Creating a brave space for LGBTQIA+ clients –

how do we hold space for clients and couples who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community?

A. Introduction and welcome – own my own identity and invite people to step into a brave space. Grounding exercise.

B. Supervision and support – learning from each other; including LGBTQIA+ clients in training videos, live couple sessions, etc.

C. Signaling for safety vs. leaving clients to guess: equity statements, pronouns, inclusive language

D. Owning identities in therapy openly. Address client needs, own your identity in therapy, ask permission or reflect on the share with clients, etc.

E. Make it clear clients can bring fears/concerns to therapy, especially in light of the socio-political background. Clients need our validation and safety, not neutrality. Clients may lack the support they need outside of our office due to their families’ prejudices/biases and/or cultural oppression at large.

F. Sit with your own biases and prejudices. What are my inherent beliefs about relationships, upbringing, etc., and how do these show up in therapy?

G. Repairing when we misstep.

H. Resources and where do we go from here?

About our Presenter ~ Rachel Chiu, MS, LMFT

Rachel Chiu (she/her) is a licensed marriage and family therapist as well as LMFT supervisor located in Greenville, SC. She is also an EFT supervisor-in-training. Rachel fell in love with EFT back in her graduate program when her couples therapy seminar professor introduced her cohort to EFT and Dr. Sue Johnson. She began using EFT in 2012, thinking all she had to do was ask her couples to “share your feeling” with their partner. She has since learned there is more to EFT than enactments (A LOT more!) but EFT has been her anchor all these many years. Rachel believes each of us are born good, worthy of love and belonging, and seeks to create a community that is diverse, thriving, equitable, justice-oriented, and loving for all therapists and clients. She is passionate about her work with clients and therapists who are historically marginalized – Spanish-speaking clients, women (especially how women’s health impacts persons with female anatomy – such as perimenopause and menopause), LGBTQIA+ couples and clients, and often talks about the intersection of patriarchy and misogyny and how oppression shows up in relationships, the therapy room, and in supervision. When she isn’t working, she enjoys spending time with her family drinking lots of iced coffee, reluctantly exercising for her own perimenopausal health, and taking the occasional nap.

This is a virtual event. Please join as this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86158001599

When Anger Visits Us in the Session

Strong emotions, especially anger, always make us feel alert and need to react and act. And here the two sides appear: the client's anger and our anger as therapists. And, many times, it is as if we are caught in a vortex that is getting more and more intense and all we want is to be able to stop everything, especially when the client turns to us with anger.

I propose that in this meeting we learn together how to get out of the spiral of anger, but at the same time we can allow the client to be with their own feelings, facilitate their understanding and support them in creating new ways to express it.

About Our Presenter ~ Roxana Alina Olaru

Hi! My name is Roxana Alina Olaru and I have been an experiential psychotherapist since 2006. My first training was at the SPER Institute Bucharest followed by training in Emotionally Focused Therapy in 2016. I have been certified by ICEEFT since 2018. In 2023 I became certified as an EFT supervisor by ICEEFT.

I work and live in Romania, Bucharest.

This is a virtual event. Please join as this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86158001599

The Reflect/Xivity Pendulum

Recently (May 2025) I finished my doctorate within a systemic programme in the UK. During this doctorate I developed a model for structured reflectivity and reflexivity, the reflect/xivity pendulum.

In this presentation I will introduce this pendulum, and I hope to do so in an engaging and experiential way, we will work with it, please do not expect an ‘old school lecture’.

Please ‘bring’ a case to the meeting on which you would like to reflect.

About Our Presenter ~ Petra Deij

My name is Petra Deij. Let me firstly introduce myself: I am from 1966, I am white, cisgender, straight, married, mum of three adult sons; a systemic family therapist, supervisor and trainer in the Netherlands, and an EFCT, EFFT and EFIT therapist and supervisor.

I truly love my profession, since early years, probably since my childhood I have been interested in patterns. In how people can make them work, and at times, don’t know how to disentangle destructive patterns. I see my work as a systemic EFT-therapist as a chance to (re-)connect people to each other in a way that is best for them. This is sometimes best done by co-creating distance, other times by working on and increase of connection.

Recently (May 2025) I finished my doctorate within a systemic programme in the UK. During this doctorate I developed a model for structured reflectivity and reflexivity, the reflect/xivity pendulum.

In this presentation I will introduce this pendulum, and I hope to do so in an engaging and experiential way, we will work with it, please do not expect an ‘old school lecture’.

Please ‘bring’ a case to the meeting on which you would like to reflect.

This is a virtual event. Please join as this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86158001599

This is a virtual event. Please join as this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86158001599