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Psychotherapy & Pastoral Counseling Intensive
October 10-12, 2026
Gila River Resorts & Casinos - Wild Horse Pass
5040 Wild Horse Pass Blvd
Chandler, AZ 85226
UNITED STATES
More on Chandler, AZ & the Wild Horse Pass Resort!
Weekend Psychotherapy/Pastoral Counseling Conference Intensive Only Access - For Select Members Only: $349.00
LPC's and Social Workers can earn up to 9 CE credits during the intensive pre-conference offerings.
Participants receive access to Saturday, Sunday, & Monday educational sessions.
Non-CE offerings include Sunday's Welcome Address by Matthew Rhodes (ACPE Board Chair), the Sunday evening Annual Chair's Banquet, and all sessions on Monday.
Monday's highlights include the first General Session with Psychotherapy members on the panel discussion about Culture of Safety, and the final plenary of the day with Tricia Hersey the author of Rest is Resistance which is of resonance with attendees of all professions.
How do I register? (MUST SEE step-by-step directions)
Class Schedule for CE Credit Events
Saturday, October 10, 2026
8:00 AM - 9:30 AM
The Future of Education and Training of Pastoral Counselors
Dr. Tom Knowles-Bagwell (bio)
1.5 CEs
11:45 AM - 1:15 PM
The Wound Has a Theology: Sexuality, Neurodivergence, and the Pastoral Reckoning You Can No Longer Ignore
Dr. Myron Krys (bio)
1.5 CEs
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Beyond Talk Therapy: Guided Imagery and Spiritual Integration in Counseling
Dr. Melody Thompson, LPC (bio)
1.5 CEs
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Who Is Sitting With Your Client? De-epidermalizing the Healer
Dr. Myron Krys (bio)
1.5 CEs
Sunday, October 11, 2026
9:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Why Pastoral Counseling in the Age of Extremism: Healers Outside the Forum
Dr. James Coffman (bio)
1.5 CEs
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Re-envisioning Supervision of Pastoral Counselors: Relational Mutuality, Creative Process, and Formational Companionship
Dr. Ryan Noel Fraser (bio)
1.5 CEs
Non-CE Credit Events on Sunday
2:00 PM - 2:45 PM: Conference Opening Ceremony*
6:15 PM - 9:00 PM: ACPE Annual Chair’s Banquet*
Non-Credit Events on Monday
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM: ACPE Annual Member Meeting
10:45 AM-12:00PM: General Session I: Culture of Safety in Supervision Panel Moderated by Lynne Mikulak*
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Workshop Session I: Peer Review Presented by the Professional Well-being Committee
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Workshop Session I: Toward an Evidence-Based Vision for Spiritual Care Education in Digital Health: A Conversation with CPE Educators Presented by Csaba Szilagyi,Fabian Winiger, Kelsey White, and Simone Brandstädter
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Workshop Session I: Accreditation Outcome Training Accreditation Commission
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Workshop Session I: Precepting and Clinical Pastoral Education Presented by Caitlyn Bailey & Calvin Bradley
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Workshop Session I: Use of Self (no-self?): A Contemplative Approach Presented by Jurgen Schwing
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Workshop Session I: Re-envisioning the 1A Unit: A Korean Immigrant Hybridity Toolkit for Collective Growth and Resilience Presented by Rev. Sunghee Han, Rev. Ki-Do Ahn, Jeanie Ju
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Workshop Session: Navigating Difficult Conversations Presented by Betty White
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM: Keynote Address Presented by Tricia Hearsey*
(*Green bolded non-CE events especially recommended for psychotherapist attendees. You are welcome to attend anything on Monday with enrollment in the Intensive.)
Detailed CE Class Descriptions
The Future of Education and Training of Pastoral Counselors
Presenter: Dr. Tom Knowles-Bagwell (bio)
Time: 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM, Saturday, October 10, 2026
Presentation Overview:
Historically, pastoral counselors were first theologically educated and trained clergy who added on to that foundation a time of training in a free-standing clinical training program. This model was adapted from psychoanalytic institutes and the training of psychoanalysts. With the increasing regulation of mental health care practices of all disciplines by state licensing boards, education and training for this practice has shifted to the academic institutions that prepared applicants for licensure. These programs are challenged not only by the task of interfacing theological method with clinical practice, but also with the educational requirements laid out in the various licensure laws regulating the various professions. This workshop will be a gathering of current and potential higher education professors to observe the development of one, two or three programs, their structures, school fit, theoretical attendance, financial dynamics, and operational values. Attention to pedagogical techniques, state licenses, and inner- and off-campus support systems will be identified.
By the end of the workshop, participants will:
- Understand the historical context for transformations in the modalities of pastoral counseling education and formation.
- Be knowledgeable about a variety of program designs currently available to persons seeking pastoral/counseling training.
- Understand issues surrounding financing of training for pastoral counseling.
- Understand the relationship between the training of pastoral counselors and other mental health professions.
