Upcoming 2025 ONLINE Seminars & Presentations
Emotional Alchemy for the Therapist’s Soul
Facilitator: TJ Walsh, MA, LPC
Meeting Time: 7:00- 8:30 pm EST
Dates: September 10,17, 24
CEs: 4.5
Course Description:
Emotional Alchemy is the practice of turning raw, often overwhelming emotion into creative insight and grounded action. It’s a way to work with what’s real—the stuff that lives under the surface—through intuitive image-making and reflection. It’s not about the product. It’s about the process. As helpers and healers, we’re trained to hold space for others, but we also need ways to metabolize what we absorb—especially the things that don’t quite have words. In this seminar, we’ll explore how painting (yes, even messy, weird, “I-don’t-know-what-this-is” painting) can help us transmute what’s stuck, unknown, or heavy…into something useful, beautiful, and alive. We’ll work with Emotional Alchemy’s stages of transformation—naming, holding, metabolizing, transmuting, and integrating—alongside modern psychoanalytic ideas like reverie, aesthetic communication, the analytic third, and the importance of tending to the person of the therapist.
Learning Objectives:
1. Describe the stages of the Emotional Alchemy process (naming, holding, metabolizing, transmuting, integrating) and explain how each stage supports therapist self-reflection and emotional regulation.
2. Demonstrate the use of intuitive painting as a self-tending tool for processing emotional residue and preparing for clinical work.
3. Differentiate between cognitive reflection and embodied emotional processing, and discuss the role of image-making in accessing unconscious material.
4. Evaluate the impact of personal emotional states on therapeutic presence and plan creative self-care rituals to support ongoing clinical clarity.
5. Identify countertransference signals through reflective art-making and summarize how these insights can inform ethical and attuned therapeutic practice.
Note: since this seminar has a strong experiential component, participants will need to have some simple art supplies on hand. Nothing fancy—letter-sized paper (or a sketchpad), markers, crayons, paints if they want, etc. The main thing is that they have a few materials ready to engage with the creative process each week.
About the Facilitator:
TJ Walsh, BFA, MA, LPC, NCC, CCTP is an innovative painter and dynamic psychotherapist, educator, brand strategist, and higher education administrator based in Philly. He writes and speaks on the topics of art, culture, faith, and mental health and his work is exhibited and published internationally. TJ has worked at the colorful intersection of creativity, art, therapy, and education for over 20 years and is an expert in creativity, relationships, fear, and procrastination. He received his BFA in Graphic Design from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and his MA in Clinical Counseling Psychology from Eastern University, Saint Davids, PA. He is trained psychodynamically, is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and has advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy. Prior to his work in mental health and higher education administration, he was a Creative Director, Art Director, and Director of Communications for several national and international nonprofit organizations in NYC and Philly where he specialized in brand development, corporate communications, non-profit marketing, social media engagement, fundraising communications, project management, and strategic planning.
Joining: The Narrative Metaphor
Facilitator: Richard Friedman, PhD, LCSW, NCPsyA
Date: Wednesday, October 8th
Meeting Time: 7:00-8:30pm EST
Fee: $40
CE’s: 1.5
Description:
The analyst’s job is to help their analysands say everything, but — as Freud discovered — people resist this both consciously and unconsciously. When I was in training I wasn’t taught much beyond Oedipal interpretation and joining as practical ways to resolve resistances. I still use both interventions in my practice, but most often I use a technique that I’ve developed over the last fifty years that I call the narrative metaphor or simply story-telling. What occurred to me is that the Oedipal story is only a metaphor, that is — in the context of a psychoanalysis — a narrative myth that describes a universal phenomenon of a young child’s management of triangulation, and that joining is in part a way of validating the analysand’s story. What I do in my work when helping an analysand overcome a resistance — either conscious or unconscious — is suggest vocabulary and stories that cover what the analysand is reluctant to talk about. These stories help resolve resistances by giving analysands narrative frameworks that work as aids to say what they had resisted talking about. In this webinar I hope to help the participants learn how to tell useful stories that range far beyond Oedipus, stories that give analysands a vocabulary and a narrative framework with which to tell their own stories without resistance.
Learning Objectives:
To learn the background to why, when, and how psychoanalysts speak — what analysts call interventions — during an analytic session.
To learn the importance of choice of words for interventions and the importance of introducing words at key moments during an analysis.
To learn ego syntonic interventions based on stories that express thoughts and feelings analysands had been unable to articulate on their own.
About the Presenter:
Richard Friedman, PhD, LCSW, NCPsyA
After control analyses with Hyman Spotnitz and Marie Coleman Nelson and graduation in 1978 in the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies’s second class, Dr. Friedman taught for many years at four psychoanalytic institutes. Dr. Friedman has published articles in several journals including two papers in “Modern Psychoanalysis,” many book reviews, and chapters in three books. After spending over half a century learning to be an analyst, Dr. Friedman enjoys giving back to the profession through supervision of candidates. He continues in the private practice of psychoanalysis in New York City, although most of his work is now done remotely.