Emanuela Nardella, RP
BIOGRAPHY
Emanuela (Ema) Nardella is a Registered Psychotherapist in private practice since 1986. She has a Social Services Certificate, BA, Professional Teacher’s Certificate and MEd in Instructional and Clinical Psychology. She has worked in a broad array of clinics, community organizations and public schools as well as University teaching and research assistantships. She has taught pre-service teachers counselling skills and Instructional Psychology. Prior to 1985 she taught in the public school system in Ontario and British Columbia.
More currently Ema writes, facilitates Gestalt therapy process groups and supervises in service mental health workers, on professional development and self care. Ema follows a humanistic, experimental and phenomenological based model to encourage conditions for integration, creativity and professional development rather than emphasizing a fractionalized psychopathology model. She focuses on deeper awareness and thus opening choices for others to grow in joy, talent, meaning and relational contact.
She does this through creative experimentation, psychodrama, embodiment with didactic and dialogic components. Deepening awareness through spontaneous experimentation and planned exercises to facilitate learning (cycle of experience), to process and integrate unfinished business, blocks, polarities, contact interruptions within the psychotherapist self and in the relational alliance between helper and
helpee, is a hallmark of her practice.
WORKSHOPS
Creative Adjustments of mental health workers to Covid-19 and post-pandemic recovery
Speaker: Emanuela Nardella, RP
This workshop will introduce and present key concepts and structure in gestalt theory and practice that most apply to the workshop title. Topics will include: contact styles (communications that support our early survival by creatively adjusting), the cycle of experience (learning points in this process), and how the two interrelate.
Targeted questions to encourage reflection and increased awareness will be given to address in break-out groups. Participants will identify their own personal contact styles and where this energy lies on the cycle of experience in order to address where our movement can go next. The workshop will also include an experiment in recovery where participants, in small groups, will be guided by imagery (psychosynthesis style). Participants will then be given the opportunity to ground in their small group by sharing a phrase, word, feeling or image to capture their guided imagery experience. The final portion of the workshop will be the coming together of the whole group to give our closure/withdrawal to our working together in this workshop.
This workshop is designed to move our personal energies to fuller learning to not only benefit us intrapersonally but to then have us be more available and more fully present to the ‘others’ we want to affect and be affected by.
Key Take-aways
- Learning conceptual Gestalt terminology and how it relates to topic of pandemic life.
- Identify their contact styles and interruptions.
- Be clearer (more aware) of their resistances and the way these help them identify one or more ways/options to fuller contact styles rather than limiting contact styles.
- A sharpened focus on their own plan to professional quality assurance as outlined by their own college, training institutes, etc.
- Better support their relational presence with their clients, patients, students, teachers, family, community.
- Bridge stratification gap in our own professional alliance with our clients, colleagues, etc. by delving into ourselves and looking at our creative adjustments rather than our degrees and certificates, to be less top down and more human to human sharing.