This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
The Wound Has a Theology: Sexuality, Neurodivergence, and the Pastoral Reckoning You Can No Longer Ignore
Presenter: Dr. Myron Krys (Dr. M.K.), PhD, MDiv, LPC (bio)
Time: 11:45 AM - 1:15 PM, Saturday, October 10, 2026
Presentation Overview:
Your clients are not arriving with presenting problems. They are arriving with presenting theologies, inherited doctrines about their bodies, their desires, their minds, and their worth that have been shaping and scarring them long before they ever found your office. This is not simply religious trauma. It is theological trauma, the wound that lives not in the institution but in the beliefs themselves, and it demands a clinician equipped to name it. This general session brings together three of the most under-addressed dimensions of human experience in pastoral and clinical literature, sexuality, neurodivergence, and racialized religious formation, and makes the case that you are not merely useful in these conversations. You were made for them. Come ready to be equipped, challenged, and returned to your practice with a vocabulary for what your clients have been carrying long before the theological damage had a name.
Intended Audience: Pastoral Counselors, Psychotherapists, CPE Educators, Clergy, Chaplains, Spiritual Directors, Graduate Students.
Format: Luncheon Keynote, 60 Minutes
At the conclusion of this training, participants will be able to:
- Differentiate theological trauma from religious trauma by comparing their definitional criteria, symptom presentations, and etiological pathways, and formulate culturally responsive clinical and pastoral response strategies across diverse presenting concerns.
- Analyze the intersecting influences of sexuality, neurodivergence, and racialized religious formation on compound shame and relational disconnection, and apply this intersectional analysis to case conceptualization within pastoral care contexts.
- Evaluate the distinctive competencies of religiously trained clinicians and construct a rationale for their ethical integration into liberation-informed psychotherapeutic practice with QTBIPOC, neurodivergent, and other marginalized populations.
- Apply an integrative whole-person framework — incorporating theological, sexual, neurological, and relational dimensions — to clinical scenario analysis, demonstrating skilled integration within contemporary pastoral counseling practice.
This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
Beyond Talk Therapy: Guided Imagery and Spiritual Integration in Counseling
Presenter: Dr. Melody Thompson, LPC (bio)
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM, Saturday, October 10, 2026
Presentation Overview:
Many clients possess insight into their struggles yet continue to experience emotional, relational, and spiritual barriers to healing. While cognitive and verbal interventions play an important role in counseling, experiential approaches such as guided imagery can help clients access emotions, memories, beliefs, and internal resources that may not be readily available through traditional talk therapy alone. These interventions can facilitate deeper emotional processing, support meaning-making, strengthen coping resources, and create opportunities for corrective emotional and spiritual experiences. This presentation examines the theoretical foundations, clinical applications, and ethical considerations associated with guided imagery and spiritually integrated counseling. Participants will explore the relationship between experiential interventions, attachment-informed care, emotional processing, and spiritual resource utilization. Particular attention will be given to the role of guided imagery in addressing identity concerns, attachment wounds, grief, shame, spiritual struggles, and meaning-making processes.
By the end of this session, participants will:
- Describe the theoretical foundations and research supporting guided imagery and experiential interventions in counseling.
- Identify appropriate clinical applications, benefits, and limitations of guided imagery within therapeutic practice.
- Recognize ethical considerations related to informed consent, client autonomy, cultural responsiveness, and spiritual integration.
- Apply spiritually integrated and experiential interventions in a manner that is clinically appropriate, ethically sound, and responsive to client needs.
This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
Who Is Sitting With Your Client? De-epidermalizing the Healer
Presenter: Dr. Myron Krys (Dr. M.K.), PhD, MDiv, LPC (bio)
Time: 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Saturday, October 10, 2026
Presentation Overview:
Many of us were trained to be a blank slate. But the blank slate was never neutral, it was an imperial product, built inside the same structures that racialized pathology, pathologized queerness, and theologized shame. When a clinician arrives at a session unaware of what those structures have written onto them, harm does not require intention. The structure does that work without announcing itself, and the healer, however well-meaning, reproduces it. Because the same systems that wounded our clients also formed us. This workshop gives you what most clinical and pastoral formation stopped short of, permission to examine what was done to you, and the tools to stop reproducing it. Drawing on De-epidermalizing Praxis and the Identity Reclamation Project, two integrative frameworks developed by Dr. M.K. for liberation-informed clinical work, you will leave with a working vocabulary for theological countertransference, an applied framework for decolonizing your clinical posture, and concrete intervention language for working with clients navigating theological trauma, neurodivergence, sexuality, and racialized religious formation. This work will not land the same way for everyone in the room, but the requirement is the same for all of us: the kind of clear-eyed examination that makes you dangerous to the systems that trained you.
At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Analyze the "blank slate" clinical standard as a product of Western imperial frameworks and evaluate its differential impact on clinicians across racialized, marginalized, and theologically formed identities.
