Becoming A Collaborative Divorce Mental Health Professional:  A Two-Year Training Program Offered by Kate Scharff, MSW, Beginning Fall 2015

Even for experienced clinicians, becoming a Collaborative Divorce professional is a major undertaking. Learning to apply concepts and skills from the world of psychotherapy to this new multi-disciplinary, legal, and outcome-focused process requires a profound, complex, and often destabilizing paradigm shift. It also requires us to expand our knowledge base and skill set in ways we might not have imagined. Beginning and Intermediate Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Team trainings are crucial introductions to the practical and philosophical underpinnings of Collaborative Practice, but they are just the beginning. Dedicated Collaborative coaches and child specialists know that becoming an important and valued contributor at the Collaborative table requires an ongoing commitment to learning- on both the cognitive and affective levels.

This two-year program is designed specifically for mental health professionals who have decided to expand their practices into the sphere of Collaborative Divorce. But since at its core, Collaborative Practice is a state of mind, participants will acquire knowledge, skills, and enhanced self-awareness that will have broad applicability across all areas of their life and work. In recognition of the fact that participants’ practices will likely include non-Collaborative divorce cases, we will dedicate some of our case consultation time to discussing relevant material from other modalities (including mediation, cooperative divorce, divorce coaching, parenting coordination, developing parenting plans, and psychotherapy with individuals and families dealing with separation and divorce).

The Year One curriculum is designed to provide students with a solid grounding in the foundations of Collaborative Practice from a psychological perspective. In Year Two we’ll make a careful study of the distinction between competence and excellence in our work. We’ll explore divorce as a developmental phenomenon, and our role in establishing the optimal psychological conditions in which clients and professionals can reach their own highest transformative potential. The aim of year two is to help students “up their game” through more nuanced understanding, consolidation of basic skills, and the mastery of more advanced interventions.

For more information about this program, including meeting dates and curriculum, click on Becoming A Collaborative Divorce Mental Health Professional

To print out the registration form, click on Becoming a Collaborative MHP-Registration Form