Carla Smith, PhD, LCSW, LMFT

Carla Smith, PhD, LCSW, LMFT, is the Chief Clinical Officer at Motivo, where she leads clinical quality, compliance, and the standards governing supervision and continuing education across the platform. She is licensed as a clinical social worker and as a marriage and family therapist in Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, all in good standing, and is the founder of Haven Therapy and Wellness. Before joining Motivo, Dr. Smith spent eight years at Mercer University School of Medicine as Assistant Program Director and Assistant Professor, overseeing clinical training for master's students in the Marriage and Family Therapy program. She holds a PhD in Human Development and Family Science with a specialization in Marriage and Family Therapy and an MSW in clinical social work, both from the University of Georgia. Her research and teaching center on clinical supervision, cultural humility, and therapist development.

Carla’s courses

Holding space: Supporting clients and ourselves through collective trauma

When a whole community is living under sustained threat, the clinician is often inside that community too, and the usual separation between the person holding the space and the people in it does not hold. This closing session of a three-part series brings the clinical model together into practice: collective trauma as a shared condition, somatic and grounding work for use in therapy and in supervision, and a durable plan for sustaining the work.

Jan 29, 2026 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

Essential DBT skills for suicidality: Tools for clinicians and supervisors, part I

Suicide is among the leading causes of death in the United States, occurring roughly once every eleven minutes, and 22 percent of high school students report having seriously considered it in the past year. Almost every clinician will hold this material. Far fewer have been trained in a model built for it. Day one of a two-part training covers the dialectical stance, the clinical distinctions within suicidality, the three states of mind, and the distress tolerance skills that carry a client through a crisis.

Dec 3, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

Supervision that supports: Getting more out of the supervision hour

Every supervision hour is doing three jobs at once, and only one of them arrives with deadlines attached. That is the one that takes the hour. This two-hour working session is about protecting the other two, with a session map that contains administrative content, a validate-reframe-build sequence for supervisees presenting burnout or avoidance, and de-escalation coaching built into the structure.

Aug 25, 2026 at 5:00 PM

2 CE credits

The greenest on the ground: What your supervisees need from the hour you have with them

Pre-licensed clinicians are routinely handed the highest-acuity cases on a team, often within weeks of finishing a master's program. This session looks at what those conditions do across a supervisee's first three years and at what a supervisor can change inside one existing hour: skill-mapping ahead of the endorsement decision, caseload triage at session start, protected developmental time, and a standing question about cultural dynamics.

Sep 16, 2026 at 8:00 PM

1 CE credit

What great clinical supervision looks like in practice: A CE panel discussion

Ask any clinician about the supervisor who shaped them and the answer is almost never a technique. It is a relationship that changed how they work. This panel gets specific about what produces that, covering psychological safety, feedback that lands, the balance of support and challenge, cultural humility inside the supervisory relationship, supervising within real constraints, and staying responsive across years of practice. Grounded in an analysis of 630+ associate recommendations read against current peer-reviewed research.

Jul 29, 2026 at 5:00 PM

1 CE credit

Essential DBT skills for suicidality: Tools for clinicians and supervisors, part II

Day one covered getting a client through the moment. Day two covers the work that makes the moment less frequent and the plan durable: emotion regulation through pros and cons and the ABC skills, interpersonal effectiveness through DEARMAN, behavioral chain analysis, and a collaborative safety plan that gets used between sessions. Includes a second worked case study.

Dec 4, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

Doing more with less: Supervision, documentation, and evidence-based care in rural high-acuity settings

Rural and frontier behavioral health runs on thin staffing, long referral distances, and caseload acuity that would trigger escalation somewhere better resourced. Clinical guidance written for urban systems tends to assume away the conditions that define the work. This session covers evidence-based care under real constraint, documentation of clinical complexity that survives payer review, and supervision as a protective factor for ethical decision-making.

Dec 18, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

Administrative vs. restorative clinical supervision

This course will provide helpful tips and dialogue about providing quality clinical supervision to providers in community-based settings. We will explore the differences between administrative and clinical supervision, with emphasis on ways supervisors and their supervisees can maximize supervision to meet the growing needs of clients within underserved communities.

