Narrative Therapy: The Re-Storying of Lives and Relationships
Course Description
Clients typically arrive for therapy with a story or an account of their lives that is “problem saturated”. Referred to as the “totalizing” of experience, clients are only able to focus on the disturbing or painful aspects of their life circumstances to the exclusion of everything else. The primary focus of the Narrative approach is to facilitate a client’s rediscovery of the intentions and actions in the life stories they bring to therapy that contradict their problem saturated perceptions and descriptions, and to help them in re- storying their lives. The course will introduce participants to Narrative Therapy– situated within a constructivist/post-modern perspective––emphasizing meaning making as the principal way human beings create, respond and adapt to reality.
Practitioners will learn how to engage with clients in therapeutic conversations that help to unpack the unique outcomes and events embedded in a client’s experience and consciousness, but have been turned away from or forgotten over time. Narrative therapy offers a new lens to view the possibilities constructed and co-created in therapeutic conversations and ultimately in the client’s re-storied, lived experience.
Practitioners will learn how to engage with clients in therapeutic conversations that help to unpack the unique outcomes and events embedded in a client’s experience and consciousness, but have been turned away from or forgotten over time. Narrative therapy offers a new lens to view the possibilities constructed and co-created in therapeutic conversations and ultimately in the client’s re-storied, lived experience.
Course Objectives
- Describe and explain the Constructivist theoretical and conceptual framework central to the Narrative Therapy model
- To emphasize the importance of the clinician understanding their own clinical epistemology as a necessary precondition for conducting therapy
- Explain and discuss the antipathologizing position of the Narrative approach to psychotherapy
- Describe, demonstrate and practice the narrative approach of inviting clients to begin the process of co-exploration of talents and abilities that are hidden or veiled by problem saturated life narratives
- Describe, demonstrate and practice the Narrative methodologies of Deconstructing the Problem, Mapping Influences and Externalizing Conversations that lead to the rediscovery of exceptions, unique outcomes, re-descriptions and re-authoring
- Provide trainees with the opportunity to participate in experiential exercises that help give a hands-on understanding of the Narrative clinical methodologies
- Demonstrate the clinical utility and efficacy of the reflecting team
Course Outcomes
- Participants will be able to:
- Describe their own personal clinical epistemology and its implications for conducting psychotherapy mindfully
- Describe and explain the principal core constructivist (meaning making) foundations in the Narrative Therapy model
- Execute confidently and competently the rudimentary skills of Narrative constructive
questioning, mapping influences, externalizing conversations, facilitating re-storying by identifying unique outcomes and promoting re-descriptions
Workshop Dates
Workshop Dates
To Be Announced
Registration
As class dates are finalized, registration information will be made available.