Elevate Your Wellbeing: Self-Regulation, Work-Life Balance, Art of Complaining, Individual and Workplace Needs, Psychotherapy Approach
Offering Description
This specialized offering is designed specifically for members of the veterinary team navigating the complex interplay between personal wellbeing and professional demands. Through five focused sessions, participants will explore how early relational patterns shape their identity and interactions, learn to reframe unproductive complaining, and assess which approach to work-life alignment best suits their current life stage. The series also examines how stress responses impact boundary-setting and offers strategies to strengthen self-regulation and relational clarity. Grounded in the realities of veterinary practice, this offering provides practical, evidence-based tools to reduce stress, foster healthier relationships, and sustain a more fulfilling career.
Each session includes content from top-rated ACVIM Forum programming featuring newly designed interactive and supportive elements, allowing participants to reflect and actively apply new insights in real-time. Created for immediate practical use, this content is valuable for all members of the veterinary team. In alignment with the ACVIMs mission, vision, and values, this new offering has been designed with accessibility and affordability in mind, to ensure this content is approachable for veterinary team members at any stage of their career.
Sessions included in this offering are:
- A Psychotherapy Approach to Veterinary Wellness
- Self-Regulation: The Fundamental Skill Required to Establish Boundaries
- Work-life Balance, Blend or Bleed: Which Strategy Works for Veterinary Specialists?
- Making Whining Work for You: The Art of Complaining
- Identifying and Responding to Individual and Workplace Needs
Learning Objectives
- Analyze how early relational patterns influence their professional identity and interpersonal dynamics by applying psychoanalytic concepts to their own experiences and evaluate how these insights can guide more intentional and resilient professional engagement.
- Distinguish between different types of complaining, and apply evidence-based strategies to engage in constructive complaining.
- Evaluate whether work-life balance, integration, or separation is most desirable for their current stage of life, and apply practical strategies to align their personal and professional responsibilities with their individual needs and goals.
- Describe the connection between nervous system responses and boundary-setting, and explore how self-regulation practices can support more meaningful and enduring relational boundaries.
- Identify sources and signs of stress, evaluate their current self-care and coping strategies, and apply practical stress management techniques to create harmony in life and at work.
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Session Descriptions
Michele Gaspar, DVM, MA, LCPC
A Psychotherapy Approach to Veterinary Wellness
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Michele Gaspar is a veterinarian and psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago. As a member of the VIN Foundation's Vets4Vets program, she works with veterinarians across the career spectrum who have professional and personal challenges. Her professional interests include broadening the veterinary profession’s understanding of the psychological issues that impact veterinarian wellbeing and lead to burnout and jeopardize career sustainability.
Session Description: Veterinary wellness has typically concentrated on what can be called the "window dressings" of wellness: Exercise, nutrition, rest/relaxation and good social connections. While these are beneficial, they do not fully help the clinician or technician find meaning in work and avoid burnout. Additionally, these recommendations for wellness are particularly difficult to access when depression, anxiety and other mental health issues are present. There are, however, paths to a different type of wellness that require that we consider our earliest relationships, patterns that have emerged because of those interactions and become aware of how they manifest in our professional and personal lives. In this presentation, we will look at some psychoanalytic concepts (good and bad objects, masochism, fate and destiny, disappointment and hope) that offer a new way of seeing ourselves, our chosen profession and how we interact with others. Introductions to historical and contemporary psychoanalytic writers and thinkers will provide templates for re-engaging with the why of our professional choice and how we can work with professional challenges with clarity and courage.
Laura Motschenbacher, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM)
Making Whining Work for You: The Art of Complaining
Recording Duration: 25 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 50 minutes
Speaker Intro: Dr. Laura Motschenbacher is a small animal internal medicine specialist practicing at the University of Minnesota where she is an assistant professor. She enjoys training residents and students and has a special passion for communication and leadership subjects. When not working, she enjoys gardening and traveling with her family.
