Month: December 2025

Ethical Technology

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Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-IIRegister Now for CE programs
Thursday, January 29, 2026

Virtual
9:00 am – 12 pm (ET)
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
UConn SSW Alumni and Current Field Instructors receive a 10% discount

Link to webinar will be included in your email confirmation

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, mental health clinicians face new ethical challenges around confidentiality, data security, and informed consent. This engaging training is designed to equip clinicians with practical knowledge and real-world strategies for using technology ethically and responsibly in their practice. We will explore best practices for telehealth, digital record-keeping, and client communication, while strengthening our understanding of privacy laws and ethical codes. Join us to gain confidence in making informed decisions that protect your clients—and your professional integrity—in the digital age.

Learning Objectives:

  • Identify the options for the use of technology in practice
  • Learn the ethical pitfalls for using technology
  • Explore how to use technology safely and effectively
  • Anticipate potential future risk with technology

 

Clinician Burnout in a Post-Pandemic Politically Charged World

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Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-IIRegister Now for CE programs
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
9 am – 12 pm (ET)

Live Webinar
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

Clinicians are faced with significant strains on the boundaries of the clinical relationship in this politically charged, post-pandemic climate. Exhausted and pressured, clinicians need support and tools to navigate these unique stressors on clinical practice.

This training explores how clinician burnout has changed under the unique pressures we face today, and offers tools we need to address them.

Learning Objectives:

  • Explore the ethical strains on the clinical relationship due to the politically charged climate among health care clinicians
  • Examine the concept of power, what it is and how to build it in oneself and in the workplace
  • Investigate passion for work and how to reignite it when under pressure
  • Connect the concept of values-based purpose with job satisfaction

Understanding Neurodivergence and Fatherhood: Different Brains, Same Purpose, Stronger Fathers

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Anthony Gay and Qur-an Webb

Register NowTuesday, March 24, 2026

Live Webinar
6 pm – 8 pm (ET)

This webinar explores the intersection of neurodivergence, trauma, racial inequity, and fatherhood, equipping social workers, educators, clinicians, and family service professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively support neurodivergent fathers and fathers raising neurodivergent children. Using a strength-based, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive framework, the session challenges traditional interpretations of behavior and helps participants develop practical, inclusive, and actionable engagement strategies.

This webinar reframes neurodivergence as a social-justice issue, highlighting how undiagnosed traits, systemic bias, and misunderstanding contribute to father disengagement and poor family outcomes.

Learning objectives:

Explore the core neurodiversity concepts including distinctions between neurodivergent, neurotypical, and neurodiversity terminology 

Understand the insight into how trauma, poverty, racism, and systemic inequity intersect with neurodivergence, particularly for fathers of color 

Develop strategies to recognize and support undiagnosed neurodivergence in fathers who may present as angry, resistant, disengaged, or noncompliant.

Safe Steps: Navigating the Field in Gang-Impacted Communities

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Anthony Gay and Qur-an WebbRegister Now
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Live Webinar
6 pm – 8 pm

This webinar is a safety-intensive training designed to equip child protection professionals, outreach workers, and community-based staff with the knowledge and situational awareness needed to work safely and effectively in gang-impacted neighborhoods. Building on the foundation set in Unmasking Gang Culture, this follow-up session shifts focus from gang education to real-world application, giving professionals the tools to recognize early warning signs, de-escalate tension, and preserve personal safety without compromising youth engagement.

Participants will examine how gang dynamics shape both individual behavior and neighborhood environments, and how those dynamics affect the safety of staff working in the field. Through detailed strategies, scenario practice, and visual identifiers, this training centers the reality that safety is not just about physical presence it’s about psychological readiness, cultural competence, and relational intelligence.

Learning objectives:

  • Identify street-level gang indicators in high-risk environments.
  • Understand how to enhance engagement with gang-involved individuals.
  • Recognize environmental red flags and safety planning.
  • Develop trauma-informed safety strategies, de-escalation and exit protocols

Supervising the Diagnosing Clinician

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Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-IIRegister Now
Wed, January 14, 2026
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
3 CEC

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

This training marries the essential elements of a successful supervisory practice with the foundation of the diagnostic process. Participants will gain tools to ensure that each supervised clinician can learn how to diagnose disorders and conditions that will be a treatment focus. This training will give participants tools to both evaluate and improve diagnosing tools, and how to troubleshoot and intervene as may be needed.

