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About The Gevirtz School
Clinical Services Spotlight
Alumnus Rebecca Williams Returns to UCSB to Lead Mindfulness Workshop
What's old is new again. Mindfulness is an ancient life philosophy designed to slow the mind and simplify priorities. This process sends messages to your body that allows it to heal from negative thoughts, painful emotions, and day-to-day stressors.
Rebecca Williams, Ph.D., is an alumnus of the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, with a specialty in clinical psychology. She is a psychologist, teacher, mentor, and author. She specializes in recovery from mental illness and addictions. Rebecca has worked for the last 16 years at the San Diego VA providing treatment to veterans and supervision to trainees targeting serious mental illness, unemployment, and substance abuse recovery. Rebecca has developed a system for identifying losses and how the lack of resolution maintains the loss-addiction cycle. She specializes in providing a therapeutic environment for developing the necessary patient alliance to facilitate the difficult discussion of loss.
Rebecca's new book The Mindfulness Workbook for Addiction (New Harbinger Publications, 2012, mindfulnessworkbook.com) integrates the understanding of how loss impacts addictive behaviors. The workbook outlines the function addiction is serving and provides tools to develop healthy coping for dealing with loss.
Dr. Rebecca Williams and Dr. Michael Reider will be conducting a lively 3-hour workshop that will include mindfulness techniques, understanding the loss-addiction cycle, and developing therapeutic alliance to facilitate change. The workshop will be on Thursday, January 24, 2013 from 9am – noon at UCSB. For more information contact the Hosford Clinic at 805-893-8064 or email dyan@education.ucsb.edu.