees contribute consultation, based on their academic knowledge of the science of psychology, psychological assessment, and unique clinical skills and interests, as is relevant to the cases discussed.
Training Prioritization Tracks
In order to tailor trainees’ learning experiences to their interests and strengths, each trainee has the option of prioritizing one track per 20 hours of time at the clinic. Additional training opportunities may be available, but these tracks will define trainees’ training priorities for the upcoming training year. Training Specialization Tracks currently available are: Group Therapy, Trauma, Asylum Assessment, and Leadership. Trainees rank their preferences early in the year, and are assigned a specialization track as soon as feasible.
Hamm’s training program is “supportive, comprehensive, flexible, engaging.” – a former trainee
