Salon: The Person of the Therapist

Announcing the second EHI Online Salon

Topic: The Person of The Therapist

Facilitators: Sonja Saltman, EHI Core Instructor and Joshua Diliberto, EHI Teaching Assistant           

Date:  October 29, 2024 11 am -12:30 PDT (2pm-3:30pm EDT; 6pm-7:30pm UTC)

Online: Via Zoom/Zoom Breakout Rooms

Fee: $25 for General/Professional. Please reach out to Michelle via the form on contact page for info on $10 economic inequality/hardship tickets.

Limited Registration: Due to the format EHI is limiting the number of places to 30 participants for this Salon.

EHI is excited to be starting a new series of experiential salons. The intention for these salons is to honor EHI’s commitment to experiential learning as well as the time honored group process of discussion and integration.

On October 29, EHI Is hosting a two-hour virtual community space for examining and invoking The Person of the Therapist. Personal, relational, and cosmological aspects are considered in group discussion, practical demonstration, small group engagement, and will be flexible in nature to follow emergent wishes from the group.

General Outline (2 hours):

• Welcome Introduction, poem, check-ins (25 minutes)
• Conceptual frames for understanding Person of Therapist (20 min total)
  • Intro “The Person of the Therapist in Practice”
    • Sonja, and Josh share conceptual definitions
  • Introduce personal context as example of one’s own way of being, seeing, and holding relational psychotherapeutic worlds
  • Members are invited to provide their own definitions
  • Whole group process of topic, encouraging first person engagement and description that may also involve other sources
• Experiential exercise: “Exploring how it is to be The Person of the Therapist.” (35 min)
  • We ask for a volunteer “client” and Sonja and Josh both individually respond to the client (we could add a couple of responses from the group as well). We follow this interaction with a perusal of what feelings/thoughts within us, the therapists, led to a given response reaction. That means looking at arrows that provoked choosing a particular path. What evoked curiosity and interest in the therapist for the next interaction? What does this choice reveal about the person of the therapist?
  • We can make contact with the movement (the music) being experienced from the group in the here and now stay with it as a whole, and as it flows between persons.
• Small groups (25 min)
• Final Large Group Process: (15 min)
  • Discussion, Integration, shared resources, and announcements

As we acknowledge that the word “salon” implies a more free flowing structure this is a flexible outline that will be modified by Sonja and Josh to work with what is happening in the moment.

For Reference:

There is no mandatory reading for this offering but the text book, Existential-Humanistic Therapy, 2^nd Edition by Schneider and Krug published APA, and The Art of Counseling, revised edition 1989 are resources we would like to mention.