Continuing Education Trainings:
Practical, Creative, & Fun
Providing CEUs for NY State Licensed LMFT, LCAT, LCSW, LMHC & Psychologists!
🎭 ROLES IN PRACTICE: USING THE DRAMA THERAPY ROLE SORT TO MAP CLINICAL AND CLIENT IDENTITY
Nov 5, 12, 19 & Dec 7
3-16 Continuing Education Credits (CEs) for NYS licensed LMFT, LCAT, LCSW, LMHC & Psychologists
Facilitated by Isabel Shanahan, MA, RDT, LCAT & Hollis Witherspoon, MA, RDT, LCAT
🌿 Overview
This four-part series invites clinicians to explore drama therapy’s Role Theory and Role Method as tools for deepening clinical identity, enriching client work, and expanding creative flexibility. The Role Sort Webinar Series introduces clinicians to creative tools cultivated within and expanded from role theory .Across three evening webinars and an in-person day-long training, you’ll practice using the Role Sort to explore your role repertoire—examining both intrapersonal and interpersonal roles, alliances, and conflicts. Each session stands on its own, but together they form a powerful arc for clinical reflection, casework, and growth, building sequentially toward an embodied, in-person intensive.
November 5th — Mapping the Clinical Self
Live Webinar, 6-9 pm | 3 CEs
Role Theory, Role Sort, and Professional Identity
Discover who you are as a clinician. Using the Drama Therapy Role Sort, clarify your professional roles, strengths, and growth edges. Identify burnout patterns and refine your clinical niche — the populations, modalities, and values that define your authentic practice. Leave with renewed focus and a stronger sense of alignment between who you are and how you work.
🌀 Guiding question: “Who am I as a clinician?”
November 12 — Applying Role Theory to Clinical Practice
Live Webinar, 6-9 pm | 3 CEs
Case Conceptualization, Assessment & Treatment Planning
Shift the lens toward your clients. Learn to apply role-based assessment to conceptualize cases, design interventions, and ethically integrate drama-therapy tools within your existing framework (CBT, IFS, psychodynamic, somatic, etc.).
Gain hands-on techniques for promoting role flexibility, emotional regulation, and creative problem-solving.
🌀 Guiding question: “Who is my client?”
November 19 — The Relational Field
Live Webinar, 6-9 pm | 3 CEs
Working Through Stuck Roles, Transference & Countertransference
Examine the dynamic space between therapist and client. Identify and transform “stuck” relational patterns through role-based awareness, action, and reflection. Strengthen attunement, ethical boundaries, and responsiveness as you explore transference and countertransference through creative process and embodied insight.
🌀 Guiding question: “What happens between us?”
December 7 — Role Theory Embodied Integration Intensive
IN PERSON, 10am-6pm, Balance Arts Center, NYC
An immersive, experiential intensive where theory meets embodiment. Practice administering the Role Sort, role training, doubling, role-reversal, and Empty Chair techniques to integrate learning in real time. Discover how to adapt action methods safely and ethically for trauma, grief, and relational healing. Leave with embodied confidence and practical tools you can bring directly into your clinical work. This session will invite participants to work on a hypothetical case study in which clinicians can integrate their knowledge into a self and peer supervisory practice.
🌀 Guiding question: “How do we embody it?”
💫 Series Flow
Webinar 1: Who am I as a clinician?
Identity · Burnout awareness · Niche clarity.
Webinar 2: Who is my client?
Assessment · Conceptualization · Planning
Webinar 3 What happens between us?
Relational awareness · Repair · Flexibility
In Person Training: How do we embody?
Experiential integration · Embodied practice
📩 Registration
Each training may be taken individually or as a full series.
Webinars - 3 CEs Each | $95 or Bundle all three for $250 ($35 savings!)
In Person Training - 7 CEs | $350
MASTER THE SERIES: BUNDLE ALL 4 TRAININGS (WEBINARS + IN-PERSON) FOR $525 ($110 savings!)