- Apply De-epidermalizing Praxis (DEP) and the Identity Reclamation Project (IRP) to assess their own theological, cultural, and institutional formation as it operates within the therapeutic relationship at individual, institutional, and systemic levels.
- Evaluate how unexamined formation functions as a vector of harm in clinical and pastoral encounters — not through individual intent but through structural reproduction — across clients navigating theological trauma, neurodivergence, sexuality, and racialized religious formation.
- Construct a decolonized clinical posture that deploys the reclaimed self — theological, relational, neurological, and cultural — as a liberatory resource in pastoral and psychotherapeutic practice.
Intended Audience: Pastoral Counselors, Psychotherapists, CPE Educators, Clergy, Chaplains, Spiritual Directors, Graduate Students
Format: Workshop · 90 Minutes ·This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
Why Pastoral Counseling in the Age of Extremism: Healers Outside the Forum
Presenter: Dr. James Coffman (bio)
Time: 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Sunday, October 11, 2026
Presentation Overview:
The workshop will examine religion and culture in the 21st century through the lens of pastoral counselors and spiritually integrated practitioners. It will offer a timely defense of practitioner identity by revisiting the development of pastoral counseling specialists, identifying what the field has learned and where gaps remain. The session will consider key philosophical foundations, both ancient and modern, to surface themes that may shape the formation and training of the next generation of practitioners. Attention will be given to phenomenological tools, their alignment with the clinical method, and their practical limitations.
The workshop will also explore questions of practitioner identity, including how religious identity may be expressed responsibly in clinical work and how issues of authority, accountability, and community can be addressed within professional practice. We will address the question of "How can the religious cloak be appropriated?" Finally, the workshop will describe extremism in its cultural manifestations as a response shaped by economic pressures and dehumanizing systems that constrain witness of human suffering and forestall healing and redemption. It will conclude by asking how practitioners should live and act with persons influenced by religious extremism in ways that remain clinically grounded, ethically responsible, and humanizing.
At the end of the workshop, participants will be equipped to:
- Analyze key religious factors of healers in contemporary culture and recognize a role for pastoral counseling specialists.
- Articulate the integrative role of theology and psychology in addressing complex issues of identity, belief systems, and emotional distress in modern ministry contexts. Evaluate clinically appropriate and ethically responsible approaches for engaging individuals influenced by extremist ideologies.
- Begin to develop practical strategies for training and formation of pastoral counselors who can offer compassion, informed, and contextually responsive care in a rapidly changing (dynamic) landscape.
This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
Re-envisioning Supervision of Pastoral Counselors: Relational Mutuality, Creative Process, and Formational Companionship
Presenter: Ryan Noel Fraser, PhD, LCPT (bio)
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM, Sunday, October 11, 2026
Presentation Overview:
Within supervision, shaped by dual commitments to formative learning and evaluative accountability. While these commitments are essential, supervisory practice can at times become overly oriented toward assessment, thereby constraining the relational, spiritual, and imaginative dimensions that are central to pastoral counseling. This presentation proposes a re-envisioning of supervision as a relationally grounded, spiritually attuned, and creatively engaged process of formational companionship. Drawing on CPE supervisory pedagogy, pastoral theology, and relational psychotherapy, this presentation articulates a model of supervision rooted in mutuality, hospitality, and trust development. Supervision is reframed as a dynamic, co-created space in which supervisor and student engage in reflective dialogue, emotional attunement, and theological meaning-making. Emphasis is given to the role of emotional intelligence, self-reflection, and spiritual awareness in fostering deep learning and integration. This approach attends carefully to each pastoral counseling student’s relational patterns, cultural context, strengths, and growing edges, supporting the development of authentic pastoral identity. The supervisory relationship becomes a primary site of learning, where safety and challenge are held in creative tension, and where imagination expands possibilities for both care and self-understanding.
Participants will explore how supervision can function not merely as evaluation, but as a transformative relational encounter that nurtures clinical competence, spiritual depth, and professional identity formation. Practical strategies will be offered for cultivating trust, embodying hospitable presence, and facilitating supervisory conversations that are both accountable and deeply forma pastoral psychotherapy contexts, supervision is oftentive within ACPE outcomes and competencies.
- Describe a relational and spiritually grounded model of pastoral counseling supervision that integrates ACPE outcomes with insights from pastoral theology and relational psychotherapy.
- Supervisory Practice: Demonstrate supervisory practices that foster mutuality, emotional awareness, hospitality, and trust within the supervisory relationship.
- Formational Outcomes: Assess how supervisory relationships contribute to students’ pastoral identity formation, self-reflective capacity, and integration of spirituality and clinical practice.
This session is eligible for 1.5 CE credits
Continuing Education Credits
National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC)
ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7004. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB)
ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care and Education, Provider No. 2045, is approved as an ACE provider to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: November 5, 2025 - November 5, 2028.
New York State Education Department
Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc. 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 mental health counselors (#MHC-0301), licensed social workers (#SW-0852), licensed marriage and family therapists (#MFT-0153).
How do I register? (MUST SEE step-by-step directions)