People arrive ready, with a story already started, and they do not disappear when therapy ends.

Treating the Whole Person — How the Catholic Christian Meta-Model Transforms Clinical Care

Clinical training gives you partial lenses: one for the inner life, another for behavior, the family, the brain. Each is true, but none is the whole person.

The Dignity Beneath the Diagnosis: Understanding Clients Through the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person

Every counselor carries a picture of the human person into the room, whether they name it or not. In one hour, this faith-integrated course helps you make it explicit and whole — so you can see a client’s dignity beneath the diagnosis.

Seeing the Whole Person: The Eleven Premises of the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person

A clinician's framework for assessing the whole person, for clients of any faith.

Most assessment models see one dimension of a person at a time. The Catholic Christian Meta-Model sees the whole. In this lesson, Drs. Craig Titus and William Nordling introduce the model's eleven premises and develop the first two: that the person is a body-and-soul unity, and that the person is fulfilled through vocation. Using a real family case, they show how these premises reshape assessment for clients of any faith.

Two Diagnoses, One Person: Treating Co-occurring Disorders

Two diagnoses. One person. One hour.

Most clients don’t arrive with one clean diagnosis. Dr. Kathie Erwin, a licensed counselor who has practiced and taught for nearly twenty years, walks you through what actually happens when two diagnoses live in one person: how to use the DSM-5 to aim, why trauma and culture and a client’s spiritual strengths belong in the plan from day one, and how a whole-person approach turns five separate problem lists into one coherent plan.

When the Spiritual Looks Clinical: Assessing Extraordinary Religious Experience

A client tells you something outside them has taken hold. The language is religious, the fear is real, and it fits no category you were trained to name. In this course a working exorcist shows how he answers that moment, and it starts the way any careful evaluation should: sit down, listen, and rule out mental illness before considering anything else. You will learn to reason from base rates, to honor a client’s spiritual worldview while running a rigorous differential, and to recognize the point where consulting clergy or referring is the competent move.

The Test Is Not an X-Ray: Reading the Person, Not Just the Profile

Give personality-assessment feedback that reads the person, not just the profile.

Reading the person, not just the profile — a Catholic-Christian approach to personality assessment feedback

Beneath the Symptom: A Catholic Christian Approach to Eating Disorders

The eating disorder is rarely on the intake form — and it’s often the most dangerous thing in the room. Learn to see it.

Eating disorders are more common than counselors think and easy to miss. Dr. Fredericka Vyvlecka teaches you to recognize anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, read the red flags, and assess the whole person behind the symptom. Grounded in DMU’s Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person.

More Than the Wound: A Catholic Christian Approach to Treating Trauma

Trauma does real damage. It does not get the last word. In this one-hour lesson, Divine Mercy University faculty apply the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person to trauma care — showing how to treat the wound without reducing the person to it.

What Your Child Isn't Saying: Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course

Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course

Ian Masson, LPC, NCC, RPT, Director of the IPS Center at Divine Mercy University, presents clinical warning signs of childhood anxiety across developmental stages — including bullying, digital safety risks, and the role of family relationship and faith community as protective factors.

Goals That Move the Group: Setting Direction Across Group Therapy Models

How direction actually emerges in process and psychoeducational groups.

Goals matter in every group, but they are not set the same way in every group. In this conversation, Prof. Gabriel Dy-Liacco shows Dr. Harvey Payne how direction emerges in a psychodynamic process group — through honest expression, linking, and shared themes — and how that differs from the direct goal-setting of a psychoeducational group. You will leave able to read a group’s design and set direction accordingly.

Your Personal Journey Matters: The Formed Self as an Instrument of Healing in Group Therapy

You were taught to keep your own story out of the room. Dr. Scrofani spent fifty years proving the opposite. In this one-hour course, he traces his path from a Little Italy tenement to a career of more than 120 therapy groups, and shows why he came to believe that the curative factors of group therapy are, at heart, the classical virtues. Grounded in Divine Mercy University's Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, you will see how your own history, character, and faith are not the background to your clinical work but the instrument of it.

The Whole Person in the Group — Facilitation Through the Catholic Christian Meta-Model

What changes in a group when you see the whole person.

A group is more than a room where people work on their problems. In this panel, Dr. Harvey Payne, William Nordling, Gabriel Dy-Liacco, and Su Li Lee show how the Catholic Christian Meta-Model reframes group work as the formation of the whole person — through vocation, virtue, self-giving, and shared suffering — and what it asks of the leader who bears the group’s burden.

