Come join Katie Heiden-Rootes, PhD, LMFT, for a weekend workshop!

This two-day workshop offers a relational, systemic approach to working with queer and trans youth and their parents, with a focus on strengthening family connections even amid difference, distress, and uncertainty. Participants will explore how to maintain an affirming stance with youth while also engaging parents in ways that reduce defensiveness and open space for reflection and change. Drawing on family therapy frameworks and queer intersectional feminist practices, the workshop emphasizes how therapists can hold multiple truths in the room where parents become change makers and queer and trans youth reclaim wholeness. Through case discussion, reflexive inquiry, and live demonstration, clinicians will deepen their capacity to stay relationally present in complex family systems and support pathways toward increased safety, understanding, and belonging.

Come join Katie Heiden-Rootes, PhD, LMFT, for a weekend workshop!

This two-day workshop offers a relational, systemic approach to working with queer and trans youth and their parents, with a focus on strengthening family connections even amid difference, distress, and uncertainty. Participants will explore how to maintain an affirming stance with youth while also engaging parents in ways that reduce defensiveness and open space for reflection and change. Drawing on family therapy frameworks and queer intersectional feminist practices, the workshop emphasizes how therapists can hold multiple truths in the room where parents become change makers and queer and trans youth reclaim wholeness. Through case discussion, reflexive inquiry, and live demonstration, clinicians will deepen their capacity to stay relationally present in complex family systems and support pathways toward increased safety, understanding, and belonging.

A defining feature of Bowen theory is its emphasis on putting the healing and resolution of problems back into the system from which problems originated, rather than in the therapy room and in the therapist-patient relationship. As such, a Bowen approach is less like other therapies and more akin to coaching, research collaboration, or consultation. Shifts in thinking about the therapeutic process itself, and shifts in how the therapist manages themself are embodiments of differentiation of self, a core concept of the theory. This, and other concepts such as triangles, cutoff, and multigenerational transmission of emotional patterns, will be introduced and illustrated with case examples showing the applicability of Bowen thinking for working in a non-pathologizing manner that is compatible with culturally-competent, adoption-competent, and decolonizing therapy modes of therapeutic work.