Wine, Cheese & Psychoanalytic Saturdays: Inviting the Clinician’s Body into the Therapy Room (Part II)

​The Wine & Cheese events are an opportunity for likeminded therapists in our SPS community to meet, socialize, network and learn from each other. Come join us!

​Wine, Cheese & Inviting the Clinician’s Body into the Therapy Room (Part II) with Jennifer Vera, MFT 

​Acknowledging the therapist’s body in the room—and in the transference— has remained a site of tension, discomfort and avoidance. As clinicians, we must interrogate our own relationship to our bodies to find the relational courage to hold our client’s projections and engage in this rich clinical material. A continuation of our November event on the subject, a panel of three eating disorder specialists will present their experiences in tracking how their own bodies are brought into clinical encounters, followed by a discussion. Particular attention will be paid to the range of visible and invisible identities—such as race, sexual orientation, gender, body size, ability and age—and how these manifest in the body.

Presenters: 

Lynn Welch, LMFT, is psychotherapist with extensive training in medical and Alzheimer’s residential settings. She has expertise in working with eating disorders, grief, loss, chronic illness and older adult populations. She is interested in how disruptions of the body psyche facilitate emergent interpersonal and intrapsychic processes.

Ashley Merriman, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, advocate, and consultant based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice centers Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and bi-racial/ multi-racial folks around issues of identity, racial & sexual trauma, eating disorders, alternative/ non-traditional relationship models (ethical non-monogamy/ polyamory, kink & BDSM), veganism & eco-anxiety, and interpersonal struggles.

Samar Warmerdam, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist providing collaborative and relational therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her areas of specialization and interest include adolescence and young adulthood, eating disorders, perinatal mental health, and immigrant and first generation identity.

​Panel facilitated by

​Jennifer Vera, MFT, is relational psychotherapist, clinical consultant and educator, in private practice in Sacramento, CA. She specializes in the treatment of eating disorders, ‘quarter-life’ transitions, reproductive and perinatal mental health, with a particular focus on supporting LGBTQ and BIPOC patients. Jen is also the co-founder of LEDE: Eating Disorder Education, an organization dedicated to increasing community access to culturally-relevant eating disorder treatment, while growing and training a diverse, inclusive community of eating disorder therapists.