Guarding the Gift: Pornography, Gender Differences, and the Restoration of Marital Intimacy

A Catholic Clinical and Pastoral Perspective

What drives pornography use — really? This 1-hour NBCC CE course brings together clinical psychologists and spiritual directors to examine the emotional and relational roots of pornography use, with close attention to how those roots look different in men and women. Grounded in Catholic anthropology and current clinical practice, Guarding the Gift gives counselors and pastoral ministers a framework for accompanying individuals and couples with compassion, precision, and hope.

Beautiful and Holy — Preparing Couples for the Wedding Night

Accompanying the Body, Heart, and Soul Toward Self-Giving Love

Help couples prepare for a wedding night — and a whole married life — that is genuinely beautiful and holy, without freezing when the intimate questions come.

Guarding the Gift: Pornography, Gender Differences, and the Restoration of Marital Intimacy

What drives pornography use — really? This course brings together clinical psychologists and spiritual directors to examine the emotional and relational roots.

What Your Child Isn't Saying: Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course

Clinical Indicators of Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — through a Catholic anthropological lens

The Elephant in the Living Room — Counseling the Multigenerational Family

When adult children and aging parents share a home, family roles can become strained. Dr. Kathie Erwin shows how to address unspoken tensions, renegotiate roles, protect the couple’s bond, and honor older adults through Divine Mercy University’s whole-person psychology and Christian principles.

When Children Grieve: Helping Kids and Families Through the Death of a Loved One

Whether you sit with grieving families professionally or you are simply the adult a child turns to, this course gives you what to say and what to do.

When someone dies, children take in far more than the adults around them realize, and they grieve in ways that look nothing like adult grief.

More Than a Mirror: Accompanying Women Beyond Body Image

A Catholic-Christian, whole-person framework for clinicians and pastoral caregivers — with Divine Mercy University faculty.

A Divine Mercy University faculty roundtable on why body image presses so differently on women — and how the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person helps you treat the whole person, not the symptom.

Made Male and Female: Gender, Development, and the Catholic Vision of Human Wholeness

A one-hour continuing education course in Human Growth and Development. Drawing on the IPS Anthropology Project, the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP), and the developmental research of scholars including Paul Vitz, this course explores the distinction between biological sex and the development of gendered personality, the role of peer belonging and family structure in sexual identity formation, and a pastoral and clinical framework for accompanying individuals presenting questions of sexual identity.

Male and Female, Body and Soul: The Science of Sex Differences for Clinicians

What the body knows about men and women

Sex differences are real, measurable, and clinically relevant. Explore the biology, brain, and complementarity of man and woman through a Catholic view of the whole person, and learn to accompany clients with science, clarity, and respect.

Free to Become: How Our Choices Shape the Soul

Every choice is quietly building someone. This course helps you meet them.

For Catholic adults who sense that their daily choices matter but have never been shown exactly how, Free to Become turns St. Thomas Aquinas' account of the moral and spiritual life into one clear, personal hour. Unlike a rules-and-sins approach to morality, it explains the inner mechanics of a free act and the growth those acts produce, and it does so with enough rigor that counselors and pastoral workers can earn continuing education from the same material.

When Good Intentions Aren’t Enough: The Three Sources of Morality for Helping Professionals

This one-lesson course provides a Catholic framework to distinguish moral acts from well-intended mistakes using three sources: object, intention, and circumstances. Grounded in Veritatis Splendor and Aquinas, it helps professionals judge actions clearly while honoring human dignity.

Free to Become: How Our Choices Shape the Soul

Guided by St. Thomas Aquinas, learn to tell the object of an act from its intention and its circumstances, and the hard, freeing line between judging an action and judging a person.

The First Person You Lead: Self-Awareness, Servant Leadership, and the Use of Self in the Helping Professions

The best leaders are not the ones with the most impressive résumé. They are the ones who can see themselves clearly.

Failure Is Not an Option: Leadership, Decision-Making & Virtue Under Pressure

Leadership is what your character does when control runs out.

An asynchronous, six-lesson formation course that uses six scenes from the film Apollo 13 (1995) — set beside the real April 1970 mission — as a case study in how good decisions get made and good character is revealed when everything is on the line.

More Than Qualified: Women in Leadership through the Lens of Catholic Psychology

Have you ever been invited into a leadership role and wondered: Why me? I'm not qualified for this. You are not alone — and you are almost certainly wrong. In this 15-minute interview-based lesson, Dr. Tammy Tenaglia, Ph.D., shares what she discovered when she joined a Catholic foundation board surrounded by corporate executives: her distinctiveness was the point. Her psychological expertise was exactly what the room needed. Drawing on Catholic anthropology, the science of impostor syndrome, and the spiritual practice of daily self-examination, this lesson equips Catholic women to step into leadership from a place of clarity, confidence, and conviction.