Location: Stearns Center, Room G12
Time: 9:00am - 1:00pm
We are uniquely privileged and pleased to have Dr. Maureen Walker presenting for this year’s. Professional Development Seminars – April 6 is a seminar not to be missed!
Helping professionals know that empathy is at the heart of all growth-fostering relationships. Like any truism that we accept as fundamental, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that simple truths are often difficult truths. When that happens, our tendency may be to resort to a shadow version – an illusion of empathic connection – and call it “good enough”.
In this interactive seminar, participants will explore the micro-skills that facilitate empathic attunement: awareness, respect, and curiosity (in Relational-Cultural terms, the ARC of empathy). Using the Relational-Cultural model as a theoretical framework, participants will also deepen their exploration with conversations and exercises designed to address the following broad questions:
- How does the central bias of mental health practice affect the process of career counseling?
- How do we work with relational images (our own and that of our clients) to promote growth and transformation?
- How do we embrace vulnerability and shame as ‘active ingredients’ in the transformational process?
- How can we sustain empathic connection in the face of a cross-cultural “misfire”?
- How do we foster discernment when there is an apparent disconnection between calling and career?
- How might the career counselor help a client/student sustain a sense of purpose and productivity when navigating a misaligned or hostile work culture?
Attend this seminar and experience empathy as a process that offers opportunities for both the client and counselor to embrace possibilities for mutual growth.
Facilitator: Maureen Walker, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist, speaker, educator, and writer who helps people bridge cultural differences such as race, religion, gender and other social status markers. She graduated from Mercer University with degrees in Vocal Performance and English, and then taught for eight years in the Georgia public schools.
After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Walker moved to New England to become a staff psychologist in the MBA Counseling Service at Harvard Business School. She served in various roles during her 25-year career at Harvard, where her work always involved helping young professionals from many countries and multiple ethnicities thrive in an academically rigorous and culturally complex environment.
As the Director of Programming for the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley College, Dr. Walker has enjoyed the colleagueship of such pioneering scholars as Jean Baker Miller, Janet Surrey, Judith Jordan, and Irene Stiver, with whom she contributed to the development of the Relational-Cultural model of psychological healing and development.
Her current work consists of multiple strands, offering psychotherapy to private practice clients, and training and supervision at the Center for Relational Growth, (also known as the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute).
With the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, Dr. Walker is currently involved in developing curricular and certification programs in Relational-Cultural psychology, and is writing a book that provides practical insights and guidance for repairing the racial schisms that undermine authentic relationships in the 21 st century. This book will chart pathways toward a connection with consciousness – habits of mind and spirit that help transform racialized narratives of disconnection to narratives that expand our vision of what it means to be fully human, to be a force for good in the world.
