Dr. Janet E. Helms is co-founder of Psychologists for Racial Justice (psych4rj@gmail.com); Professor Emeritus, Boston College; and a licensed psychologist. She is Past President of the Society of Counseling Psychology (Division 17 of the American Psychological Association). Dr. Helms is the sixteenth most influential psychologist in the country based on her scholarship on race, racism and the other “isms” or conditions of societal oppression, according to an AI ranking. She is the author of the McGuffey Longevity Award winning book, “A Race Is A Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life.”

Dr. Anmol Satiani is a co-founder of Psychologists for Racial Justice (psych4rj@gmail.com) with Dr. Helms. She is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Illinois who is serving as the Training Director, Clinical Supervisor, and Staff Psychologist at Center Focused Therapy, a group psychotherapy practice in Chicago, Illinois. Her presentations, consultation work, teaching, and scholarship have centered around race, culture, clinical supervision, and training. Given her passion for clinical training, she has been actively involved in the Association for Chicagoland Externship and Practicum Training (ACEPT) for over 10 years, including serving as President and founding and chairing the ACEPT Student Financial Concerns Committee. Dr. Satiani completed the APA Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology (LIWP) signature program in 2023. She earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at Boston College.

Program Description

The general focus of this interactive, three-hour workshop is helping clinicians to recognize the racial dynamics of therapy. Most mental health service providers are White professionals whose competence in managing racial dynamics has been shaped by their own White racial socialization and clinical training in which there was virtually no attention to racism per se. Consequently, when racism becomes salient in interactions with clients, the provider in charge has no guidance as to how to provide effective interventions or to recognize ineffective ones. Since practitioners rarely receive training in the power dynamics of race and racism as they pertain to therapy, they may not be aware of how they express their racial identities in their interventions or how clients express their racial identities in clinical practice. Therefore, it is important to use a diagnostic model that helps practitioners recognize the power dynamics of racial identity and engage in processes to reduce conflict or clinical impasses specific to the therapeutic relationship, and/or the institutions in which clinical work occurs. In this three-hour workshop, we intend to engage clinicians in using Helms’s White Racial Identity Model to recognize different types of problematic and harmonious clinical relationships and dynamics of clinical environments, as well as clinicians’ roles in contributing to them. We will be utilizing virtual breakout rooms to encourage participants’ discussion of clinical material associated with brief informational sessions.