Special Guest
Curt Thompson, psychiatrist, author, speaker, and co-host of The Becoming Known Podcast

Education is an institution where we train developing clinicians to be wisdom bearers. Wisdom encompasses everything we are trying to do to become professional human beings. The experiences of our personal pasts, neurodevelopmental pasts, and generational pasts impact our present and what we anticipate in our futures. Engaging our stories with our futures in mind enables us to engage suffering with the hope of what could be. By following this path in our own lives, we are better able and better positioned to help our clients do the same. The sessions within this one-day event break down these components so that we may better and more fully engage the work of helping.

Curt Thompson, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist, author, speaker, and co-host of The Being Known Podcast. He has been in private practice for over 30 years in Falls Church, Virginia, graduated from Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine, and completed his psychiatric residency at Temple University Hospital. He strives to help patients develop flourishing lives by telling their stories more truly, in order to become more deeply known, for the purpose of creating beauty and goodness in the world. With conviction and humor, he trains clinicians and speaks at workshops, retreats and conferences, integrating neuroscience, human relationships and Christian faith. He and his wife Phyllis are the parents of two adult children and live in Northern Virginia.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Develop and apply the concept of wisdom as a principal focus of all psychotherapeutic endeavors
2. Become familiar with the interpersonal neurobiological features and implications of implicit and explicit memory as well as anticipation as applied to psychotherapy and the development of wisdom
3. Identify and utilize awareness of anthropological assumptions in the process of becoming mental health providers
4. Identify the significance of suffering as a necessary variable in the process of healing

4 NBCC Continuing Education credits offered.

Event Details

• Date: Friday, April 25
• Registration/Doors Open: 8:30 a.m.
• Event Start: 9 a.m.
• Event End: 4 p.m.
• Location: Participants can attend this event in person or via Zoom.
  • In person location: Denver Seminary Chapel | 6399 South Santa Fe Dr. Littleton, CO

Schedule

8:30 a.m. – Registration and Doors Open
9 a.m. – Session 1 – Becoming People of the Way of Wisdom
10:15 a.m. – Break
10:40 a.m. – Session 2 – Hope that Comes from Engaging Suffering
11:45 a.m. – Lunch Break
1 p.m. – Session 3 – How to Use Your Story to Engage the Stories of Those Whom You Help
2:15 p.m. – Break
2:30 p.m. – Session 4 – Q & A with Curt Thompson, MD
4 p.m. – Closing

Participants must attend all four sessions to earn Continuing Education credits.

Sessions

• Session 1: Becoming People of the Way of Wisdom
  • Through our education, we have been trained to bring and extend wisdom in our helping profession. Part of our training, including understanding and practice of psychotherapy, also includes becoming living, embodied wisdom. We are faced with the question of what it means to be wisdom in the world. When we learn how to be people of wisdom, we are better suited to be purveyors of wisdom.

• Session 2: Hope that Comes from Engaging Suffering
  • We will discuss the impact of suffering, namely how I experience and make meaning out of pain. Society tells us that we shouldn’t suffer, that we should do the things and surround ourselves with the people who make us happy. Suffering is primarily a function of how I tell my story and the hope I develop in the middle of suffering has everything to do with the future I am constructing in my mind. This has everything to do with the stories we tell ourselves. Wisdom becomes the ultimate byproduct of what happens as our character develops through our engagement with suffering.

• Session 3: How to Use Your Story to Engage the Stories of Those Whom You Help
  • We will discuss the utilization of our stories for the work involved in the helping profession. This is a movement toward living a new story that makes possible and forms the ability of those whom we help to engage their own process of healing. This session shifts our attention from our personal narratives as providers to not only that of our clients but to the rhythmic movement between us through the use of our own experiences, suffering, and healing, a process and a direct byproduct of our becoming purveyors of wisdom.

Denver Seminary Counseling Division has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 3094. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Denver Seminary Counseling Division is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

Provider contact: Dr. Elizabeth Norris | 6399 S Santa Fe Dr, Littleton CO 80120 | 303.357.5834