Dream Work for Deepening Clinical Outcomes
Presented by: Becky Robbins, MA, LMHC
When: Thursday, January 23rd, 2025 | 9:30 am – 5:00 pm Pacific Time
Where: Live on Zoom. You will receive your Zoom link/invitation the week of the workshop.
Continuing Education Credit Hours: 6 CEs | $190.00
This fundamentals workshop provides a strong, basic understanding of the necessary aspects of working with dreams in a clinical setting. The instructor utilizes integrated theoretical models of working with dreams, including cognitive-experiential, expressive arts, and nature-based dream work models, to explore the benefits of doing dream work with clients.
The purpose of this workshop is to introduce the context, foundations, benefits, and ethics of engaging in dream work in therapy sessions with clients, as well as to provide experiential exercises for “hands-on” learning that can be implemented immediately. Support material from Clara Hill’s work, “cognitive-experiential dream model” highlight the value of dream work in deepening outcomes with clients. This workshop will also introduce participants to working with clients’ significant dreams, grief/loss-related dreams, and trauma-related dreams with tenderness and through the clinical lens.
This session provides a good foundation for understanding the theories involved in working with the unconscious—aka dreams—as it provides a multi-modal, cooperative learning experience to reinforce the ideas presented. The instructor will make clear the benefits of doing therapeutic dream work using an integrated model. Participants will explore the ways in which the various approaches complement each other and are appropriate for a wide range of clients, including those clients who are remembering, working through, and healing grief, loss, and traumatic experiences. This session also considers ethical, legal, and documentation topics related to dream work in the clinical setting.
OBJECTIVES:
- Explain the difference between “dream interpretation” and “dream work” and why the latter is what we do in therapy
- “Light” foundations of dream work
- Name individuals in our field who influence today’s workshop content, models, approaches
- Understand how to introduce and use dream work in the clinical/ therapeutic setting, shifts from “Freudian” ways to multi-theoretical
- Explain how our unconscious speaks through our dreams so that important information stored in our bodies and memories can come forth and become conscious, possible demo
- Identify how dream work enhances one’s practice
- Identify parts of dreams with examples of when they might come up in therapy
- Understand how to utilize several dream work approaches from a range of exploratory, expressive, and nature-based theorists
- Provide examples of appropriate application of each approach including that the client has the last word
- View a live demonstration of dream work demo (recorded/link or live/volunteer)
- Explore and practice techniques for doing dream work that can be used immediately, through demonstrations and “hands-on” experientials in this workshop
- Learn how to become a better container for working with your clients’ dreams through self-empowerment, self-care, self-regulation, and protective practice when working with dreams, especially with dream content related to grief, loss, phobias, and trauma
- Consider legal, ethical, and documentation implications for doing dream work, especially with survivors of trauma (such as a dream that recalls repressed childhood abuse) and those experiencing grief and loss, as well as social and environmental impacts (such as dynamics of power and privilege) of dream content in client’s waking life