Family law and court-involved mental healthg professionals carry around a head full of conflict. We all routinely absorb the emotional intensity of families in crisis — anger, fear, trauma, grief, blame, urgency, and uncertainty. Over time, that pressure builds. If we ignore it, it can affect our judgment, our health, our relationships, our professionalism, and the very families we are trying to help. In this important and timely presentation, our distinguished guest speaker. Dr. Benjamin D. Garber, Ph.D., will invite participants to think about their own emotional experience using the metaphor of a professional “balloon.” How full is your balloon? What happens to your thinking, flexibility, empathy, and decision-making as emotional pressure increases? And what can family court professionals do to release pressure in healthy, intentional ways before it spills over into our work, our colleagues, our clients, or our homes? Drawing from research on self-care, burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, judicial stress, and professional resilience, Dr. Garber will explore how escalating emotion can make professionals more rigid, more vulnerable to confirmation bias, more defensive, and more prone to mistakes. He will also offer practical tools for “letting the air out,” including breathing, imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, labeling and externalizing emotion, stepping away, ownership, gratitude, compartmentalization, and the use of structure, boundaries, limits, roles, and routines to reduce anxiety and restore agency. This session is not a fluffy reminder to “practice self-care.” It is a practical and research-informed conversation about professional survival, clear thinking, and modeling healthy emotional regulation for the families we serve. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how their own emotional state affects their work, why resilience matters, and how managing our own “balloon” can improve both professional well-being and child-focused family court practice. Self-care “Balloon” PPT: https://ln5.sync.com/dl/a23436b20/6bpuscst-8rr54xed-wvcpgx6g-cmmw2diu