Advancing Knowledge
As part of our commitment to community education, Hamm Clinic hosts annual public conferences featuring local and national mental health experts. Recent conferences have focused on integration of equitable care, psychodynamic practice and understanding resiliency and sustaining mental health.
2023 Conference
The 2023 Hamm Spring Conference was a full day of training May 19, 2023, entitled; Build Resilience – Nurture Joy: Exploring the Science and Soul of Healing
About Build Resilience – Nurture Joy
Attendees explored the science and soul of healing with Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, founders and co-hosts of the JoyLab program and podcast. As experts in evidence-based techniques for promoting resilience, Drs. Emmons and Prasek engaged attendees in a process of discovery and understanding around resiliency, finding joy, and developing techniques for sustaining mental health.
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2022 Conference Highlights
The 2022 conference, Intersectional Trauma and Resilience: A Day of Learning, Community, and Care was held October 7, 2022 at the Saint Paul Student Center of the University of Minnesota.
Speaker Dr. Rachael D. Goodman discussed intersectional trauma and resilience as a framework for clinical practice and advocacy. Together, participants spent the day examining and exploring work with immigrants, refugees, and trauma survivors broadly and learned about building strategies for “community care” rather than simply “self-care” as an essential element of the trauma work.
Dr. Rachael D. Goodman, LPC (she/her), is an Associate Professor in the Counseling Program at George Mason University. Dr. Goodman’s expertise centers around trauma and resilience, and is grounded in social justice. Since 2014, Dr. Goodman has been engaged in community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) that seeks to understand and address intersectional and structural trauma and stress in partnership with undocumented immigrants.
Dr. Goodman provides consultation and professional development to schools and agencies on issues related to trauma, stress, and trauma-informed care; compassion fatigue and burnout; and community and self-care. She is Past President (2017-2018) of Counselors for Social Justice (CSJ), a division of the American Counseling Association (ACA), and currently serves as the CSJ Representative to ACA’s Governing Council. Dr. Goodman is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the District of Columbia.
2020 Conference Highlights
In October of 2020 Dr. Lisa Moore, LICSW, PhD, spoke on “Race, Black Bodies, and Psychodynamic Therapy.” The virtual convening explored how one identifies fear as it resides in those with power and suggested approaches for addressing the effects of this fear in the context of clinical practice.
Dr. Moore helped us to identify and distinguish the presentation of mental health symptoms as responses to various forms of racism versus those emerging due to organic mental health concerns and identify the stages of dehumanization that shape dominant forms of oppression by individuals and institutions. She discussed Frantz Fanon’s theories and the application of psychodynamic theories in clinical practice cross-racially.
The conference also featured a special performance by poet, activist, and educator Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre. His work explores the relationships between identity, power, and resistance. Guante strives to cultivate a deeper, more critical engagement with social justice issues, one based in both empathy and agency. 2020 Conference Brochure.
2019 Conference Highlights
In May 2019, Usha Tummala-Narra, PhD presented “Sociocultural Identity and Oppression: A Psychoanalytic Perspective.”
She highlighted psychoanalytic understandings of sociocultural context in psychotherapy, focusing specifically on experiences of sociocultural oppression— such as racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism—and intersecting experiences of interpersonal violence.
She covered contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives that emphasize the impact of sociopolitical contexts on mental health and the centrality of the therapeutic relationship in addressing effects of oppression on clients’ sense of safety, functioning and relational life. Clinical vignettes helped to translate culturally informed psychoanalytic theory to practice.
