White Racial Identity in Clinical Practice

The general focus of this interactive, three-hour workshop is helping clinicians to recognize the racial dynamics of therapy.  Most mental health service providers are White professionals whose competence in managing racial dynamics has been shaped by their own White racial socialization and clinical training in which there was virtually no attention to racism per se.  Consequently, when racism becomes salient in interactions with clients, the provider in charge has no guidance as to how to provide effective interventions or to recognize ineffective ones.   Since practitioners rarely receive training in the power dynamics of race and racism as they pertain to therapy, they may not be aware of how they express their racial identities in their interventions or how clients express their racial identities in clinical practice.  Therefore, it is important to use a diagnostic model that helps practitioners recognize the power dynamics of racial identity and engage in processes to reduce conflict or clinical impasses specific to the therapeutic relationship, and/or the institutions in which clinical work occurs.  In this three-hour workshop, we intend to engage clinicians in using Helms’s White Racial Identity Model to recognize different types of problematic and harmonious clinical relationships and dynamics of clinical environments, as well as clinicians’ roles in contributing to them.  We will be utilizing virtual breakout rooms to encourage participants’ discussion of clinical material associated with brief informational sessions.

*Please note that this webinar is being offered using Zoom Meetings, and we will be moving into breakout rooms throughout the afternoon.  We ask you to turn your cameras on if it is at all possible in order to improve discussions.