Supervision to promote Cultural Sensitivity in Therapeutic Practice

Mia trained extensively with Dr. Ken Hardy, Director and Clinical and Organizational Consultant at the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships, while a student at Ackerman. The impact of these combined experiences and training compelled Mia to offer consultation and supervision to fellow therapists, especially fellow White identifying therapists, to support each other in the journey to understand systemic and individual forms of racism, its impact on our lives and our community, our clients, and most urgently, the lives of our children.

Mia completed Dr. Hardy’s ten-week intensive course: Understanding and Addressing Racial Trauma. This course provided a racially-focused, trauma-informed clinical framework that can be used by therapists, community-based workers, and other providers to comprehensively understand and effectively address the unique needs of Clients of Color experiencing the unnamed, but widely experienced, condition of racial trauma.

Mia continued with Dr. Hardy and Associates, participating in The (Online) Saturday Series on Race. The Saturday Online Series on Race was designed to create a multiracial space where honest, open, and thoughtful conversations about the enduring, invisible, and ubiquitous centrality of whiteness could be explored. Each three hour session brought together panelists of thought leaders, activists, authors, educators, and clinicians of various racial backgrounds, offering critical reflections on whiteness. The format was conversational, interactive, and quasi-experiential using a roundtable approach. This series ran from January 2023 to July 2023 for an accumulated 45 hours of continuing education.

Additionally, on January 5 and January 12 of 2024, Mia participated in Overcoming White Defensiveness. Dr. Ken Hardy and Dr. Lane Arye co-facilitated this workshop for anyone interested in understanding, addressing, and overcoming the traps of white defensiveness.

Supervision in the Self of the Therapist Work

During her time at Ackerman Institute, Mia was offered an opportunity to enroll in a class titled The Self of the Therapist in exchange for permission to film her Self of the Therapist process to be used for training purposes. This seminar class was taught by Dr. Harry Aponte, Dr. Forogh Rahim, and Fifi Garrette-Lloyd and was based on Dr. Aponte and Dr. Karni Kissil’s book The Person of the Therapist: Mastering the Use of Self.

This evidence-supported Person of the Therapist (POTT) model looks to make conscious and planned use of a therapist’s gender, class, culture, race, sexual orientation, religion, and in particular, personal vulnerabilities and sufferings connected to family of origin and how they relate to and work with clients. This is about us, as clinicians, developing a conscious, purposeful and disciplined access to our humanity within our professional role in the therapeutic relationship. The POTT approach views the personal connection in the therapeutic relationship as a factor common to all therapies. The model emphasizes the importance of us as therapists being able to both identify with and differentiate ourselves from our clients.

Mia continues to work in one on one Self of the Therapist supervision seeking a deeper understanding of self and the use of self within the context of her clinical/healing work. She is available to work with mental health practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of self and use of self within the context of clinical work.