CCA conference

Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Colorado Counseling Association conference. This was the first conference I had been to regarding anything for counseling. I absolutely loved it. It was a full day from 9-5 but I didn't feel like I was there for that long.

Our keynote speaker was a man by the name of David Capuzzi and he was absolutely amazing. He gave an hour and a half talk that felt like 15 minutes...it was over way too soon. He is a specialist on grief and loss and he told some amazing stories and gave us a model of the stages of grief and loss. He had us do this activity where we wrote down 6 things we value on 6 cards, we then had to take one of those things away and discuss how we felt about that choice with a partner from our table. My item had been my therapist, out of all the things written on my cards I decided that was the one thing I could live without. Mainly because I have become to realize that I do have some great friends and connections to help me get through things. Also, I can always get a new therapist at some point ;). Next we had to turn over the cards and then mix them up and then let our partner randomly pick a card, and once again discuss with our partner how we felt about that. Luckily for me the item she chose for me was my career. I say luckily because the place that I am in right now in life I have a lot of choices and being on 2 different career paths I have the option and also, I never specified which career ;). Also, I know that I am young and have different abilities to always find something different. It would be hard but I know that I could adapt to the situation.

The last session I chose to go to was a discussion about IRRT (Imagery Rescripting and Reprocessing Therapy). This was such an amazing talk and a powerful form of therapy. We were able to hear a recorded session of this therapy in action as well as hear numerous stories of how this type of therapy has helped numerous people in such a short amount of sessions. This is a type of therapy that is used for the treatment of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). What it does is ask the client to go back to the memory of the traumatic event, and then it places the client there as their adult self and asks them to take over the situation. I won't give away all the information because if someone reads this I want them to be able to fully commit to the therapy without any thoughts of what should happen. However, this is a therapy that empowers the client to be able to overcome what they have gone through and come to a new place with their traumatic event. For one client it worked in one session, and he was a veteran from Vietnam. He was able to live his life again without having fear of dying every day. It was an amazing and empowering talk. I am thinking about finding out more about this type of therapy and thinking about using it with one of my girls.
I think this could be something amazing for one of my girls to help her through the sexual abuse she encountered from her father when she was 3. She is a girl that I have connected with and she has so many amazing qualities but can't realize it because of all the things she has experienced in life. She constantly has nightmares about these incidents when she was younger and I want her to move past these nightmares and live her life. She was doing really well for a month and then something happened, I haven't figured out what yet, but something happened and she has had a hard time getting back on track. I think this might be something I can do that could maybe help her. It is just a matter of determining if she is "healthy" enough to handle it. She still has some suicidal ideations so this could play a big part if she could or could not handle this form of therapy.

I made a small side track there about one of my girls but I couldn't help it. The talk was so amazing and the type of therapy was just so inspirational that it really made me think. I think this type of therapy could really help a lot of people with PTSD and I really hope it starts to become popular in therapy.

At the end of the day I made some amazing connections with people and was able to network a little bit. I stopped by the table for the Betty Ford Center which is something based in Colorado that has younger kids come to a four day workshop; these kids have been affected by parents who suffer from alcoholism. My friend Michelle informed me of this center and she volunteered herself, so I think I am going to do it as well in June. It will be an amazing experience and it will count towards my internship hours. I am so happy that I went and am I inspired and already planning on going to the ACA (American counseling association) conference in March which is in New Orleans! I can't wait!