Trainer
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Dr Alia OffmanDirector NA Chapter | TrainerDr Alia Offman is a registered psychologist in Ontario, Canada providing counselling and professional training services using MiCBT. She obtained her doctorate in research psychology at Carleton University, a Master’s in Education at the University of Ottawa, and post-doctorate training as a counselling psychologist. She is currently working through Self-Balance Psychological Services to provide MiCBT therapy and training.
She has been a Contract Instructor at Carleton University for over ten years teaching in the psychology department. She has supervised their fourth year Honours Projects course, taught a fourth-year seminar course in The Psychology of Human Sexuality and undergraduate courses in The Psychology of Women, Statistics and Social Psychology. She has also taught in the education department at the University of Ottawa as a sessional lecturer. She is currently developing a fourth-year course in Mindfulness and Well-being.
Alia is a published researcher with the majority of her work focused on adult populations, studying such diverse areas as workplace productivity, the impact of discrimination on health, communication in relationships and the effects of relationship violence on self-esteem. She was an Associate Researcher at Carleton University and a Research Associate with the Ottawa Health Research Institute.
Working within her individuals has always been important to Alia. She has completed 3 levels of training in the Mindful School Program and will be a volunteer teacher in her individual’s school, offering mindfulness training to grade school students. For many years she volunteered with Planned Parenthood Ottawa, and she was recognized for her work in the field of human sexuality. She was awarded the Norman Barwin Scholarship from the Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada.
She continues to study and train in mindfulness approaches and is working under the supervision of Dr Bruno Cayoun in expanding MiCBT in Canada.
- Dates: Tuesdays April 4, 11, 18, 25 May 2, 9, 16, 30 June 6, 13
- No online classes: May 23
MiCBT Applied Course
IMPORTANT
Given that this is an applied course during which you are assisted in delivering the MiCBT programme to one or more people, you will need a client base with which to practice. You need to have at least 2 clients with whom you can implement MiCBT from Week 1—we recommend 3 clients, with a minimum of 2 clients, in case client dropout prevents you from continuing to implement MiCBT and actively participate in the course. Sometimes this takes a while to organise so we recommend that you are organised sufficiently in advance to be ready to start implementing the programme just after our first online class.
The MiCBT Applied Course consists of 10 online lessons over a 12 week period. All lessons are conducted online, which allows you to use interactive documents, interact with other participants and the presenter, and review the recorded sessions if needed.
This week’s class will guide you to prepare important bases for a successful programme. You will learn to set a therapy contract with clients, describe the MiCBT model, and teach them the pre-mindfulness relaxation method. This session includes:
- Introduction of each participant
- Planning the implementation of the program, setting goals and discussing professional and ethical matters
- Explaining the four stages of MiCBT to clients
- Setting a therapy contract.
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 1: Progressive Muscle Relaxation and mindfulness of the body)
This week’s class will guide you to prepare important bases for a successful programme. You will learn to set a therapy contract with clients, describe the MiCBT model, and teach them the pre-mindfulness relaxation method. This session includes:
- Introduction of each participant
- Planning the implementation of the program, setting goals and discussing professional and ethical matters
- Explaining the four stages of MiCBT to clients
- Setting a therapy contract.
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 1: Progressive Muscle Relaxation and mindfulness of the body)
This week’s class will guide you to address your clients’ difficulty adhering to a regular practice schedule for homework assignments and provide them with a rationale for practising mindfulness of breath. This session includes:
- Feedback from each participant
- Using the Socratic dialogue to assist clients with time management and practice commitment
- Providing a rationale for mindfulness of breath
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients
This week’s class will guide you to explain the rationale for integrating mindfulness of body sensations in therapy and teach your clients unilateral body-scanning in the traditional Burmese Vipassana method used in MiCBT. This session includes:
- The co-emergence model of reinforcement
- The role of equanimity in the extinguishment of learned responses
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 1: Implementing the rationale for unilateral body-scanning)
- Feedback from each participant
This week’s class will guide you to emphasise the role and practice of equanimity in mindfulness meditation as an exposure (to sensory stimuli and memories) and response prevention method and teach your clients to recognise the deeper and usually subconscious elements of their experiences and transfer the skills to everyday experiences. This session includes:
- The four characteristics of body sensations
- The importance of skill transfer
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 1: rationale for unilateral body-scanning without instructions, monitoring applied practice using the Interoceptive Signature Form) as preparation for exposure in Stage 2)
- Practice feedback from each participant
This week’s class will guide you to implement mindfulness-based exposure methods using the skills acquired in the preceding weeks and teach your clients the first advanced scanning method. This session includes:
- Providing a rationale for Stage 2
- Describing and filling out the SUDS (Hierarchical Exposure) form and using bipolar and in-vivo exposure methods
- The rationale for advanced scanning techniques (rapid detection of early distress cues for better prevention of reactivity and addressing deeper schemas, including self-schema)
- Explaining symmetrical scanning
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients.
This week, there is no online class with the teacher as more time is needed to implement the skills taught last week.
This week’s class will guide therapists to implement the same mindfulness-based exposure methods as last week but with more anxiety-provoking situations that keep clients in entrenched avoidance and teach them a more advanced scanning method. This session includes:
- Stage 2: bipolar and in-vivo exposure methods to address the last and most distressing avoidance items on the SUDS form
- Reviewing SUDS ratings across all items
- Explaining the generalisation of desensitisation effect
- Explaining partial sweeping
- Setting and explaining this week’s homework for therapists and clients.
This week’s class will guide therapists to teach clients mindfulness-based interpersonal skills, which help reduce interpersonal reactivity such as passivity, aggressiveness, or conflict-avoidance behaviour. It is sometimes called “the art of seeing human suffering”. This class will also guide therapists in implementing advanced body scanning that enables deep perception of the early onset of emotional processing. This week’s class includes:
- Explaining sweeping en masse
- Providing a rationale for Stage 3: externalising attention to understand others (“seeing suffering”) and preventing reactivity to their reactions
- Implementing Experiential Ownership (as an interpersonal-regulation method) based on co-emergence reinforcement
- Setting and explaining next week’s homework for therapists and clients processing, including early detection of distress cues.
This week’s class will guide you to implement empathic training grounded in thoughts, emotions and daily actions and teach Loving-Kindness meditation to your clients. This session includes:
- Practice feedback from each participant
- Advanced body-scanning: transversal scanning
- Grounded Empathy (compassion training)
- Loving-Kindness practice as a counter-conditioning context
- Five ethical challenges (as “behavioural experiments”) to ground empathic intentions into compassionate actions
- Setting and explaining next week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 4: rationale for grounded empathy training with ethical behaviour, implementing transversal scanning and Loving-Kindness techniques)
This week’s class will reinforce your skills in teaching compassion and help clients link mindfulness of ethical intentions and actions to create and maintain a sense of connectedness with others, thereby decreasing the probability of relapse. This session includes:
- Practice feedback from each participant
- Continuing compassion training
- The sweeping in-depth technique
- Setting and explaining next week’s homework for therapists and clients (Stage 4: refine applications of ethical behaviour, sweeping-in-depth and loving-kindness methods).
This week, there is no online class with the teacher as more time is needed to implement the skills taught last week.
This week’s class will summarise the course and review your learning outcomes. We will also discuss the use of the MiCBT Institute’s resources. This session includes:
- Practice feedback from each participant
- How to maintain gains in the long term
- Course revision and summary
- Evaluating learning outcomes
- Further training and planning professional support
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