Hour of Private Practice:  Questions and Answers

Friday,  November 20, 2026 (Noon – 1 pm ET)

This course examines how one’s culture impacts decision making in various treatment settings. Providers are constantly faced with ethical choices resulting in ambiguous outcomes and difficult decisions that may be morally confusing. Understanding cultural concepts enables providers to bridge the difference between themselves and diverse populations. Participants will acquire a better understanding of the ethical decision-making process when cross-cultural conflicts occur while addressing implications of unconscious biases. The workshop will address these issues through a combination of interactive dialogue, focused discussion, applied. practice exercises, and small group work

Supervising clinicians in high acuity settings requires supervisors to manage complex clinical, relational, ethical, and organizational demands while maintaining an effective supervisory stance. This six-hour training provides an advanced, practice-oriented examination of supervision under sustained stress and high clinical complexity.
Participants will examine vicarious trauma and burnout in supervisees, the effects of supervisor stress responses and parallel process, culturally responsive supervision and power dynamics, boundaries and over-functioning, structured decision-making for high-risk situations, and strategies for sustaining effective supervision over time.

As social workers, we serve in diverse settings, many of which can be prone to high stress and conflict. It can be tough when a client, family member, or colleague expresses intense emotions or conveys their needs as criticism or a demand. Our social work education prepares us to use active listening and respond with empathy. Yet, when emotions run high, we may find ourselves resorting to communication habits such as becoming defensive with and judging others. These reactions exacerbate an already difficult situation, weakening our collaborative relationships with persons served and colleagues, and can even result in formal complaints. In this session, we’ll consider various social work practice scenarios that illustrate these conflict engagement patterns. Drawing on our understanding of human behavior in the social environment and our commitment to the NASW Code of Ethics, we’ll explore how application of Nonviolent Communication principles can strengthen empathy for ourselves and others amid conflict; support our emotional self-regulation during these high-stress interactions; and enhance our capacity to transform conflictual communications into collaborative dialogue with clients, families, and colleagues.