Magical Thinking and Trauma Throughout the Lifespan

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Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.EDRegister Now for CE programs

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

10 am – 12 pm (ET)

Live Webinar
2 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Magical Thinking, the cognitive process of assigning direct cause and effect to life events, was once thought to only occur in young childhood. Recent research supports that Magical Thinking is present throughout the lifespan, especially when we are confronted with traumatic and/or grief events. This workshop will explore how the Magical Thinking of traumatic events in childhood forges a narrative of self-blame that the child brings into adulthood. We will explore how to clinically expose the destructive self-blame stories that clients have carried within themselves. We will explore ways to assist clients in reconstructing their narratives. This workshop will also examine elements of Magical Thinking that child perpetrators use to manipulate their victims into silence. Lastly, we will discuss the tendency for traumatically grieved clients to re-employ Magical Thinking in their guilt and shock over the deaths of loved ones.

Please note: This workshop will contain content regarding childhood sexual abuse and suicide.

Learning objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify Magical Thinking throughout the lifespan
2. Participants will learn how to assist clients in reframing narratives that have been distorted by Magical Thinking Cause and Effect beliefs.
3. Participants will understand the role of Magical Thinking in the cognitive processing of grief.

Why the DSM Doesn’t Acknowledge Sensory Integration Symptoms

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Register for CE programs nowRuth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.ED
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
10 am – 12 pm

Live Webinar
2 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) is a condition where a person has difficulties regulating their senses within their environment. These are our clients who can experience the world as being “too loud” or “too intense”. They can experience the world as being so sensory over-whelming that their bodies go into a defensive “fight, flight or freeze” stance. For many people with SPD, their constant need to re-regulate their senses to adapt to the stimuli around them, creates symptoms of distractibility, irritability, anxiety, and depression.

So where is SPD in the DSM 5? It isn’t. Although more than half of all the diagnostic criteria of disorders in the DSM 5 describe symptoms of SPD, the APA refuses to acknowledge SPD as a disorder. Therefore, DSM 5 conditions such as ADHD, PTSD, Tourette’s, ASD, ODD, the Anxiety Disorders as well as Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, are never understood or treated through the lens of sensory integration. Yet all of the above disorders are, in large part, sensory-based disorders. Imagine trying to treat a client with ASD or PTSD and not teaching the client about their sensory system reactions?

In this interactive webinar, participants will:

  • Explore the long-delayed need to incorporate sensory integration issues into our working knowledge of the DSM 5
  • Recognize that negative behaviors of are better de-escalated when sensory overload can be quieted (calmed down), similar to “sensory rooms” and “sensory placed” used in schools
  • Consider the clinical cost of these misinterpretations for both children and adults

Adolescent Addiction

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Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II

Register for CE programs nowWednesday, January 28, 2026
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Historically mislabeled as a difficult population, this webinar will explore the characteristics of adolescent addiction, the recovery pitfalls, and effective treatment interventions that will engage your young clients.

Adolescent Addiction is a distinct problem, with biopsychosocial elements unique to this age group, which indicates there are unique treatment implications. This training explores the unique elements of adolescent addiction and discusses the best ways to both prevent and treat it. While the majority of the training addresses substance use, other addictions – gambling, sex, internet, fitness – will be included.

Adolescent Addiction is often guided by cultural, political, and social forces. Adolescents my be judged for wanting attention, submitting to peer pressure, or making “stupid” choices, depending on the culture in which the teen is a member. The degree that the addiction is accepted is often based on these influences. This training includes a discussion of these influences, not only in understanding how teen addiction develops, but also how recovery can be sabotaged or supported by these influences.

Participants will:

  • learn the differences between the adult and adolescent brain
  • explore the principles of addiction and how it affects the adolescent brain
  • review updated assessment tools for this population