Workshop Presenters

Peggy Sax, PhD is in independent practice in Middlebury, Vermont, USA, as a licensed psychologist, consultant, workshop presenter and instructor. She has apprenticed herself to narrative therapy since the early 1990s. An enthusiastic teacher, Peggy feels privileged for opportunities to share powerful stories of learnings from over 30 years of work with families and their children, teens, adults, couples, communities and students of all ages. She is the author of the soon to be published book, Re-authoring Teaching: Creating a Collaboratory. Peggy deeply appreciates the honor of co-creating this tribute to Michael White - to share with others the gift of Michael's sparkling presence, and to continue to harvest teachings from his pioneering narrative practices.

Gaye Stockell, MA started her career as a psychologist working in community psychiatry in Sydney, Australia. Whilst there she was introduced to the work of Michael White and David Epston. They had most recently published Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) and Gaye, along with Marilyn O'Neill started to explore Narrative ideas and put the ideas into practice. Currently working in independent practice, Gaye has continued that exploration within many contexts and with lots of people. She is very appreciative of the impact that Narrative Therapy has had on both her professional and personal life.

Workshop Contributor

NOTE: David Epston regrets that he is unable to be at this workshop. However, he is an active participant in its co-construction and his stories are woven throughout.

David Epston, MA, CQSW, D. Litt., is codirector of the Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand and adjunct professor at the School of Community Studies, UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. In 1985, David Epston and Michael White were the innovators of narrative therapy. Epston's work has been received enthusiastically in the US, as well as Latin America, Canada, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. His publications include Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Experience, Contradiction, Narrative and Imagination and Playful Approaches to Serious Problems: Narrative Therapy with Children and Their Families, and Biting the Hand that Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia.

Summary of the Workshop

Peggy and Gaye have the honor of introducing, reviewing and celebrating Michael White's remarkable contribution to the world of therapy and community ideas. In addition to telling the stories of Michael's influence on our work, we will feature collaborations between Michael and David Epston, the co-founder of narrative therapy. Through viewing and listening to recorded interviews, reviewing transcripts, story-telling and actual practice, we will demonstrate reverberations from the spectrum of Michael's early work through his most recent ideas and practices.

Narrative explorations are like journeys with therapists as companions, guided by a range of maps. Throughout this workshop, we will highlight several narrative maps for guiding therapeutic conversations into new territories:

• Externalizing conversations
• Re-authoring conversations
• Outsider witness practices and definitional ceremonies and
• Re-membering conversations
  
  

These maps never specify the destination, nor determine the route taken. Instead, they orient the therapist to recognize possibilities in the hidden territory of people's lives.

By reviewing recording interviews and transcripts, we will demonstrate Michael White's skillful narrative interviewing - how he began by being with people, meeting them where they were, in the known and familiar, and then slowly with his questions he accompanied them into new territory, moving from pain toward possibilities, clarified values and actions. We will illustrate how these practices can awaken in people a sense of agency, to understand they could actively shape their own lives according to their commitments, values, and understandings of life.

The workshop will also review the ethics that guide narrative therapy. We will explore concepts and specific practices for therapy that honors social interdependency and diminished hierarchy, toward making therapy more participatory and linked with a community of support.

In particular, we will focus on:

• An ethic of collaboration that honors both professional knowledge and insider accounts of journeys of self-discovering in overcoming complex problems, aided and abetted by communities of support that include human service practitioners;
  
  
• An ethic of circulation and innovative public practices that narrative therapists use to incorporate audiences into the therapy process.

Our goal is to create a tribute that will be meaningful to many of us, and would have been to Michael. Throughout the workshop, Peggy, Gaye and David will explore the personal history of narrative ideas and practices in the contexts of therapy, community work, research and teaching. Through recordings, David Epston will tell stories about his collaborations with Michael over more than 25 years. Peggy and Gaye will reflect on the impact on their work, making visible how they carry Michael in their professional lives and their future work.

