Event Description:
After forty years of critical and expansive thinking about the body, WTCI brings you the next iteration of our annual online seminar: Body Talk. This seminar for practitioners is made up of five dimensions: Nourishment, Embodiment, Technology, Illness, and Aging. Incorporating intersectional feminist theory and practice, we provide skills for helping clients develop a freer and more positive relationship to their bodies amid life’s vicissitudes. The importance of social location and identities are addressed throughout. The seminar will deepen participants’ understanding of bodies in the context of the personal, the public and the political. This virtual seminar provides 8.5 CEUs for qualifying practitioners. It will be held weekly from April 17-May 22, 2026, Friday mornings from 9-10:30AM.
Cost of program: $400
We will accept a maximum of 15 participants to maintain the intimacy cultivated by WTCI clinical training. This virtual seminar provides 8.5 credit hours for qualifying practitioners*.
Class 1: Welcome: April 17th, 2026
Introduction and Overview
Debra Kram-Fernandez, Ph. D., LCSW, 200- RYT and Marisa Mabli, LCSW
This first session includes an overview of WTCI and the seminar. We will share our hopes and dreams for the program, and learning the Social Location of the individuals who are taking the class with you.
Objectives:
1. Become familiar with the structure and expectations of the 6-week seminar.
2. Discuss and experience self-identities, others’ identities, and commonalities and differences among seminar participants.
Class 2: Nourishment: April 24th, 2026,
Reconnecting clients to their sense of attunement
Ruchi Amin, LCSW
Attunement can be interrupted by social and interpersonal dynamics, and this class will explore ways to support clients in reconnecting with their sense of attunement.
We will explore nourishment on two dimensions; the emotional and the physical, and the connections between the two. We will address the relational, social, and cultural forces that influence the development of eating problems and how to navigate this in the therapy room.
Objectives:
1. Understand psychoanalytic theory with feminist lens as it relates to working with eating problems.
2. Understand clinical interventions that can be utilized in the therapeutic space.
Class 3: Embodiment: May 1st, 2026,
Embodiment and Empowerment for All Body Colors
Valerie Coleman-Palansky, LCSW, MS Ed, LMT, Registered Jin Shin Do(r) Acupressure Practitioner
Embodiment and Empowerment for All Body Colors will focus on understanding embodiment in people inhabiting a body of color and the process of maintaining an empowered sense of self in the face of traumatic racism. We will examine the embodiment of racial trauma and related intersectionality for both POC and white therapists in our work with clients using early and current cisgender and queer, Black feminist/womanist theorists, artists, and writers for inspiration. Further, from our own embodiment of these prompts we will define and integrate our own inclusive practice model that encourages empowerment and Selfhood.
Objectives:
1. Identify how racial trauma is experienced in all bodies.
2. Apply an empowerment model that helps ourselves and our clients address individualized racial trauma.
Class 4: Technology: May 8th, 2026
Physical Bodies and Virtual Bodies, the Body and Beyond, Somatic Countertransference: Bringing the Therapist's Body into Zoom
Andrea Gitter, MA, LCAT, BC-DMT
Our new normal of providing teletherapy via 2-dimensional platforms has raised challenges and presented new opportunities for embodied psychotherapy. We will explore therapists’ embodiment and its effect on treatment. We will focus on idiosyncratic posture, gesture, cadence, prosody, and other non-verbal/somatic “utterances” to unearth what they reveal and how they influence our patients’ treatment. Attention will be paid to how body/psyche develops, including how family history, gender and culture are written on and expressed through the body/self. Attention will also be paid to non-verbal/somatic signifiers and how this helps access viscerally experienced countertransference and facilitates kinesthetic empathy. What do we do when this information isn’t fully available because we’re not in the room together?
Objectives:
1. Learn to differentiate between the visual body and the visceral body and how they can reveal countertransference reactions.
2. Learn, through clinical examples, how to make use of these somatic manifestations of psychic structure, both their own and their patients’ and to implement interventions in this relational “dance” within an intersubjective framework.
Class 5: Illness: May 15th, 2026,
Psychology of Somatic Illness – how to work in psychotherapy with pain and the body?
Aleksandra Rayska, PhD
Somatic illness is often not considered a part of psychotherapy, but rather belonging in a physician's office. However, the impact of chronic illness or pain on mental health cannot be understated. In this seminar, we will explore psychological underpinnings of chronic illness and pain, and we will think together about how to address them in clinical work. We will deepen our interest in the meaning behind the physical symptoms and allow ourselves to be curious about the psychology of pain and chronic illness. Together we will explore the role of bodily communication and symptom development using clinical material.
Objectives:
1. Expand understanding of somatic issues in psychotherapy.
2. Explore psychological underpinnings of illness and pain and consider how to address it in clinical work
Class 6: Aging: May 22nd, 2026
Cultural Inequities /Constructs and the Aging Body
Debra Kram-Fernandez, Ph. D., LCSW, 200- RYT and Lela Zaphiropoulos, LCSW, ACSW
This seminar has considered the body across dimensions of nourishment, illness, technology, and embodiment. In all these dimensions, we/our bodies are aging. There is a cultural predisposition to ask the question, “What’s wrong with me /my body?” If we shift the question to simply “What’s wrong?” and look at aging against the backdrop of the social and cultural constructs as well as economic inequities in our current society, we allow for expansive thinking that engenders curiosity instead of depression about our changing physical bodies. We allow for exploration/celebration of lived experience instead of acceptance of invisibility, and we allow for tapping the wisdom of older people instead of devaluing their worth. This class addresses aging and the aging body, this universal experience, both personally and in our clinical work. (90 minutes).
Objectives:
1. Demonstrate a greater understanding of the social-cultural constructions/constrictions about aging and the body.
2. Discuss the commonalities and differences between our aging bodies, our clients’ aging bodies, and clinical implications.