Save the Date: 2025 Fall Psychotherapy Gathering

2025 Fall Psychotherapy Gathering

September 26-28 * Decatur, Georgia

Weaving Our Roots: Deepening Connection with Self, Colleagues, and Clients

We’re thrilled to announce the theme, dates, and location for the 2025 Fall ACPE Psychotherapy Gathering.

The theme of our gathering is “Weaving Our Roots: Deepening Connection with Self, Colleagues, and Clients.” And as those words suggest, we’ll be sharing meaningful spiritual connection with ourselves and one another in ways that deepen the meaningful spiritual connections we have with our clients.

 There are lots of places where psychotherapists can find head-knowledge, including about spiritually integrated psychotherapy. It is much rarer to find a gathering that centers spiritual experience and spiritual connection as both the path and the destination, and that is our aim. S/spirit is the heart of our professional community, and openness to S/spirit will be the heart of this gathering.

What we’ll do together will be practical and relevant for the work of psychotherapy and related practices of care (life coaches, educators, chaplains and other clergy), and there will be continuing education credit. But the learning we’ll share will be more experiential, embodied, and conversation-based than presentation-based. There will be no “speakers” or PowerPoint slides. We will be learners and teachers together.

One of our highest intentions for the weekend is to grow connections between the newly emerging ACPE SIP community and the pastoral counseling community who came to ACPE via the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC). Our planning team includes people from both “gardens”: Kathryn Summers, Carol McGinnis, and Russell Siler Jones from the AAPC garden, and Tamara Hanna, Dwight Hughes, Latasha Matthews, Lacrecia Dangerfield, and Wiley Smith from the SIP garden. And we’re planning the weekend so that each community can hear stories, values, and wisdom from the other.

We’ll be meeting at the First Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia, and we have a block of hotel rooms at the Hampton Inn in Decatur. The Hampton Inn is 0.1 miles from the church and 0.2 miles from the Decatur MARTA station. We know that “church space” brings different associations for different people, and we’ll be working with that as part of exploring and weaving our roots (and preparing ourselves to be with a diverse population of clients). Meeting in the church space rather than hotel space will make this event waaaaaay more affordable for participants.

We’ll be in touch very soon with more information about the weekend, including registration information (for the gathering and for the hotel), but in the meantime . . .

• Save the dates:  September 26-28 (Friday late afternoon through Sunday lunch)
• Think about people you’d like to introduce to this community and the way of being together we’re developing
• Reach out to any of us if you have thoughts or questions

Joyfully,

Lacrecia Dangerfield, Tamara Hanna, Dwight Hughes, Russell Siler Jones, Latasha Matthews, Carol McGinnis, Wiley Smith, Kathryn Summers