Session Description: Complaining is a natural part of being a human. It is something that can make us feel better and feel heard. There is research demonstrating that however cathartic it feels to complain, repetitive complaining is damaging to ourselves, relationships with others, and career success. In this session, we will explore the different types of complaining and practice different strategies that make complaining effective and beneficial, rather than damaging.
Marie Holowaychuk, DVM, DACVECC
Work-life Balance, Blend or Bleed: Which Strategy Works for Veterinary Specialists
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Dr. Marie Holowaychuk is a specialist in small animal emergency and critical care, and a passionate advocate for wellness in the veterinary profession. She achieves this by speaking, consultanting, coaching, and facilitating online programs. She recently founded Reviving Veterinary Medicine, a website and podcast dedicated to improving the mental health and wellbeing of veterinary professionals.
Session Description: As a specialist, you are overworked and exhausted by the never-ending pull of patient care, client needs, and other professional obligations. When you add to these the demands of your life outside of work, such as raising children, caregiving for pets, or practicing self-care, it is no wonder you feel burnt out. And as you progress in your career, your desire to balance work and home life will become stronger, leaving you to wonder, is it really possible to achieve a balance between your personal and professional lives? During this session, you will learn what work-life balance means and how you might achieve it with practical tools and strategies for managing your time, preserving your energy, setting boundaries, and saying no.
Angie Arora, MSW, RSW
Self-Regulation: The Fundamental Skill Required to Establish Boundaries
Recording Duration: 25 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 50 minutes
Speaker Introduction: Angie Arora is a Social Worker supporting the human needs that arise from human-animal relationships, specializing in veterinary wellbeing, end-of-life/pet loss support, and equity issues within veterinary and shelter medicine. As a Wellbeing Coach and Certified Compassion Fatigue Specialist, Angie provides trauma-informed support and coaching to help animal-care providers foster self and community connection so they can reconnect to themselves and their work in new and improved ways. In addition to operating her private practice, she teaches at Seneca College and is actively involved in relevant veterinary medicine initiatives with organizations including BLEND Vet, NVA Canada, the Toronto Zoo, and veterinary hospitals across Ontario, Canada.
Session Description: Perhaps you’ve heard the statement, “No is a complete sentence” when it comes to establishing boundaries with others? While well-intentioned, this approach is not enough. This session will explore self-regulation as a fundamental component to establishing more meaningful and long-lasting relational boundaries. More specifically, we will explore introductory approaches to nervous system regulation as it relates to fight, flight, freeze and fawning responses in context of boundaries. By doing so, participants will leave the session with a deeper appreciation of the need to connect inwards before we choose how we relate to others.
Stephanie Johnson, LCSW
Identifying and Responding to Individual and Workplace Needs
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Stephanie is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has been with the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine for the last 31 years in the capacity of Counselor in the Office of Admissions and Student Success and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Science. She provides coaching and counseling to the veterinary students of LSU as well as consults to staff, faculty and house officers. Stephanie also teaches professional skills including communication, wellness, ethics, and the human animal bond and facilitates small group learning within all four years of the LSU DVM curriculum.
Session Description: Veterinary medicine attracts those who exhibit a high level of compassion, empathy and drive to care for others, the most vulnerable. The very traits that make you dedicated can also make you vulnerable. Neglecting our own self-care places us at risk for engaging in ineffective/maladaptive coping strategies which can impair our ability to live up to our own personal and professional standards. Let’s explore our own self-care, stress identification and management and consider practical steps to create harmony in life and at work through examples of stress management/self-care activities.
Course Information
- Date: On Demand
- Location: Virtual
- Audience: ACVIM Diplomates and Candidates, ECVIM Diplomates and Candidates, Affiliate Diplomates and Candidates, Veterinarians, Veterinary Technicians, Veterinary Assistants, Students and Allied Professionals
- Specialty: Multispecialty