Virtual- MI, Culture, and Intergenerational Healing: Ghosts and Angels in the Nursery

Virtual

📅 Friday October 9, 2026

Time 9:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. MT

8 a.m. PT | 10 a.m. CT | 11 a.m. ET

📍 Location
‍ ‍Zoom

🎓 3 hours Cultural CEUs:

New Mexico Counseling & Therapy Practice Board and the New Mexico Social Work Board

💲 Early Bird Tuition: $100 (tax included)
Available through October 2

Regular Tuition: $115 (tax included)

How do our histories shape the ways we understand, protect, care for, and respond to others? What gets carried forward from our families, relationships, communities, and cultures—and how does the past become active in the present?

This 3-hour cultural training explores the intersection of Motivational Interviewing, culture, attachment, trauma, and intergenerational healing through the enduring psychodynamic concepts of Ghosts in the Nursery and Angels in the Nursery. Fraiberg and colleagues described how unresolved experiences from the past can reappear in present relationships. Lieberman and colleagues expanded this framework by drawing attention to memories of having felt loved, understood, protected, and safe—experiences that can also remain psychologically available and be carried forward.

Using the MI Spirit of partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment as a guiding stance, we will explore how family history, culture, migration, loss, language, relationships, traditions, and lived experience shape the meanings people make of themselves and others. We will consider how painful histories can be repeated in the present, as well as how memories of care, safety, belonging, and protection can become resources for healing.

I’ll also introduce Following the Angel Threads, a clinical interview I developed over years of working with children, parents, and adults with histories of complex trauma. We’ll listen to excerpts from recorded interviews and explore what happens when we slow down benevolent relational memories: what helps a memory become more vivid, how reflections can deepen meaning while preserving the client’s authorship of their own story, and what these memories can teach us about how a person experiences love, safety, belonging, protection, and being understood. We’ll consider how what we learn can guide the therapeutic relationship and treatment of complex trauma.

Throughout the training, an ofrenda will serve as a recurring metaphor for what remains present across generations: stories, values, wounds, traditions, absences, protective relationships, sensory memories, expectations, and sources of belonging. We’ll also use characters from literature and film to explore intergenerational patterns, protective adaptations, family roles, perfectionism, silence, burden, belonging, and change.

Finally, we’ll turn our attention toward ourselves as helpers. Participants will reflect on the “ghosts” and “angels” we carry into professional relationships and consider how our own histories influence what we notice, fear, value, rescue, avoid, or feel compelled to change.

Throughout the training, we’ll return to three questions:

What do we inherit? What do we carry? What do we choose to pass forward?