What is Motivational Interviewing?

Motivational Interviewing (MI) was brought into Singapore ten years ago from the US and builds especially on the Carl Rogers person-centred approach to therapy. It is excellent in cases of addiction, and as a transtheoretical model, useful for all client’s ambivalence towards change. It also helps individuals move away from unhelpful external motivations towards clarifying personal values, and building inner strength. Based on the ground breaking work of William Miller and Stephen Rollnick’s book, Motivational Interviewing, Helping People Change, this model approach has revolutionized counselling, asking carefully crafted questions within a collaborative conversational style, strengthening the client’s own problem-solving skills, motivation and commitment toward lasting, stable change.

DBT 3 Credentialing:

These two half-day collaborative sessions with Dr. Peter King are being arranged for those who are interested in further DBT credentialing. The first session will be conducted on 3 March 2020, with practicum requirements being met before the final half-day DBT3 session conducted on 31 August 2020. For additional information, contact SEL network staff.

What is Stabilisation Based Therapy?

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

About the Training

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

Family Violence Narrative Therapy

Like other Narrative Therapy courses offered, this course is undergirded by concepts from literary theory, social anthropology, and modern vs. traditional power and gender politic discourses. However, this particular workshop gives special attention to the sensitive work of addressing family violence within the particular context of Singapore. (This course also counts towards the Graduate Certificate in Narrative Therapy).

Local speaker Mr. Mohd Fareez brings his depth of knowledge of Narrative Therapy and experience and contextualizes it within Singapore’s mental health community, for focused application. Special topics to be covered include: definitional ceremonies, use of outsider witnesses, and re-authoring conversations – all for helping support client's recovery and reconnecting with their respective communities.

Hightlight: 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.

What is Compassion Focused Therapy?

CFT is an integrative psychology model that focuses on the cultivation and application of compassion for both self and others. CFT integrates cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques with developmental and social psychology and affective neuroscience. The approach was originally developed by Professor Paul Gilbert for clients with high-levels of self-criticism and shame and has a growing evidence base for a variety of clinical disorders and presentations. Practicing compassion has been shown to have powerful effects on physiological, psychological and social processes, specifically in the regulation of threat-focused emotion.

Note: DBT 1 focuses on the rudiments and model. DBT 2 concentrates on individual counselling . Both are indispensable. Watch DBT in Singapore - it will fast become the preferred therapy of choice.

DBT 1 focuses on the rudiments and model. DBT 2 concentrates on individual counselling . Both are indispensable. Watch DBT in Singapore - it will fast become the preferred therapy of choice.