This week I hit the magic number of 3000. The 3K hours needed to sit for the MFT licensing exam. So now I start the process of studying for the exam. I hope to be licensed by the end of the year. This part of the journey is nearing an end. It was a long road with lot of highs, and a few lows.
Now I'm in Toronto for a week with plenty of time to think about the future.
I'm ready.
Last night I returned home from the American Family Therapy Conference which was held in San Francisco this year. I was hoping to daily blog this conference as well but this being my 2nd conference in two weeks, I just didn't have the energy at the end of the day. Sorry! Anyway, I wanted to provide a summary of the conference and point out some of the peak moments for me.
Once again AFTA really did a nice job of putting on a conference focused on cutting edge practices in family therapy while maintaining a focus on social justice. This was a special conference for me because I had the opportunity to present with Anne Arnold and in the process show video of my work with families. It was a wonderful experience. After it was done Anne and I had a chance to peak at the evaluations and they were amazing. Success! Other highlights from the conference included having an opportunity to meet and spend time in conversation with a couple of stalwarts of the San Diego narrative community Jan Ewing and Gerald Monk from SDSU. Another highlight was being asked about my interest in teaching a class in a very important MFT program here locally. Keep your fingers crossed please, hopefully I'll have more to talk about at a later date. I also caught many great brief presentations and great keynotes. The one keynote that particularly stood out was Positive Deviance, Social Complexity, and Generative Relationships by presenter Arvind Singhal. I look forward to doing it all again in Chicago next year and continuing the relationships that started in San Francisco. Here's some photos from the presentation we did. Enjoy:
Hello Friends! Here's a great opportunity to train in Narrative Re-membering Practices with Lorraine Hedtke in September. More info will be coming and I will share as I get it.
Therapists come and go, but family and friends more often stick around for a lifetime. - Pru (a veteran consumer of human services)
Hello again! Day 3 of the Therapeutic Conversations conference in Vancouver and it once again it did not disappoint. This morning I had the opportunity to catch the exceptional workshop facilitated by Peggy Sax (pictured Bryna Andressen, Charley Lang, Peggy Sax) titled Neighborly Ways of Being: Building Communities, Linking Lives. Peggy Sax, through the use of video interviews and co-research, showed how the narrative practitioner can work to identify practices that strengthen naturally occurring communities of support using the rhizome metaphor as a guide for curiosity and surprise. Sax's workshop challenged common assumptions about working in individualized ways and how intentional therapeutic communal practices can strengthen social connectedness in ways that do not center the therapist. Sax showed how these communal practices can provide a wide range of non-prescriptive options for connectedness. It was a powerful workshop that gave me much to think about as I blew off the rest of the day to walk around Vancouver and see some art. Tonight is my last night in Vancouver. It has once again been a wonderful respite and opportunity to see what my narrative family has been working on. Goodbye Vancouver, I leave you with a song in my heart..
Hello again! It was another wonderful day of learning Vancouver. The weather here was beautiful today so it was hard staying indoors, but fortunately for me all the workshops I attended made the lack of sunshine OK. The day started with a First Nation Welcome ceremony that included a song by the appropriately named band "The Externalizer's." Following that Stephen Madigan welcomed everybody to the conference and then gave the morning keynote. Madigan's keynote set the tone for the conference by declaring narrative therapy as a counter to longstanding therapeutic traditions of the privatized problemed self, doing this via an anti-individualist, relational stance. Madigan's keynote was an argument against de-politicized therapy. He also pointed out how quite realistically that anybody with little graduate studies can make claims of knowing on other bodies, and also name others pathologies. Powerful stuff. Madigan in a bit of humor went on to advance the idea that we should actually call ourselves Licensed Declassification Professionals.
Following the morning keynote I attended the workshop titled Insider, Outsider and the Generative Space in Between facilitated by Allison Rice and Dennis Dion (pictured with me in the middle). This was by far my favorite workshop. Allison and Dennis collaborated together for several years at the Peak House where they worked with youth and families struggling with the problem of substance misuse. Allison and Dennis did a wonderful job bringing forth their deep interrogation of the problem of addiction and its tactics and how an understanding of other theoretical frameworks (harm reduction, 12 step, etc.) help bring about a fluidity that resists binary ways of seeing problems or solutions. I understood both Allison and Dennis to have a poststructuralist and realistic understanding of substance misuse. I found them quite creative in the use of queer theory in their idea that it would be un-queer to attach a tag to someone that they don't prefer, but also that it would be un-queer to remove a tag that the person would prefer. I also found them to be quite pragmatic when they asserted that deconstructing modernist approaches to the problem in early abstinence could be quite dangerous. A bold position in this crowd for sure, but in my experience as an insider, their understanding resonated with me quite powerfully. Allison and Dennis' workshop really was an opportunity to see how a social constructionist/narrative lens really contributes meaningfully to those seeking our help.
In the afternoon I had the opportunity to catch the workshop where John Winslade did another outstanding job of making the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze more user friendly. There was much helpful discussion added by the presence of Tom Strong, Joel Shapiro, and Jonny Morris who were all equally adept at making some dense material more understandable. Kudos!
