“Whatever Happened to the Smoke Break?” Strategies for Secondary Trauma
This webinar is for those working within organizations, especially helping professionals who are vulnerable to secondary trauma.
“Whatever Happened to the Smoke Break?” explores secondary trauma and strategies for reducing its organizational and individual impacts. In the current era, it seems few of us get any breaks at all. This webinar offers specific, concrete ideas for healing and protecting from secondary trauma and invites those working within organizations to generate ideas that they can implement in their settings.
Kristin Dempsey and Ali Hall show that the same qualities that make us effective with others in our work—such as empathy, compassion, and caring—may over time leave us more vulnerable to secondary trauma. Fortunately, these same qualities can provide us with significant protective factors as well.
While secondary trauma is always present for helping professionals, pandemic circumstances have amplified and accelerated these experiences and impacts.
Who's Presenting
Kristin Dempsey
Kristin Dempsey is a Bay Area psychotherapist, counselor educator and trainer. Kristin has over three decades of experience working in community mental health settings and public K-12 schools providing mental health and substance use education and treatment services. She currently supports individuals and families in her San Francisco and Burlingame private practice offices as well as through telehealth. Kristin is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), and she currently teaches motivational interviewing to behavioral health and other allied human services professionals. She is an adjunct professor at the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology Program and lecturing faculty at San Francisco State University. Kristin is the author of The Harm Reduction Workbook for Addiction (New Harbinger, 2024), co-author of Advancing Motivational Interviewing: An Experiential Skills Guide for Mental Health Professionals (PESI, April 2026), and a writer for The Mental Health and Substance Use Recovery Workbook (New Harbinger, May 2027).
Ali Hall
Ali Hall is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), a MINT Certified Trainer, and an independent consultant and trainer. Ali currently serves as a Director Emeritus from the MINT Board of Directors, focusing on professional skill development for MI practitioners and trainers. Ali served as a Lead Trainer and in supporting training teams for several MINT Trainings for New Trainers (TNTs). Ali is the co-developer of the Motivational Interviewing Competency Assessment (MICA), a coding and coaching tool for MI skill improvement, co-author of the book Motivational Interviewing for Mental Health Clinicians: A Toolkit for Skill Development (2021), developer of the Cultivating Hope activity deck (2025) and co-author of Advancing Motivational Interviewing: An Experiential Skills Guide for Mental Health Professionals (PESI, April 2026).