Course Goals and Objectives

• Describe the tradition of thought that shapes narrative practice.
• Define three significant implications of this tradition of thought for narrative practice.
• Identify the primary categories of inquiry of the definitional ceremony, re-authoring conversations, remembering conversations, and externalizing conversations maps for therapeutic practice.
• Summarize three specific applications of these maps, as illustrated in the workshop.
• Provide an account of the relevance of the notion of the "absent fut implicit" to therapeutic conversations.
• Describe the relevance of this notion to addressing pain and distress that is an outcome of trauma.
• Formulate three therapeutic questions that reflect an understanding of the relevance of the "scaffolding" of therapeutic conversations in one's own counseling practice.
• Differentiate the therapeutic orientations that foster a sense of personal agency from those that diminish a sense of personal agency.

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• Ellyn Bader, Ph.D. and Peter Pearson, Ph.D. "High Impact Couples Therapy: How to Sustain Systemic and Intrapsychic Change"
  
  Sunday, October 7th to Friday, October 12th, 2007
  (6 days, 5 nights - 16 CE credits approved)
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  Drs. Bader and Pearson Return to Italy...
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  Drs. Bader and Pearson are founders and directors of The Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California - http://www.couplesinstitute.com. From 1975 to 1986, Ellyn and Pete trained therapists in Italy and other parts of Europe, and now they are returning! This is a wonderful opportunity to obtain high quality couples therapy training while enjoying a visit in Italia!
  
  From 1975 to 1986, Drs. Bader and Pearson trained therapists in Italy and other parts of Europe, and now they are returning! This is a wonderful opportunity to obtain high quality couples therapy training while enjoying a visit in Italia!
  
  As therapists, workshop leaders, authors and speakers, Drs. Bader and Pearson are dedicated to helping couples create extraordinary relationships. They educate, enlighten and entertain while presenting innovative theory and techniques for improving relationships. Over the past 30 years they have trained therapists throughout the United States, Europe, South America and Australia in couples therapy. They have had multiple opportunities to practice what they preach, because they have been married to each other for 24 years and have worked together for 22 years.
  
  Drs. Bader and Pearson are the originators of The Developmental Model of Couples Therapy. Their first book, In Quest of the Mythical Mate: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy, was a recipient of the Clark Vincent Award for an outstanding literary contribution to he field of marital therapy from the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. Their most recent book, Tell Me No Lies, teaches couples to take charge of their relationship and to work together toward mutually defined goals and values. Drs. Bader and Pearson have been quoted in multiple national publications and have been featured on over 50 radio and television programs including The Today Show and CBS Early Morning News.
  
  Dr. Ellyn Bader served on the Clinical Faculty at Stanford University, Department of Psychiatry, for 8 years. She is the past President of the International Transactional Analysis Association. Dr. Peter Pearson served as an Associate Consulting Professor at Stanford University, School of Counseling Psychology, for 11 years. He has been conducting the very popular couples workshop, Coming From Your Heart, for 18 years.
  
  COURSE DESCRIPTION:
  
  Difficult couples challenge therapists with their aggressive interactions,demands for intimacy, chronic feelings of hurt and their high degree of sensitivity to confrontation. The main trap for therapists is getting caught in the bottomless well of negativity in which these struggling couples seem trapped.
  
  In this workshop, Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson will demonstrate how to use a developmental approach to start and, more importantly, sustain positive momentum with high-distress couples. They will illuminate a model based on four pillars of change:
  
  1) Helping the couple define a vision for their
  relationship that will stand as a vital reference point to maintain more positive collaboration throughout therapy;
  
  2) Targeting and resolving specific intrapsychic impasses;
  
  3) Changing the systemic process for discussing highly charged emotional issues; and
  
  4) Developing new targeted skills that support effective negotiation and decision-making.
  
  Ellyn and Peter will also describe and demonstrate how to effectively use six different types of confrontation to impact entrenched negative patterns. Participants will learn to take a stronger leadership role at the outset of treatment so that couples change faster with less conflict and more cooperation. Case transcripts, videotapes of actual therapy sessions and simulated role playing will all be used to demonstrate these principles. You will also learn innovative applications of recent brain neuroscience. These interventions are specifically designed for couples. The result is collaborative change that is more efficient and easier than conventional cognitive, behavioral and psychodynamic approaches.