What is Narrative Therapy?

Based on the work of Michael White and David Epston, Narrative Therapy involves ways of understanding the stories of people’s lives and the ways of re-authoring their stories collaboratively between the therapist and the people whose lives are being discussed.

Sessions Key Concepts

• Externalization of the Problem: Where Person is Not the Problem, the Problem is the Problem • Re-authoring Identity • Working with Maps of Narrative Practices:  Landscape of Action & Landscape of Identity • Re-membering: Developing the Idea that Identity is Shaped by Social Connections and the ‘Club of Life’ • Use of Case Studies and Other Practical Examples • Outsider Witnesses • Definitional Ceremonies • Personal Agency • Gender Issues • Addressing Trauma with Narrative Therapy • Absent and Implicit: Enquiring Into Stories of Self Beyond the Problem Saturated Story

Course Introduction and Outline

These are dark days. An end to predictability of food and supply chains and events we take as normal - is this the demise of our Singaporean way of life? These are precursors to a “new normal” including new economic realities and social norms. But what about me? The single? The career person? The newly married? What about my job?  Who’s paying the mortgage? These are multiple everyday leaks. Panic, worry, and feeling isolated are natural. How do I deal with it? Join SEL as Ian, Charlie, and Andrew explore:

Worry Escalation- How Panic & Worry Set In
• The Worry Monster Strikes
• What Worry Does to Me
• Why Won’t the Worry Monster Go Away?
• Small Group Discussion Exercise

How to Respond in a Balanced Way
• Poise and the Art of Living - Children as an Example
• Engage with Nature - Innate Desire to Get in Touch with Our Roots
• Physically Apart But Connecting Hearts & Spirits

Feelings of Isolation that Develop
• John Donne’s Meditation 17 Introduction
• Nurturing Mental Health in the New-Normal of Self and/or Family Isolation
• Keeping Self Isolation from Becoming Emotional Isolation - Keeping Communication Open & Healthy
• Reframing Isolation with Change Talk
• Small Group Discussion Exercise

Looking to the Future
• Paying Attention to EQ
• Developing Spirituality - Learning How to Discern Wisely - How You Start and End the Day
• Being Weak and Not a Weakling

Will I Recover and How Do I Get Back?
• The Need for Self Awareness
• Staying with the Feelings
• Navigating the Emotions
• Small Group Discussion Exercise

This is a unique 2-hour ZOOM presentation complete with notes and exercises so you can learn from the comfort of your own home. Register here on our website and we will send you an invitation link via email to the zoom meeting before 15 May.

Course Meeting Dates

This ZOOM course is comprised of two segments: Segment 1 (Day 1 meeting 25 June 2020) & Segment 2 (Days 2-3 meeting 15-16 October). Segment 1 of the course may be completed before deciding to join Segment 2 of the course in October.

A Course Brief

The stories people tell themselves and others about traumatic events do affect how they live their present and future lives. While the actual events and their effects can be helpfully explored, a narrative approach also seeks to bring forth and richly describe people’s responses to traumas. Often these responses have been, and still may be, of value to the person. Typically, these response stories are undeveloped or completely invisible.

In bringing together therapeutic skills that focus on story, body, affect and power, this workshop will give participants many practical methods and conversational approaches to assist people in moving beyond trauma. Keeping this in mind, we will consider four therapeutic dimensions:

Storied:

• Identify and name resistance to trauma events: thoughts, feelings or actions taken that reduced the negative effects at the time and/or later

• Assist people in telling unsaid stories: noticing details, asking helpful questions, and bringing forth a valued sense of self in spite of the effects of trauma

Embodied:

• Befriending bodied distress and becoming familiar with beneficial bodied sensations

Affect:

• Using mindfulness for strong adverse emotions and attending to and increasing desirable emotions

Power:

• Identifying and unpacking the social contexts and relations of power in traumatic incidents

We will also think about how we might bring these constructive responses to trauma, the actual incident/s, and the effects of trauma, into a fuller storied life.

This practical and interactive workshop will explore the importance of asking different kinds of questions while creating a felt-sense of compassion. Participants will be introduced to a variety of ways of working with people including some mindfulness and somatic awareness skills as complementary to narrative question-asking. Brief and extended examples from participant’s clinical work will also help illustrate narrative approaches.

Course Brief

1. How is a NEW BEGINNING a Mixed Blessing

2. Why We Must Go with the Enfolding Future of Work and Organisation

3. Why HOPE is Invincible and Infectious

4. Why HOPE Galvanises Our Aspirations

5. What is FLOURISHING and from the School of Positive Psychology - How Finding Flourishing Can Effect the Changeover Meaningfully

If you are a part-time or full-time student currently studying counselling or psychology online or mainstream, you can receive 50% off of the regular price of $900 ($450 Net)!

A Course Brief

Narrative Therapy was developed as an approach to counselling in response to the power relations influencing individual’s lives. One of the key concepts of narrative therapy is the dominant problem-saturated story of the person is challenged by externalizing the problem, and through therapy, helps facilitate the development of an alternative narrative. Within this process, a definitional ceremony involving outsider witnesses is used in influencing these narrative shifts. First the individual is given the opportunity to reappear and to retell their story in front of witnesses. Then, the witnesses are encouraged to retell parts of the story that moved them in a special way, reflecting how their own perspectives may have been challenged or changed after hearing the person share. These re-authoring conversations give hope to many, helping to make sense out of pain and loss, reconnecting individuals to themselves and to their community as a whole.