What Is Narrative Therapy?
Instructors: Suzanne Gazzolo, PhD, LCPC, and Matthew Mooney, LICSW
Date: Thursday, April 25, 2019; 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Location: Cummings Center Community Conference Room, Beverly, MA

This one-day training is for people who have heard about narrative therapy but have never been formally introduced to its radically collaborative, respectful, and social justice ways of understanding people and problems. Sometimes people mistakenly think narrative therapy is simply about listening to people tell their stories. This is partly true, but there is much more.

Narrative therapy helps people grow a new sense of personal power, choice, and action with the problems in their lives and relationships. Importantly, it also addresses the political nature of problems. Specifically, narrative therapy raises questions about whether problems should be understood as a mental health issue or as an effect of power relations and social injustice.

In this workshop, the basic assumptions and ideas that distinguish the Narrative Worldview from the culturally dominant Normative Worldview will be introduced. The exciting implications and effectiveness of working from a narrative perspective will be illustrated in real examples from clinical work. The intention of this workshop is to offer participants an initial taste of narrative therapy and its implication for ourselves as people committed to helping people who are hurting. Based on this taste, participants can then assess whether they would like to pursue further narrative training, including the two-day "Narrative Therapy in Practice" course that we offer. (Click here to learn about and register for the April 26 & 27 offering of this course. You can save $25 by registering for both the April 25 "What Is Narrative Therapy?" workshop and the April 26 & 27 "Narrative Therapy in Practice" course.)

In this workshop, participants will learn:

• Critical distinctions between Narrative and Normative Worldviews
• The purpose of Rich Story Development
• The social justice practice of externalizing problems

Fees:

• Early Bird Registration, by April 1 -- $105; $75 for students
  
• Regular Registration, after April 1 -- $125; $75 for students