The day ended with the afternoon keynote by Sheila McNamee who is the Vice President of the Taos Institute. McNamee's keynote was titled Pushing the Relational Edge: Constructing Narrative Practice and her project seemed to be one of promoting a promiscuous stance (mixing it up) as opposed to one of practice purity. I'm not sure how this talk went over with the narrative faithful, but it did have me thinking about the morning workshop where both Rice and Dion showed a real practice that was less worried about "getting it right" and more concerned about points of connection, effectiveness, and protecting the people who sought their help from getting caught in the middle of theoretical battles. Lots to think about today. So while I'm considering all that happened today, enjoy another Vancouver sunset:
Hello from beautiful Vancouver. I just wrapped up the daylong workshop with Bill Madsen titled Collaborative Helping: A Simple Map to Transform Relational Positioning. I first became a fan of Bill Madsen's work when I was introduced to his outstanding book Collaborative Therapy With Multi-Stressed Families in grad school. It was one of the few books from grad school that I re-visit again and again.
In today's workshop Madsen attempted to introduce us all to what he called disciplined improvisation through the use of a collaborative helping map he developed in an effort to operationalize family-centered values and principles to the often messy work of family therapy. His MAP or line of inquiry consisted of four parts (simplified considerably for this blog post):
Organizing Vision: Where do you want to be headed in your life?
Obstacles: What gets in the way? Supports: What supports you?
Plan: What needs to happen?
Madsen believes that through this MAP our relational stance, or how we are with people, will be transformed to a more collaborative approach. Our conceptual maps, or how we think of people and problems will shift, and our helping practices or what we do with people will be more ethical.
Anybody familiar with appreciative inquiry would find much to appreciate in Madsen's approach. Borrowing from the four D's of AI Madsen in his MAP rearranges the AI Dream phase to Vision and the AI Design phase to Plan. However, unlike appreciative inquiry's strength based focus, Madsen holds on to his poststructuralist cred by shifting the language of strengths and needs to one of supports and obstacles. All in an effort to move from the internal view of strengths as characteristics, to a more intentional view of strengths as skills of living, intentions, purposes, values, and hopes and dreams. It is in this shift that Madsen believes more interesting conversations can happen.
I was quite happy that I had the opportunity to spend the day learning from Bill Madsen. His presentation gave me much to think about. It was interesting to see how someone is integrating the principles of appreciative inquiry into narrative practice and how that may look. The conference is off to a great start for me, and I'm really looking forward to the rest of the week. More later, but until then enjoy this Vancouver sunset I caught last night.
Hello! I've found myself back in Vancouver for the 10th running of the Therapeutic Conversations Conference hosted by Stephen Madigan and the Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy. This years line-up looks to be pretty awesome and it is my intention to actually blog the conference. I will do my best to give daily updates of what the day held for me, and throw up a pic or two of the activities, and maybe even an interview or two of some of the narratively inclined folk in attendence. So please come back and enjoy the sights and sounds of beautiful Vancouver, BC.
Today I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Susan Petrella at Creative Orange County about my past OC art experience, my gallery The Office, the OC Art Blog, the Hoff Foundation, and some hopes for the future. Please take a listen if you have some time. The interview can be found HERE.
Attn: Therapist/Counselor friends!
On Friday, April 27 from 10:00am to 1:00pm the The Long Beach - South Bay chapter of the California Association of Marriage & Family Therapists (LB-SB CAMFT), in collaboration with the Orange County American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (OC AAMFT), and the Los Angeles chapter of CAMFT (LA CAMFT), invites you to their Fifth Annual MFT Job and Internship Fair. This job fair will be held at the Carson Civic Center located at 801 E. Carson Street, Carson, CA. The cost to attend is $10 and breakfast is included. For more info head on over to: www.lbsb-camft.org.
So for those that don't know I'm responsible for another blog that gets much more traffic then this site. I started the OC Art Blog back in 2004 when I had my little gallery as a way of promoting the art space and the OC art scene. Over the past several years it had gained quite a following but then I went to grad school and it lost a bit of its MoJo. Well over the last several months I decided to get the blog back to its former glory. Luckily for me I have found several local writers/artists to help make it happen. This Saturday we are having a little relaunch party and art show that will feature the work of our writers Suzanne Walsh, Sarah Walsh and Joy Shannon (pics in order). Please come out support your local art scene and say hello. Details Below:
OC ART BLOG RE-LAUNCH PARTY AT THE SANTA ANA ART WALK SATURDAY APRIL 7TH
Location: The Backroom at Memphis at the Santora
7pm-10pm
The OCArtBlog is hosting a re-launch party for it’s website in the back room of Memphis at the Santora on Saturday April 7th from 7-10PM during the Santa Ana Art Walk. The OC Art Blog is dedicated to the Orange County art community and has re-launched with a new format, new features and new writers. Enjoy drinks, appetizers, art by Suzanne Walsh, Sarah Walsh, and Joy Shannon all while learning more about the new OC Art Blog.
The OC Art Blog was started in 2004 to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene and features artist profiles, exhibits, events/openings and music reviews. The OC Art Blog is committed to increasing awareness of the at scene in Orange County by supporting artists, galleries, museums, curators, professors, and anyone contributing to the art scene.
Come socialize with other artists and discuss your ideas, interests and art with the OC Art Blog writers and help increase the influence and impact of the blog to better promote, support and serve the arts in Orange County
For more information contact Chris Hoff: narrativechris(@)gmail.com 714-767-5861 or visit www.ocartblog.com
Recent Comments