Clinical Care for Black Women: Trauma, Strength, Rest, and Resilience

Course overview

This 3-hour self-paced written continuing education course prepares licensed mental health professionals and registered interns to provide clinically sound, trauma-informed care to Black women. The course focuses on assessment, case conceptualization, treatment planning, therapeutic engagement, family systems, risk screening, documentation, and ethical practice. Participants will examine how strength-based coping, emotional suppression, over-functioning, racialized and gendered stressors, family role strain, caregiving burden, workplace stress, grief, anger, faith/spiritual coping, rest, resilience, and boundaries may influence symptom presentation and treatment engagement. The course is designed to help clinicians avoid two common clinical errors: under-assessing distress because a client appears strong, composed, or high-functioning, and over-pathologizing culturally shaped coping strategies without understanding their adaptive function. Participants will learn how to assess beyond functioning, identify symptoms that may be hidden by competence, and develop treatment goals that support emotional expression, boundaries, rest, self-compassion, grief processing, relational functioning, and resilience.