On-demand

1.5 CE credits

What great clinical supervision looks like in practice: A CE discussion

Most clinicians can name the supervisor who shaped them, and the reason is almost always the relationship they built. In this live discussion, two experienced supervisors work through twelve qualities associates describe in their best supervisors, grouped into four areas: the relationship, clinical skill, growth, and reliability. The hour closes with four approaches that fit inside a supervision hour you already have, and with what strong supervision means for associate retention and the licensure pipeline.

On-demand

1 CE credit

Enhancing recruitment, retention, and outcomes through clinical supervision

The behavioral health workforce is projected to fall roughly 250,000 providers short of demand by 2030, and attrition concentrates in the first three years of practice. Supervision is the variable most within an organization's control. This session presents the evidence connecting supervision quality to client outcomes, clinician retention, and organizational cost, sets out four pillars of high-quality supervision drawn from the research, and covers what candidates are now asking about supervision at interview.

Dec 2, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1 CE credit

Recruitment, retention, and outcomes through clinical supervision

Retention in behavioral health turns on whether clinicians feel competent, supported, and valued beyond their productivity numbers, and supervision quality is the strongest single predictor of early-career retention. This session covers five evidence-based supervision techniques, outcome measurement as a core supervisory competency, and how to choose deliberately among internal, external, and hybrid supervision models.

Jan 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM

1 CE credit

Mapping the impact of separation: Trauma, culture, and clinical response

Family separation driven by detention and deportation is a sustained condition, and the threat on its own produces measurable harm. This session builds a working clinical model: the stress-safety cycle from environmental threat through attachment disruption to behavioral expression, how trauma presents differently in children, caregivers, and the family system, and the grounding and stabilization work that comes before anything else.

Dec 5, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

Sustaining provider wellbeing and advocacy in trauma-exposed communities

Clinicians serving communities under sustained threat carry a compound load: the client's traumatic material and the injustice producing it. This session separates four experiences that routinely get collapsed into burnout, covers six practices for building emotional capacity, and makes the case that collective care is what sustains this work over time. Includes a 30-minute experiential planning exercise.

Dec 19, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

What does great clinical supervision look like?

Competency frameworks describe what supervision should contain. They say much less about what supervisees experience as decisive, and the gap between the two is where a lot of supervisory effort goes without effect. This session presents 12 themes drawn from more than 630 written recommendations collected from behavioral health associates between 2022 and 2026, describing the supervisors who shaped their development, and translates each one into language you can use inside an existing supervision hour.

Jun 17, 2026 at 8:00 PM

1 CE credit

What Great Clinical Supervision Looks Like in Practice: A CE Panel Discussion

-

On-demand

1 CE credit

Healing in the wake of separation: Building trust and safety in clinical relationships

When a client's fear of institutions is historically accurate, engagement becomes a clinical problem before it is a treatment problem. This session works through safety across four domains and the sequencing that puts it ahead of intervention, covers the confidentiality rules specific to immigrant and mixed-status families, and applies culturally grounded adaptations of CBT, ACT, and EMDR. Includes a six-domain client safety planning framework.

Dec 12, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits

The human side of AI leadership: Perspectives on transforming behavioral health

This session was offered without continuing education credit. Artificial intelligence is moving through behavioral health faster than most organizations can evaluate it, and the exposure concentrates in the places that produce outcomes: the therapeutic relationship, clinical supervision, and the workforce holding both together. This panel covers what the technology demonstrably does, where human judgment cannot be substituted, and what clinical leaders should be asking of vendors and health systems before they adopt anything.

May 20, 2026 at 12:00 PM

0 CE credits

Holding steady in the storm: Clinicians and supervisors managing political unrest

Political and collective stress reaches the counseling room through the client and the clinician at the same time, and how regulated the clinician is shapes how safe the space feels. This session treats that as clinical and supervisory work. Participants distinguish vicarious trauma from compassion fatigue, apply a four-part resilience framework of awareness, connection, reflection, and recovery, and build a written personal sustainability protocol during a 45-minute experiential segment.

Oct 17, 2025 at 12:00 PM

1.5 CE credits