About Your Speaker
Carolyn has worked for all of her professional life with children and young people. She is currently a coeducational school counsellor, practicing and implementing Narrative Therapy ideas and concepts with students and staff who seek her sensitive guidance. Her work is informed by a Narrative philosophy based on the teachings of Michael White and David Epston, developed in the early 1990’s at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide where she also resides. As an international speaker, she shares her passion for giving more space to young people and their views and opinions in a supportive and nurturing way, reflecting her deep commitment to child focused practice. Carolyn has consulted with young people and their families regarding: anti-bullying strategies, the effects of gender-specific violence, family violence, perfectionism and its tyranny, eating problems, drug and alcohol addiction, grief and loss and associated life transitions and change.
Course Brief
Level 2 Narrative Therapy (Part 2) course takes your existing knowledge of NT to a deeper level, providing a holistic framework reviewing theory, using transcripts, video and live stop-start interviews to give practical help. Topics to be covered include: extending externalizing conversations; extending re-authoring conversations from problem to preferred stories; delving deeper into the absent but implicit concept; responding to trauma; scaffolding conversations; stop-start interviews; and the use of outsider witness practices. Here are some highlights:
Externalizing Conversations: clients often come to therapy with assumptions that their problems are linked to their personalities or their identity. Through externalizing conversations and personifying the problem, clients begin to recognize that problems are separate from them, freeing them to see new options for living.
Re-Authoring Conversations: these conversations help individuals notice the “quiet” unnoticed stories of personal strength that are able to support a new perspective and identity separate from their old problem-saturated narratives. These preferred stories may be seen as unique outcomes or exceptions.
Absent but Implicit: there are always past experiences that are not spoken, yet shape the story being “foregrounded.” The absent but implicit indicates that each problem story holds an inverse and deducible story waiting to be nurtured. An example: a client shares unhappiness associated with lonliness implying an implicit desire for real connection and belonging.
There will also be practical helps in Carolyn’s sessions that will help the clinician scaffold conversations assisting individuals to move from the known and familiar towards what is possible to know and what is valued. Finally, there will be examples given using video, role play and the outsider witness technique, helping individuals to nurture a personal preferred story, and move towards a richer sense of a healthy identity within their community.