Free Online Seminars for Clinicians
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute runs two free online seminars each month. Both are part of the series Why Good Interventions Fail. Each seminar is one hour, live on Zoom, from 12:00 to 1:00 pm Eastern. They are for practicing clinicians, supervisors and clinicians in training.
Assessing Regulation
First Friday of each month · 12:00–1:00 pm Eastern · Free · Live on Zoom
A good intervention can fail when the clinical demand exceeds the client's psychological capacity in the moment. This seminar teaches how to recognize when a client's regulation is narrowing during a session, what that looks like, and how to adjust your clinical stance so that what you ask of the client stays within what he or she can use at that moment.
What this can look like in a session
A reflective question lands flat.
An interpretation is followed by withdrawal.
A session seems productive, but nothing carries into the next week.
The client has insight, but nothing changes.
What you will learn
The ways a client's regulation can narrow during a session
What narrowing regulation looks like: a client who seems insightful but is untouched, who complies without taking anything in, who becomes activated and stops thinking, or who shuts down
How to tell engagement or emotional expression apart from the capacity to use the work
How to adjust your clinical stance so the demand of the intervention stays within what the client can use
The Incomplete Alliance
Third Friday of each month, beginning January 22, 2027 · 12:00–1:00 pm Eastern · Free · Live on Zoom
Many treatments stall because client and clinician never fully agreed on what they are working on together. This seminar describes what an incomplete alliance is, how to recognize one during a session, and what it costs the treatment. It ends with two self-checks you can apply to your current cases.
What this can look like in a session
Sessions are pleasant, but the treatment does not move.
The client agrees to a plan and then does not follow it.
The client brings a new topic every week.
The client and the clinician would describe the goal of treatment differently.
What you will learn
What an incomplete alliance is, and how it differs from weak rapport
How to recognize one during a session
What it costs the treatment
Two self-checks you can apply to your current cases
Who these seminars are for
Practicing clinicians, supervisors and clinicians in training, in private practice, outpatient, community mental health, substance use and agency settings.
About the instructor
Sarah Ozol Shore, MS, is the founder of the Clinical Effectiveness Institute. She has 20 years of clinical experience in suburban Philadelphia. Her teaching integrates psychodynamic, attachment-informed, trauma-informed, and mentalization-based perspectives, with a particular emphasis on real-time clinical judgment.
Her teaching proceeds from a single premise: clinical effectiveness is requisite for ethical practice. The question of what a client can actually receive in a session precedes any decision about what to offer. She trains clinicians who want their decisions in the room to be sharper, more responsive, and more accurately calibrated to what each client can use.
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute also offers live online trainings for clinicians. See current trainings
Sarah Ozol Shore, MS
Clinical Educator & Researcher
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute