Counseling the Exceptional: Understanding and Treating Neurodiverse Clients: Over 85% of medical professionals and counselors report feeling inadequately trained to provide support to individuals with intellectual disabilities and/or neurodiversity. However, the estimated rate of mental illness in individuals from these populations is 2-3 times higher than the general population. This presentation will provide background education on intellectual disabilities and autism spectrum disorder, review some of the stigmas and barriers, and provide ideas for strategies and accommodations in interventions across variety of therapeutic modalities to provide for the needs of clients in this specialized population.
Presented by: Suzanne Shonkwiler

Intersectionality Considerations for Black Women's Body Image: The purpose of this presentation is to inform about the importance of cultural competence in eating disorder spaces amongst Black women. By existing within a world with both Eurocentric beauty standards and Black beauty standards, Black clients often feel left out of or misunderstood in relation to their body dissatisfaction. By being informed about the influence of their intersecting identities (e.g., race, gender), more adequate, culturally-competent care can be given.
Presented by: Bria Atkins

Compassionate Conversations in Supervision: Using a Six Hats Framework to Develop Confident Counselors: This session introduces a flexible, creative, and developmentally attuned supervision framework. Centering supervision as an ongoing conversation, the workshop provides experiential activities, demonstration, and practical applications. Participants will learn how each hat cultivates distinct supervisory functions, facilitating supervisee self-efficacy, self-compassion, and client conceptualization skills through intentional shifts in perspective. Designed for supervisors but applicable to all counselors, this session offers an integrative approach to strengthening purposeful, growth-oriented, compassionate supervision conversations.
Presented by: Mandy Kellums Baraka

DAY 2 - Saturday, October 10, 2026 

8:00a - 9:00a Coffee and Exhibitor Hall Open

9:00a - 10:00a Workshop Session 5

When Silence Shapes the Session: The Conversations Clients Need Counselors to Initiate: This session explores the clinical conversations clients often need counselors to initiate, but counselors may avoid due to fear, discomfort, uncertainty, or concern about harming the therapeutic relationship. Participants will examine how silence can shape safety, shame, trust, identity, rupture, and power in counseling. The presentation will focus on five essential conversations: safety and risk, identity and lived experience, rupture and repair, shame and hidden material, and power, boundaries, and limits. Through reflection and practical examples, participants will learn language for initiating difficult conversations with humility, clarity, consent, and care.
Presented by: Ron Gardner & Jessica Kueterman

Connecting Mental and Physical Health in Perinatal Clients: The course is designed to bring awareness on the gap that exists for perinatal individuals and families. The care has been separated, and the void can create space for people to fall in the gaps. The course is aimed at how to communicate and practice with the integrated experience in mind.
Presented by: Lauren Lehman

Shame Is Not a Motivator: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Recovery: Shame is one of the most powerful drivers of addiction and relapse — and one of the most common tools still embedded in how we treat it. From “hitting bottom” mythology to moral failure narratives, behavioral health has inherited a shame-based framework that contradicts the neuroscience and relational research it claims to follow. This session draws on shame resilience theory and SUD treatment frameworks to examine how shame shows up in provider language, treatment culture, and system design — often invisibly. Participants will explore what shame-resilient care actually looks like in group facilitation, treatment planning, and everyday clinical language.
Presented by: Rachel Goodwin

10:10a - 11:10a Workshop Session 6

Stepping Into Your Power: Advocating Outside the Clinic: Counselors will learn about and gain practical skills for identifying and getting involved with Advocacy. We will explore different ways to get involved and give back at the local, state, national, and potentially international level. We will also hold space for how to balance getting involved and maintaining well being in the process.
Presented by: Dominic Augustin & Spencer Murphy

When Eating Feels Unsafe: Recognizing When It Is Not Just Picky Eating: Behind many “picky eating” concerns lies Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), a complex and often misunderstood presentation that can leave counselors feeling unsure of how to respond in practice. This workshop will support counselors in differentiating typical picky eating and clinically significant ARFID, increasing confidence in early identification and intervention. Through case study application, this workshop emphasizes a family-centered approach to care. Participants will identify ARFID presentations and explore how ARFID is maintained. By understanding these dynamics, participants will learn how to more effectively guide families toward treatment that supports the child’s sense of safety. Attendees will learn how to engage caregivers as collaborative partners in treatment while maintaining a non-blaming, strengths-based stance. Special attention will be given to the low-interest presentation of ARFID, an often under-recognized and challenging presentation due to the child’s limited internal motivation to eat and reduced responsiveness to typical behavioral strategies. Attendees will leave with clearer case conceptualization strategies and effective interventions.
Presented by: Angie Arreola & Emily Ervin

Documenting Ethical Decision Making: Ethical dilemmas are inevitable in clinical practice — but most clinicians were never taught how to document them. This presentation offers a practical framework for translating ethical decision-making into clinical record entries that demonstrate professional accountability and protect both client and clinician. Drawing on current professional codes of ethics, participants will learn what to document, where it belongs in the clinical record, and how thorough documentation supports ethical practice rather than just risk management. Applicable across theoretical orientations and practice settings.
Presented by: Brooke Randolph

11:20a - 12:20p Workshop Session 7

Practicing Cultural Responsiveness in Sessions: Cultural Values Moderate Psychosocial Impacts of Emotion Suppression: This course focuses on emotion suppression, the inhibition of ongoing emotion-expressive behaviors, which is an emotion regulation strategy that has received significant attention from researchers across the globe due to its connection to one’s psychosocial functioning. In this presentation, presenters will present and discuss cross-cultural studies on emotion suppression and its impact on psychosocial functioning. Presenters will also draw from recent research to discuss how cultural values and relationship context may influence the relationship between emotion suppression and relationship satisfaction and depressive symptoms. The importance of considering culture and cultural values when conceptualizing emotion suppression will be emphasized to avoid over-pathologizing the use of suppression to regulate emotions.
Presented by: Guolin Zhang

