About this Event
Detailed Agenda to follow. This session will include the following workshop led by Dr. Anita Federci
When Helping Gets Hard: A Dialectical Approach to Complex MHA Care
Practitioners working in intensive community mental health settings routinely encounter situations in which there are no simple or immediately workable solutions. The people they support may be navigating psychosis, substance use, dissociation, trauma, poverty, unstable housing, systemic exclusion, and significant threats to safety, all while being expected to “engage,” trust providers, regulate emotions, attend appointments, and make changes within systems that may have repeatedly failed or harmed them.
In these contexts, understandable survival responses can easily be interpreted as resistance, non-compliance, manipulation, lack of insight, or unwillingness to change. Practitioners may find themselves working harder while feeling increasingly ineffective, frustrated, protective, fearful, or disconnected from the reasons they entered the work.
This interactive workshop offers a different clinical lens. Drawing upon dialectical principles, trauma-informed care, cultural humility, validation, and the treatment assumptions of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), participants will explore how complex behaviour can be understood as meaningful within a person’s biological, relational, cultural, and environmental context. The emphasis is not on delivering DBT or adding another treatment protocol. Instead, participants will learn a way of thinking that can inform everyday interactions across housing, outreach, life-skills, case-management, and clinical roles.
Participants will examine how small moments—tone, language, assumptions, responses to missed appointments, interpretations of risk, and decisions about autonomy can either reproduce invalidation or create the conditions for safety, dignity, collaboration, and change.
Through reflection, discussion, and applied case examples, participants will identify practical ways to reduce judgment of self and other without minimizing risk, validate without necessarily agreeing, hold acceptance and change simultaneously, and preserve the person’s agency in situations of considerable complexity. The workshop will also validate the realities of practitioners who are attempting to offer humane care within systems shaped by limited resources, competing mandates, uncertainty, and chronic exposure to suffering.
Participants will leave with a more compassionate and clinically useful understanding of complex behaviour, along with several concrete practices that can be applied immediately in their work.
Learning objectives
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Interpret complex or seemingly “resistant” behaviour with greater contextual accuracy by considering its possible adaptive, protective, relational, cultural, and environmental functions.
- Recognize transactional patterns between individuals, practitioners, and systems that may unintentionally increase threat, mistrust, shame, disengagement, or loss of agency.
- Apply a dialectical stance to complex care, including holding acceptance and change, autonomy and safety, compassion and accountability, and client needs and practitioner limits at the same time.
- Use validation more precisely and effectively, including in situations involving disagreement, psychosis, substance use, repeated crises, missed appointments, or choices that generate significant concern.
- Identify one to three practical changes in their own interactions that can reduce invalidation, preserve dignity, strengthen collaboration, and support more effective care.
Workshop approach - This workshop will combine brief teaching segments with reflective and experiential activities. Participants will work with realistic situations drawn from community mental health and addictions care.
Intended audience - This workshop is designed for practitioners working in Guelph Wellington supporting individuals with complex mental health, addicitons and psychosocial needs, including life-skills workers, housing and outreach workers, case managers, community mental health clinicians, peer-support workers, addictions workers and members intensive support teams. No previous training in DBT is required.
Event venue & nearby stays
Italian Canadian Club Of Guelph, 135 Ferguson Street, Guelph, Canada
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