WSSCSW Clinical Evenings Presents: Navigating Relational Boundaries as Multi-Dimensional Clinicians with Ellen Slater MSW, LICSW
Are you ready to get your Professional Roles and Boundaries continuing education hours? Join us for a lively evening of participatory and humanistic educational content!
About the Presenter:
Ellen Slater is a white, cisgender, queer woman sitting at the intersection of many roles: psychotherapist, community member, mother, and friend. She is also a continuing education instructor, yoga teacher, and creator of the Compassion Cultivation Cycle. Her mission is to create CE trainings that not only teach from a relational frame but also embody it—building containers that invite connection, honesty, and shared learning so clinicians have a space to hold both the human and the practitioner simultaneously.
Program Description:
Professional roles and boundaries are rarely a matter of rule-following alone — they are lived, daily, in the particular texture of a clinician's community, history, and relationships. As we increasingly shift the field towards a more relational approach, we must create spaces where therapists can share what this means in practice. This 2-hour training will be discussion-heavy and is grounded in the presenter's clinical social work experience and taught through the lens of the NASW Code of Ethics. In addition to the relational field inside the therapy room, dual and overlapping relationships are important. They exist in a variety of places — tight-knit faith communities, recovery communities, LGBTQ+-affirming practices, cultural and ethnic community-based practice, professional niches (treating fellow clinicians, athletes, artists), and the increasingly unavoidable overlap created by social media and digital life.
Participants will examine NASW's ethical standards governing multiple and overlapping clinical roles. Together we will explore the research base on therapeutic self-disclosure and consider a relational, strengths-based orientation to boundary-setting that positions the clinician as a full human being in ongoing relationship with clients, rather than a neutral blank slate.
Learning Objectives:
Evaluate the practical strengths and limitations of explicit boundary-setting — including written agreements, informed consent, and role-clarity paperwork — in supporting a relational, human-centered stance with clients.
Analyze the ethical considerations of multiple and overlapping roles — including community involvement, dual relationships, and expanded offerings such as group work or retreats alongside individual therapy.
Apply research-based guidelines for appropriate, clinically effective therapist self-disclosure to case material.
Differentiate between a pathology-focused and an adaptive, strengths-based clinical stance, and evaluate how each shapes boundary-setting and the therapeutic relationship.
Date: Monday, September 14th
Time: 5:30pm-6:00pm for Sign In and Networking and 6pm-8pm Presentation
(2 CE Contact Hours — Professional Roles and Boundaries (WAC 246-809-630(3)(b))
Location: University of Washington School of Social Work, 3rd Floor (305)
4101 15th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98105
