Introduction:

Depression is one of the most common and debilitating mental health problems in Hong Kong.  An estimate of 1 in 7 people in Hong Kong will experience a common mental disorder at any given time (Mind HK: 2021).  People suffer from depression are not only overwhelmed with a cluster of feelings such as sadness, anxiety, suppressed anger, discouragement, helplessness, alienation, and hopelessness, but also experience an embodiment of poor self-image, diminishing sense of identity and pessimistic worldview.  People with depressive symptoms disclaim their emotions and try to stay away from their core painful emotions.  This dysfunctional way to cope with the painful emotions is how depression becoming problematic.

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Emotion-Focused Therapy views depression as a complex combination of secondary and maladaptive emotions which hinder people with depressive symptoms from accessing their core maladaptive emotions and activating their implicit adaptive emotions for transformation.  This workshop aims at providing an understanding of depression using the framework of emotion-focused therapy and equipping participants with practical emotion-focused intervention skills, including cultivating therapeutic presence, empathic attunement, evocative unfolding, enhancing level of experiencing, intrapersonal and interpersonal chair dialogues.
 

Objectives:

This workshop aims at equipping the following emotion-focused intervention skills step-by-step:

1. how to cultivate therapeutic presence with people with depressive symptoms

2. how to enhance empathic attunement with people with depressive symptoms

3. how to do emotion assessment and to select differentiated empathic responses

4. how to measure productive and unproductive emotions in session

5. how to enhance clients’ awareness of internal experience

6. how to give a rationale for working with emotions

7. how to establish a collaborative focus in each session

8. how to facilitate chair dialogues

9. how to build up support for contacting emotions

10. how to evoke and arouse maladaptive feelings

11. how to remove interruptions to emotional experience

12. how to facilitate accessing primary emotions

13. how to transform core maladaptive emotions

14. how to encourage reflection on emotional experience

15. how to consolidate the newly emerged sense of self

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Course Outline:

1. Understanding the phenomena of depression from a dialectical constructivist view

2. Understanding the role of emotion in depression

3. Importance of therapeutic presence

4. Empathic attunement and validation

5. Principles of treatment

6. Phases of treatment and intervention skills

7. Different variations of chair dialogue

8. Process-diagnostic approach to case formulation

 

Training Format:

• Didactic presentations

• Experiential exercises

• Case presentation and discussion

• Simulated practice of counseling sessions

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Target:  Social Workers, Counselors, Clinical Psychologists and other helping professionals

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Medium of Instruction:  Cantonese, supplemented with English

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Training Materials:  Mainly in English

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Attendance: Participants with 80% or above attendance would be granted certificates

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Trainer: 

Mrs. Catherine Poon 潘蔡妍珊女士

• B.A., M.S.W., M.BuddhStud.

• Emotion-Focused Therapist (Individual/Couple Therapy)

• Registered Social Worker

• Certified Counselor (HKPCA)

• Associate Fellow (HKPCA) 

• Approved Supervisor (HKPCA) 

• Certified EFT Trainer (Individual Therapy) recognized by the International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (isEFT)

 

Mrs. Catherine Poon has worked with the Hong Kong Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (HKCMAC) for over 20 years as a marriage counselor.  She specializes her clinical work with clients of emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, and childhood attachment trauma, and couples with chronic physical/mental illnesses, addictive behavioral problems and extra-marital relationship.  Apart from clinical practice of individual and couple counselling, she has supervised social work students at different universities and family mediator trainees from different social service agencies.  She maintains a humanistic person-centered approach in her clinical practice and supervision.

Mrs. Catherine Poon has been trained in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) with Professor Leslie Greenberg since 2004. She has given presentations, provided skills coaching in the Module Workshops, and conducted monthly supervision groups in the yearly Training Programs in EFT (Individual & Couples) jointly organized by the EFT Clinic of York University and HKCMAC from 2007 to 2017.  Over the years, she has led hundreds of supervision group sessions.  She is recognized as a certified EFT individual therapy trainer since 2016.
 
She is currently in private practice.  She continues to provide individual and couples therapy, training workshops on EFT (Individual and Couples), Advanced Empathy and Mindfulness-informed clinical work, and EFT supervision for local practitioners.  She is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong from 2015 to 2020, teaching Emotion-Focused Interventions and Marital Counseling for Master degree students of counseling and social work.