About Your Speaker

Jenny Ong has been working with families since she graduated with a Masters of Arts in Pastoral Counselling in 2008. In her earlier work with St. Andrew’s Lifestreams, she conducted micro skills training with participants from hospitals and social service sectors. She also offers marriage preparation programmes for couples and pastoral care modules for churches and ministry leaders. Jenny is also a certified facilitator for both The Virtues Project® and Signposts for Building Better Behaviour. Besides her counselling degree, she has also completed her Post Graduate Certificate in Therapeutic Play Skills with College of Allied Educators and is currently an Intermediate Theraplay Practitioner with The Theraplay Institute. Jenny now works in a crisis shelter for family violence and utilizes creative modalities in her work with both young and mature clients.

Course Overview

Interviewing and counselling are concerned with client stories. Those in the helping profession hear different stories — tales of depression and abuse, anger or grief, and sometimes even narratives of strength and courage. The interviewer’s task is therefore to listen carefully to the clients’ stories and learn how they think, feel, and act as they do. At times, simply listening carefully and empathically is enough to produce meaningful change. 

Listen, with intention, with love, with the “ear of the heart.” Listen not only cerebrally with the intellect, but with the whole of feelings, our emotions, imaginations, and ourselves. Esther de Waal

About Your Speakers

Ms. Yoges is an experienced clinician, supervisor and trainer in the area of trauma. She has 20 over years of social work experience. She graduated from Washington University (USA) in 2003 with Masters in Social Work and is currently a full-time PhD NUS research scholar student in the area of trauma-informed supervision. Prior to that, Yoges was Senior Principal Social Worker in Child Protective Services in Rehabilitation and Protection branch at the Ministry of Social and Family Development. From 2014 to 2016, Yoges was a principal social worker at Comcare and Social Support Division for the Strengthening Families Together Pilot which adopts a whole of government approach and aims to enable vulnerable families with complex needs access resources by addressing system barriers.

Her work in MSF, Ang Mo Ko Family Service Centres and Perth Distric Child protection in Western Australia has required her to be trained and skilled in trauma work with children, youth, adults and families. Yoges is also skilled in critical incident stress debrief and supervision and support for practitioners who work with trauma. Building on her foundational trainings in trauma work. Yoges now also integrates her learnings on trauma interventions from Babette Rothschild’s training and supervision seminars and conducts training or sharing on trauma relating to clients and professionals.

Ms. Ong Pei Ni has been practising social work for the past fifteen years and is currently a Principal Social Worker in a community-based social service agency. Currently, she provides individual and group clinical supervision for staff and conducts regular training and clinical competency building programmes.

Course Brief

This three-day intermediate training will revisit basic principles of trauma, goals of trauma therapy and ethical and safe trauma practices. Participants will learn to integrate the current literature, key theories and evidence-informed practice. Intervention modalities such as

• Trauma in a Therapeutic Age

• Stabilisation of Clients

• Containment of Trauma

• Complex Trauma

• Somatic Trauma Therapy

• Life Story Work

• Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

• Prevention of Vicarious Trauma

• Exploration of Post Traumatic Growth

• Expressive Therapies for Life

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

• Health and Resilience.

There will also be a workshop segment where cases will be discussed in-depth and skills application will be facilitated. Practitioners use of self is essential in trauma work as trauma work is about connection. The training will also focus on trauma-informed care, support and strategies for practitioners to prevent secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma. The training will conclude with an exploration of post-traumatic growth, health and resilience in the process of recovery and empowerment of the clients.

Pre-Requirements and Who Should Attend

One year of direct practice in the area of counselling, social work and psychology, with some knowledge and experience working with clients with trama such as: case workers, social service practitioners, social workers, counsellors, psychologists, residential care workers, hospital professionals, pastoral care personnel, church and religious counsellors, and crisis shelter workers.

If you are a part-time or full-time student currently studying counselling or psychology online or mainstream, you can register at a special price of $700! (Regular price: $350).

