ODL 314: 15 Essential Awareness-Based Strategies for Helping Professionals: Skills to Transform Your Treatment Plans for Depression, Anxiety, Anger, Trauma, Guilt and Shame

Created on: 12/12/24 Revised on: 9/18/26

Attention Case Managers ONLY: CCMC expires on this course on 11/30/26 and will not be renewed. Please complete before this date.

Target Audience:

This course is targeted for social workers, psychologists, counselors, nurses and case managers.

Please note: This on-demand webinar is a replay of a live CE event. The format reflects the original presentation and may include live Q&A, transitions, and intermittent audio/visual fluctuations typical of a live recording.

Counselor Skill Groups: 

3. Treatment Plan
4. Counseling Services

Overview:

From depression and anxiety to shame and trauma, mindfulness has demonstrated its ability to help reduce suffering. With all its benefits, mindfulness is widely used in clinical practice. There are hundreds of mindfulness interventions available to clinicians, but with so many to choose from, how do you know which to use? How do you decide on your “go-to” techniques?

Dr. Debra Alvis developed and led the Mind/Body program at the University of Georgia. She holds certification as a mindfulness meditation teacher and as a yoga therapist. With more than 25 years teaching mindfulness and using mindfulness techniques in her clinical practice, Debra has distilled the available techniques into the essential hands-on mindfulness skills and interventions you need to treat your clients.

Join Debra and learn to effectively use 15 mindfulness practices you can incorporate into your treatment plans for depression, anxiety, shame, and trauma. Debra will guide you through the specific exercises that she has found most capable of shifting clients away from debilitating vagal system patterns, intervening in the downward spiral of depression and anxiety, and cultivating safety and groundedness in traumatized clients. In addition, she will give you detailed instruction on her top mindfulness interventions to help your clients address guilt and shame and empower them to manage anger and toxic emotions.

As an additional benefit, you will have the opportunity to practice the application of what you have learned under Debra’s expert supervision. Enhance your clinical practice with mindfulness skills that work!

Course Objectives:

By the end of the session, the participant will be able to:

1. Determine how mindfulness practices can be used to develop a more resilient nervous system. 
2. Integrate mindfulness interventions into your treatment plans to counter automatic patterns of negative thoughts. 
3. Demonstrate how brief mindfulness practices can be utilized in-session to increase emotion regulation. 
4. Examine how to retrain the dysregulated, traumatized brain and implement grounding techniques and breathing exercises. 
5. Apply mindfulness-based therapies to address shame and guilt.

Presenter:

Debra Alvis, PhD, licensed psychologist, developed the Mind/Body Program at the University of Georgia providing clinician training on the integration of mindfulness and contemplative practices into psychotherapy.  Her work as a professor at the University of Georgia included the supervision of doctoral students and co-leading a research team investigating mindfulness. She is a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher certified through Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield and is trained as a yoga therapist.  

Dr. Alvis maintains a private practice and has more than 25 years of clinical experience in treating clients with a variety of conditions by combining mindfulness principles, body-oriented strategies, and traditional psychotherapeutic approaches. Her personal contemplative practice of three decades further supports her presentations.  

Debra lectures and leads retreats around the world. Her trainings have helped thousands of clinicians to integrate the richness of Mindfulness, neuroscience, and somatic psychotherapies with cognitive approaches for greater clinical effectiveness.