Please carefully review the description of each breakout session before making your selection to ensure you choose the session that best aligns with your interests and professional learning goals.

Morning Breakout Sessions

A.Social Justice as a Form of Healing

Presenter’s Name: Rev. Dr. Jaye Lynn Peabody Smith

Description: This workshop will address the impact of generational trauma and present-day social injustice on the mental health of Black Americans.  We will explore a life without healing, including how trauma shows up in both our bodies and our minds when healing is not obtained. Finally, we will discuss tangible steps for healing through acts of justice.

B. Presentation Topic: When Advocacy Becomes Exhausting: Black Fatigue, Disability, and the Mental Health Cost of Fighting for Access

Presenter's Name: Dr. Destiny Huff, LPC

Description: Black individuals and families are often required to repeatedly explain their needs, prove that harm has occurred, challenge biased interpretations, and fight for meaningful access within education, healthcare, employment, and mental health systems. For Black disabled and neurodivergent people, this burden is compounded by racism, ableism, adultification, masking, code-switching, and expectations of constant resilience. This session will explore how chronic advocacy and institutional resistance affect mental health, capacity, relationships, and trust. Participants will also learn culturally responsive and neuroaffirming approaches that reduce the advocacy burden and help create systems in which Black individuals do not have to become exhausted before their needs are recognized.

C. Presentation Topic: Welcome Home: Understanding Black Fatigue Through the Lens of Chronic Survival, Trauma, and Executive Function

Presenter's Name: Marcia Blane, LPC, CPCS, CHt, CCTS

Description: This presentation examines Black fatigue through the intersection of historical trauma, chronic stress, systemic inequities, and nervous system dysregulation. Rather than viewing rising rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and ADHD diagnoses as isolated conditions, participants will explore how prolonged survival states can shape executive functioning, emotional regulation, and overall well-being. Drawing from neuroscience, trauma-informed care, and culturally responsive mental health practices, this session provides clinicians and helping professionals with practical tools to differentiate trauma-related adaptations from neurodevelopmental conditions while promoting sustainable pathways toward healing, regulation, and restoration.

Afternoon Breakout Session

A. The Weight We Carry: Healing Intergenerational Trauma and Building Emotional Resilience in Black Communities

Presenter Name: Kimberly Ward, LICSW, LCSW-C, LCSW, RPT

Description: Trauma is not always defined by a single event. For many Black individuals and families, emotional pain may be rooted in generations of adversity, systemic inequities, racial stress, community violence, family dynamics, and unspoken narratives that continue to shape mental health today. Yet healing is possible. This interactive presentation explores the impact of intergenerational trauma through a culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based lens. Participants will examine how trauma is transmitted across generations, how it affects emotional regulation, relationships, parenting, identity, and physical health, and how clinicians and helping professionals can interrupt these cycles while fostering resilience. Grounded in neuroscience, attachment theory, and evidence-based clinical interventions, this session provides practical strategies that professionals can immediately implement when working with Black children, adolescents, adults, and families. Emphasis will be placed on recognizing cultural strengths, promoting emotional safety, and creating healing-centered spaces that move beyond symptom management toward lasting transformation.

B. Presentation Topic: Strong, Black, and Tired: When Maternal Survival Is Mistaken for Maternal Wellness

Presenter Name: Dr.Tatyana Kitchen, LMSW

Description: Black maternal mental health conversations often focus on disparities, risk factors, and adverse outcomes. Less attention is given to what happens when a Black mother appears to be functioning well despite experiencing significant emotional and psychological distress. Caring for an infant, returning to work, managing family responsibilities, attending appointments, and meeting everyday expectations may be interpreted as signs of wellness when they may instead reflect survival, necessity, or an expectation to remain strong.

C. From Reaction to Response: A Four-Step Preparation Framework for Clients Under Sustained Pressure

Presenter Name: Travis Thompson, LPC, CPCS

Description: Clients navigating chronic social and systemic stress often arrive in session already in a reactive state, flooded, defensive, or shut down before the real work of therapy can begin. This session introduces a four-step preparation framework designed to move a client from reaction to a deliberate, agency-driven response, without requiring the external pressure itself to change first. The framework consists of the following: 1) Feel Reality: the client names what they are actually feeling, without shame, before problem-solving begins; 2) Name It: the client puts language to the specific stressor or pattern driving the reaction, separating what is actually happening from the assumptions layered on top of it; 3) Decide: the client weighs their options and chooses a course of action, whether that means holding their ground or reaching out for support, with both presented as equally valid rather than a binary of strength versus weakness; 4) Actively Defend: the client follows through on that decision and stands by it under continued pressure. This session covers the clinical rationale behind each step, common points of client resistance, and how to apply the framework in individual and family treatment settings.

D.Afros, Ghettos, and Rainbows: Addressing Mental Health at the Intersection of Blackness & Queerness

Presenter Name: J. Tekulvē Flower de Jackson-Vann, LMFT

Description: According to the National Black Justice Collective, while Black LGBTQ+ individuals experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress (PTSD), and substance use, they are also less likely to have access to culturally competent professional care. As a result, many Black LGBTQ+ individuals choose not to seek mental health treatment. Using his experience as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Black Queer man, Tekulve Flower de Jackson-Vann will share important information regarding the mental health crisis among Black LGBTQ+ clients, culturally informed clinical approaches for current mental health professionals working with Black LGBTQ+ clients, and insights into how the Black clinical community can better meet the needs of LGBTQ+ clients in the Black community.