A Course Brief

Your Speaker

Joseph John is our leader through these sometimes uncharted waters. Armed with 40 years of counselling experience, he will share through case studies, role plays and honest sharing how to practise the art and skills of grief counselling.

Course Brief

Grief Therapy has become key in today’s world. With its relentless pace and rate of change, the world says, without emotion, “Hurry up, you gotta catch up, otherwise you’ll be left behind”. So we push ourselves along life’s highways always going faster. But we don’t know where we are going. And then we experience a slow down - a loss of someone close, a mother, an aunt or a brother or friend. It could also be the end of a relationship, or the parting of ways that foretells we have ended a phase in life and need to move on. And COVID-19 too. They all spell GRIEF - the absence of someone we love, the loss of job and predictability and then we bury it in ourselves. Handling grief is critical. We need to know how to handle it ourselves before we can help others as counsellors or therapists. What are some useful theories? How do we approach grief given that we will all experience it? What is there to learn? Am I open to change? Who should I turn to? Will I allow myself to feel the pain, or do I just numb it? 

DAY 1
• Theories of Grief Counselling
• Is the Goal to Always Get Over Grief?
• Stages of Grief
• How to Stabilise Someone Going Through Grief (Skill Sets)
• Practical Examples Discussed

DAY 2
• Recap Day 1
• Traditional (Grief to Be Overcome), Narrative (Grief to Be Lived Through), Spiritual (Grief Is a Gift) and Contemporary Approaches (Syncretic)
• Cultural Expressions of Grief
• Modern Expressions of Grief
• Different Settings (Family, Hospitals, etc.)
• Question and Answer Time

About Your Speaker

David Newman works in independent practice at Sydney Narrative Therapy, is an honorary clinical fellow at Melbourne University School of Social work and is a member of the Dulwich Centre teaching faculty. Recent teaching assignments have included Brazil, Nepal, Turkey, Hong Kong and Palestine. David has just finished up working part time in a psychiatric unit for young people. David is passionate about effective and respectful ways of working with people around mental health and suicidal experience. He is the author of “How we deal with ‘way out thoughts’: A living document of ways of talking with young people about suicidal thoughts” (2016, Dulwich Centre Publications) and co-author with Marnie Sather of “’Being More Than Just Your Final Act': Elevating the Multiple Storylines of Suicide with Narrative Practice" in the book Critical Suicidology (2015, UW Press) and of the resource “Holding our heads up: sharing stories not stigma when a loved one has suicided” (2016, Dulwich Centre Publications). It is possible to find out more about David’s work by watching this presentation: https://dulwichcentre.com.au/assisting-young-people-to-find-their-language-through-the-language-of-others-knowledge-from-an-inpatient-ward-by-david-newman/

Course Brief

Are you looking for hopeful, effective and respectful ways of working with those who have mental health problems? Have you wondered what Narrative Therapy might look like in a mental health setting or when working with those who have mental health problems? Then this workshop will offer clarity and inspiration for you.

The training will include a combination of lectures, discussions, the presentation of narrative therapeutic work, exercises and “live” demonstrations. There will be an emphasis on skills you can take away and immediately use in your work. The course will cover:

· Ways to externalize mental health problems
· How we can build on the ever present traces of people’s lives that sit outside of mental health problems
· Ways we can sensitively link those who have mental health problems in order to build connections and people’s stories
· Ways we can notice and elevate the skills and knowledge people with mental health concerns possess rather than introduce knowledge from outside their lives and context
· Using group work including collective creative methods such as collective poetry writing
· Finding ways for those with mental health problems to speak for themselves rather than be spoken about
· Finding ways to help people make sense of mental health distress rather than locate what is wrong with them

Learning Outcomes

· Creative ways to externalize mental health problems
· Ways to build on the stories of people’s lives that are outside of their mental health problems
· How to sensitively link those who are experiencing mental health problems
· Ways to uncover and document the skills and knowledge of people with mental health problems
· How to use the concept of the absent but implicit in making sense of mental health suffering
· Creative group work practices to use with those with mental health problems