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Abstract

This session explores how the counseling room can address JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusiveness). Speakers, share how to address JEDI from the consultation call to discharge, specifically with clients who identify as minorities including African American/Latinx and are also members of sexual minorities, veterans, the disabled, the poor and the social and politically disenfranchised. Participants will participate in small group exercises which facilitate crucial conversations about race, class, gender and sexual orientation. There is a focus serving members of our community using a mindfulness and self-care strategies to lead these transformative and crucial conversations, minimizing vicarious trauma. We will explore our serving population�s representative of our cultures can contribute to compassion fatigue which manifest in mental, physical and emotional ways. Our last goal is to celebrate client strengths, pride, culture and values with clients from a strengths-based approach and not from a deficiency approach, which we feel increases self-efficacy, contributes to help seeking behaviors and casts aside the myth that counseling is a sign of weakness. Learning Objectives: Attendees will learn how innovative strategies can significantly impact provider capacity and competency to support individuals with complex behavior support needs. Learning objective 1: To Encourage clinicians to openly create dialogue from the initial contact to the last session of therapy focusing on self-awareness using FIT model, using and the Culturagram to explain and model in a practical group exercise who knowing self lends to helping clients explore their whole selves. Learning objective 2: To discuss how counselors can integrate JEDI principles in counseling, through assessment, treatment goal creation in a collaborative manner, assessing progress, celebrating accomplishment and unpacking the effects on the client's mental health and the therapist's professional and personal growth.

Biography

Antoinette Gomez is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Registered Play Therapist. She has devoted 15 years to helping children and their families are successful in relating to one another. She also treats anxiety, depression, trauma, eating disorders, compulsions, addictions and other lifelong stressors. Trauma recovery is her area of expertise and she presents on how Justice, Equity, Inclusiveness and Diversity aligns with healing chronic, racial and generational trauma. She works on treating people with an abundance mentality and using CBT, to restructure their thoughts and to see the myriad of opportunities. PTSD is real and the struggle is REAL. She helps people including veterans and crime victims turn the page to survivorship and healing in transformative ways.