Emotional Alchemy for the Therapist’s Soul

Facilitator: TJ Walsh, MA, LPC

Meeting Time: 7:00- 8:30 pm EST

Dates: September 10,17, 24

CEs: 4.5

Course Description:

Emotional Alchemy is the practice of turning raw, often overwhelming emotion into creative insight and grounded action. It’s a way to work with what’s real—the stuff that lives under the surface—through intuitive image-making and reflection. It’s not about the product. It’s about the process. As helpers and healers, we’re trained to hold space for others, but we also need ways to metabolize what we absorb—especially the things that don’t quite have words. In this seminar, we’ll explore how painting (yes, even messy, weird, “I-don’t-know-what-this-is” painting) can help us transmute what’s stuck, unknown, or heavy…into something useful, beautiful, and alive. We’ll work with Emotional Alchemy’s stages of transformation—naming, holding, metabolizing, transmuting, and integrating—alongside modern psychoanalytic ideas like reverie, aesthetic communication, the analytic third, and the importance of tending to the person of the therapist.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the stages of the Emotional Alchemy process (naming, holding, metabolizing, transmuting, integrating) and explain how each stage supports therapist self-reflection and emotional regulation.

2. Demonstrate the use of intuitive painting as a self-tending tool for processing emotional residue and preparing for clinical work.

3. Differentiate between cognitive reflection and embodied emotional processing, and discuss the role of image-making in accessing unconscious material.

4. Evaluate the impact of personal emotional states on therapeutic presence and plan creative self-care rituals to support ongoing clinical clarity.

5. Identify countertransference signals through reflective art-making and summarize how these insights can inform ethical and attuned therapeutic practice.

Note: since this seminar has a strong experiential component, participants will need to have some simple art supplies on hand. Nothing fancy—letter-sized paper (or a sketchpad), markers, crayons, paints if they want, etc. The main thing is that they have a few materials ready to engage with the creative process each week.