Dharma Bum

Therapeutic Conversations X - Day #3

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..

Therapeutic Conversations X - Day #2

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:

Therapeutic Conversations X - Day #1

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.

Therapeutic Conversations X

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.

Scaffolding a Community of Competent Narrative Practitioners

Continuing the great free articles and Youtube videos from the Family Process Journal theme, I would now like to direct your attention to the article Scaffolding a Community of Competent Practitioners: Positioning and Agency in a Training Program for Narrative Counseling co-authored by Helen Gremillion, Aileen Cheshire, and Dorothea Lewis. This article explores the scaffolding of learning experiences in a postgraduate program in New Zealand that offers training in narrative counseling. In the article the authors examine relationships of power in classrooms, and explore ways to align poststructuralist counseling practices and the teaching of these practices. Please watch the video of Helen Gremillion describing her article then go spend some time with the article:

Foucault, Bertolt Brecht & Truth To Power

I like that title.

So hopefully I will be doing a little more posting around here now that I finished my first draft of a review I wrote of Foucault Beyond Foucault by Jeffrey Nealon for possible inclusion in a narrative therapy related journal. It was not a typical review, at least in my opinion. I included a piece on implications for practice where I hope to raise some considerations around taken for granted notions of justice-doing, and the continuing insistence of the scarcity of resistance. Now I wait to hear back from the editor, which I am finding is the hard part. This is the time when the insecurity around writing is the most intense. I hope it doesn't suck... Fun!

Continuing the power theme, yesterday Michele and I visited UCI's Experimental Media Performance Lab to catch the wonderful production of Galileo In America by Robert Allen & Antoinetter LaFarge. Galileo In America is part examination of the mythologizing of history for political ends, part German cabaret, but mostly addresses; under what conditions does anyone speak truth to power, or who gets to speak at all?

As I sat in this performance struggling with insecurity around  my recent writing project, and my insistence that resistance is everywhere. It was the character of Virginia, Galileo's daughter (but also representing Brecht's little known female collaborators who co-wrote many of his plays) that said it best at the end of the performance while calling out Brecht, when she insisted "even the furniture has a story." I couldn't have said it better myself. The show runs for another weekend. Go.

Self..

I am fond of how philosopher Daniel Dennett deals with this problem of perceived, but illusionary selves. He attributes these philosophical problems to the fact that often we think in all-or-nothing terms. Either the self exists or it doesn’t. Dennett thinks that this line of thought leads to the conceptual pitfalls and muddles that arise in thought experiments such as the teleportation case. Under Dennetts view, the self is best viewed as a “center of narrative gravity”. