Are you a skilled therapist, confident in your work with clients across a range of presenting concerns, but who desires to deepen into your clinical practice?

Would you like support around working from a "collaborative clinical framework" that informs how to work with moments of discomfort, uncertainty, and feeling stuck with your clients?

Are you excited about sharing time and expertise with other clinicians and building a growing community of colleagues?

This year of study and community might be for you!

Always, and maybe now more than ever, we need each other.

Let's grow together in our work.

Forming Now

Relational Therapy Training:

a Year of Study and Community

Oak Park, IL

in person

September 2025 - June 2026

24 CEUs for the year

The therapist/client relationship is a complex endeavor. Our work is informed by many useful modalities such as IFS, EMDR, ACT, somatic-focused therapies, and more. But also, no matter your skill set, the capacity to work with the unfolding process of the relationship between the therapist and client is critical to effective intervention and treatment. It also creates an understanding of how to actively use the greatest tool of our trade: ourselves.

Clients harmed in their early relationships often need more than just interventions, no matter how skillfully applied. They also need a relationship to experience what they have not had yet, or have experienced in lesser ways: consistency, attunement, boundaries, shared expectations and action, compassion and present-centered, honest engagement.

Relational wounding requires relational healing.

Clients come to us with needs and hopes and deep longings - and then often get stuck in treatment, or continue to make choices that seem contradictory to their goals. We observe this with our clients and we try all of the things that often work with others to no avail. We can end up feeling de-skilled and wondering what we are doing wrong.

In this year, therapists will get to study the unfolding relational process and practice ways of developing intentional skills in the use of the relationship between therapist and client. Growing capacity as a therapist who thinks with complexity about intervention via the relationship will create more ease for you as the therapist, and give you more access routes to help your clients through sticky spots in the service of increased insight and transformation.

We will use this year to read, discuss and apply psychodynamic and relational concepts to case study.

We will hold these tenents as essential:

1. Our best work is done with support from community. Just as our clients do not heal in isolation, we do not progress in isolation.

2. Effective treatment requires capacity to work with unconscious processes.

3. The ability to effectively assess for trauma and attachment wounding is critical for ethical practice.

4. Working in the present, with a well-formulated clinical frame, is the access route to lasting change.

Opening Workshop

Friday, September 12th, 2025 from 9:00-4:00 pm

Lunch included.

This day will focus on the basic tenets of core relational components for a clinical frame that we will use as we grow together in the year to come, exploring:

Principles of relational collaboration,

Window of Tolerance model & present-centered practice with our clients,

Neurobiology of trauma and attachment,

and beginning to use a "parts model" for greater flexibility with a clients' organization of experience.

We will read from seminal and modern texts and apply theory to two case consultations each month thereafter.

These guest colleagues will join Meghan one month each, to teach from their areas of expertise:

Richla Davis, LCPC on working with racism and bias in the clinical space.

https://idalillie.com/therapist/richla-davis

Morgan Vance, LCSW on ethically navigating complex case collaboration with colleagues.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/morgan-vance-chicago-il/128099

Program Details:

Friday, September 12th, 2025

9:00-4:00 pm

1st Friday of each month, Oct-June

12pm-2pm

24 CEUs for the year for LCSWs and LCPCs and LMFTs

Open to fully licensed clinicians, currently seeing clients, who have been in practice several years and who are committed to: use of self as clinician and working with implicitly held biases.

Please contact Meghan to apply:
meghanreillylcsw@gmail.com

(708) 689-3041

Tuition: $1,500

10% discount if paid in full

Applicants of all racial and gender identities and sexual orientations are welcome.

If cost would prohibit you from joining, a sliding scale is available.