Student or Pre-Licensed Discount: 20% Off All Offers
To register or receive updates, email creativewomenretreats@gmail.com
For details and to access the Learning Objectives, click HERE.
BROWSE ROLE CARDS
As Drama Therapists (Licensed Creative Arts Therapists NYS), our trainings and Continuing Education (CE) workshops are designed to provide you with immediately applicable creative interventions for your clinical practice. We use an experiential, embodied approach in our trainings supported by theory and discussion. Walk away with practical interventions to revitalize your practices whether you work with adults, children, couples, individuals, or groups.
(CEs for Creative Women Retreats trainings are provided by New York Creative Arts Therapists PLLC which is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0275, and is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists #CAT-0026, licensed mental health counselors. #MHC-0065, and licensed marriage and family therapists #MFT-0099. And is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0141. New York Creative Arts Therapists PLLC may offer NYSED approved clock hours for events or educational programs that have been approved by the department.)
PAST CLINICAL TRAININGS: APRIL 2025, NYC
Join us, for a special two-day in-person training, to learn and practice the fundamentals of Role Method, an experiential and theoretical component of Drama Therapy. From role sorts to role repertoire, as well as the elements of Psychodramatic scene-making, clinicians will learn creative and practical interventions to deepen and enrich their clinical practice. No previous drama therapy experience necessary. Learn more about the course activities and learning objectives here.
8 CEs AVAILABLE FOR NY STATE LMHC, LMFT, LMSW, LCSW, LCAT, & PSYCHOLOGISTS
EARLY BIRD PRICING THROUGH 3/21! Save $50 and an additional 10-15% for every colleague you bring!
Meet your instructors
Hollis Witherspoon, RDT, LCAT Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, Drama Therapist, educator, improv artist, psychodramatist, breathwork specialist
With over two decades of combined experience teaching, facilitating, performing and practicing therapy, Hollis & Isabel find great joy in introducing the creative elements of their field to other mental health practitioners. Our trainings are fun, informative, and geared toward the needs and interests of each group.
Isabel Shanahan, RDT, LCAT Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, Drama Therapist, educator, therapeutic theater maker, yoga instructor
Creative, connected, experiential learning
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Role theory purports that individuals hold numerous internal and external roles cultivated throughout the lifespan and presented according to social and experiential demands. The ability to fluidly shift between roles to align with a new context helps build feelings of competence and achievement. Role method in drama therapy helps clients access and train roles to better serve a relationship with the self and with the world.
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Drama Therapists are keenly attuned to the depth of knowledge and wisdom the physical body holds. Cuing the body in therapy to express it’s experience through creating sculpts and other embodied invitations allows one to bypass the familiar defenses of language and access novel and meaningful avenues of communication and insight.
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Winnicott suggested that play was a necessary component of therapy for both children and adults, and Drama Therapists agree! Using improvisation, we access the playful element of spontaneity, allowing novel responses to emerge from familiar issues, and with role play, we invite the possibility of trying on a new way of being, offering hope, exercising flexibility and perspective-taking, and increasing a sense of playfulness in the self and with others.
Continuing Education FAQs
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Licensed Creative Arts Therapists in New York State include Art , Music , Dance, and Drama Therapists.
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NYS LCATS, LMSW, LCSW, LMHC, Licensed Psychologists. CEs for Creative Women Retreats trainings are provided by New York Creative Arts Therapists PLLC which is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0275, and is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists #CAT-0026, licensed mental health counselors. #MHC-0065, and licensed marriage and family therapists #MFT-0099. And is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0141. New York Creative Arts Therapists PLLC may offer NYSED approved clock hours for events or educational programs that have been approved by the department.
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Yes! Although you will not leave any of our courses being able to call yourself a creative arts therapist, we will support your creative clinical self in a way that allows you to implement creative and embodied interventions into your practice.
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No way! As creative arts therapists, we work with children, adolescents, couples, adults, groups, and individuals. Creativity and embodiment can bypass the well-worn grooves and defenses of talking and infuse invigoration and depth into the therapeutic process.