Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 25 May 2023
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Stories are not just entertainment or make believe. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Human beings are story-makers. To live is to enact a role within a story. As the psychiatrist, Oliver Sacks writes:
‘Each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and this narrative is…constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us, through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations.’
This workshop considers a client’s entry into therapy as a breakdown of story-making. How, when stories become fixed and repetitive, unable to incorporate unforeseen events, psychological suffering arises. Caught between holding on to out-of-date stories while simultaneouosly fearful of embracing the new, clients find themselves in a time-between-stories.
The workshop explores how we can work within this between-time to help clients let go of old stories and allow new ones to emerge. The emphasis will be upon how to cultivate, for both client and therapist, an imaginative capacity which allows the story-making process already happening in the client’s life to be noticed, validated and enhanced. To do so will involve suspending or bracketing the temptations of a rational-interpretative approach and learning instead a practical and experiential skill set for working with stories as living imagery.
What we shall discover is that far from an empty void, letting go of expired stories can reveal a fertile ground of new meaning, inspiration and fresh involvement.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- How to have a broad understanding of story as an act of imagination present in all feeling, thinking, perception and action.
- How to cultivate the imaginative capacity to notice and participate in an ongoing story-making process.
- How to explore the lessons of an expired story and the fears of trying out a new story in everyday life.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Psychotherapists, Counsellors and Coaches; Art, Drama and Family Constellations therapists; Eco-therapists and anyone interested in an image-centric approach to ecopsychology
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Discover greater confidence, creativity and freedom in working with narrative and story.