Counseling with Claude: The Development of AI and LLM's as Evidence-Based Practices in Counseling: Artificial Intelligences (AI) and large language models (LLMs) are becoming transformative forces in counseling, not to mention many professional spaces. This presentation will explore the evolution of AI tools with a focus on the more well-known LLM's and examine their emerging role as evidence-based supports for clinical decision making, documentation, psychoeducation, treatment planning, and counselor training. Presenters will review current research, ethical considerations, as well as how to practically apply AI in the behavioral health setting. Participants will be aided in gaining a framework for evaluation, implementation, and responsible integration of AI with the goal of enhancing clinical efficacy while staying person-centered, trauma-informed, and ethical in one's own practice. By establishing a framework, we will also be able to work towards not only evidence-based best practices for LLM implementation but also evidence-based practices for LLM utilization.
Presented by: Gerrimy Keiffer

Defending Against Board Complaints and Litigation: A counselor’s license is one’s livelihood, and its protection is paramount. A counselor’s practice and conduct are expected to be safe, competent, ethical, and compliant with applicable laws and rules. Each State Board of Professional Counselors serves to protect the public by monitoring licensees and holding them accountable to professional practice requirements. When a complaint is asserted against a counselor to the Board, the counselor must be equipped with knowledge and resources to defend themselves adequately. Being unprepared may represent the difference between a counselor retaining or losing their license.
Presented by: Stephanie Burns

12:30p - 1:45p Catered Lunch and Awards Ceremony / Emerging Leader Recognition 

1:50p - 2:50p Workshop Session 8

The Body Remembers: Using Movement and Self-Trust to Support Trauma Recovery and Resilience: Trauma impacts both the mind and body, influencing emotional regulation, relationships, and daily functioning. This interactive session explores how movement, body awareness, and nervous system regulation can support resilience, self-trust, and recovery. Drawing from nursing, mental health, and movement-based coaching, participants will learn practical strategies that complement traditional counseling approaches. Through experiential activities and reflection, attendees will gain accessible, evidence-informed tools to help clients strengthen emotional regulation, build confidence, and reconnect with their capacity for healing and growth.
Presented by: Lita Mae Button

OCD Is a Liar: Understanding Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP):  Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is frequently misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and improperly treated in clinical practice. This workshop provides mental health professionals with an evidence-based overview of OCD, including symptom presentation, diagnostic considerations, common subtypes, differential diagnosis, and treatment approaches. Special emphasis will be placed on Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), the gold-standard behavioral treatment for OCD. Participants will learn how OCD operates through cycles of intrusive thoughts, anxiety, compulsions, avoidance, and reassurance-seeking behaviors. The training will explore how compulsions can become covert, how therapists may unintentionally accommodate OCD symptoms, and how shame and stigma impact treatment engagement. This workshop will introduce the theoretical foundations and practical implementation of ERP, including hierarchy development, exposure planning, response prevention strategies, habituation versus inhibitory learning, and managing treatment barriers. Ethical and cultural considerations, common clinician mistakes, and adaptations for various populations will also be discussed. Through case examples, experiential exercises, and clinical discussion, participants will gain practical tools to assess OCD symptoms, conceptualize cases, and implement ERP interventions within their scope of practice.
Presented by: Arlene Donnelly

Preparing Child Counselors to Work with Parents: Activities to Build Competencies: Parent consultation literature has been prolific in school counseling, yet sparse in general counseling literature. Child counselors cite working with guardians as the most challenging aspect of counseling children. Due to the many skills counseling students/supervisees need to demonstrate in counselor education programs, skills specific to working with parents are overlooked. In this presentation, the presenter will identify competencies for working with children and parents and facilitate experiential activities.
Presented by: Jenna Taylor

3:00p - 4:00p Workshop Session 9

Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Relationship: AI Chatbots Impact on Mental Health: As AI becomes a more common source of mental health support, clinicians must understand both its potential and its limitations. This presentation examines emerging research on the risks of AI in mental health, contrasts AI chatbots with the relational role of licensed counselors, reviews current regulatory efforts, and explores how clinicians can promote accessible, ethical alternatives that strengthen connections to professional care.
Presented by: Rob Kern & Isabella Neiling

The Pain and Payoff of Exploring Bias in Culturally Responsive Counseling Supervision: Counseling students benefit from consistent messaging around culturally responsive practice in clinical environments that support professional identity development. Consistent with ACA and NBCC ethical guidance, culturally responsive clinical supervision (CRCS) creates opportunities for counselors-in-training to engage topics that may feel uncomfortable for both supervisors and supervisees. Particularly, culturally responsive practices must include interactive, real-time learning experiences to help embrace risk along with learning. This presentation explores the challenges and benefits of broaching sensitive topics in clinical supervision through a CRCS framework that builds from tenets of courage, wisdom, and acceptance.
Presented by: Rhemma Payne

Words Matter: The Conversations that Shape Us. What we Wish Other Mental Health Counselors Understood: This proposed presentation addresses the importance of the language used to describe individuals who have experienced marginalization within the United States for one reason or another. It will clarify terminology and offer plenty of examples of bias-free language, how it can be applied and most importantly why it should be applied. Ethical guidelines call counselors to be multiculturally competent and to recognize client’s culture, worth, dignity and uniqueness (American Counseling Association, 2014). This presentation is calling those in the mental health field to practice intentionality in the words they use when addressing their clients.
Presented by: Lisa Wells