Special thanks to Charlie Pohl for proposing this new format and facilitating this first offering.
How you approach client care is contingent on how your frame of understanding is set. This perspective radically affects your own clinical interventions and wisdom. Exposure to a variety of understandings from other clinician can help to facilitate some clarity in your own thinking and add to your repertoire of engagement with clients.
The Open Session is designed to maximize learning by facilitating interaction between the participants about relevant clinical issues. Minimally, two thirds of each session with be a combination of breakout groups and whole group discussion with prompts provided by the facilitator to instigate reflection and conversation. Some didactic information is shared sparingly to allow for maximum engagement. To this end, we offer the following Open Session.
Anxiety: Friend or Foe? Signal or Symptom?
The term “anxiety” seems to automatically suggest it is a problem. The dictionary definition focuses on the unpleasant qualities of the experience. However, everyone can relate to anxious feeling of anticipating positive events in life: when as a child, if it was expected to be pleasant, trying to go to sleep Christmas Eve with the anticipation of the morrow and even as adults, the excited anxiety of a long anticipated vacation or the return of a loved one after a period of absence. The one common feature of either kind of anxiety is its viscerally activating effect.
If one follows the general idea of the DSM, it would appear that our primary job is to decrease the level of anxiety. However, can this at times be a misstep if indeed it is a friendly signal intended to inform us of our lives not sitting quite right, that there is a schism between our internal selves and our lives we are leading in the world or that there is a gap between the person we are and the person we aspire to be, perhaps becoming a solid and respected clinician? If so, it can be a valuable asset to our understanding of ourselves and our client’s experiences.
The Session will be conducted by Charles S Pohl LCSW who has been a clinical social worker for the past 45 years. He has supervised many MSW interns and LMSWs and teaches the fundamentals of psychotherapy to psychiatry residents. He is also a Certified Group Psychotherapist (CGP) for the past 30 years and is a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association.
Registration will be limited to the first 25 enrollees.
Yours in Social Work solidarity,
Charlie Pohl
ISCSW Chair, CEU Committee and Treasurer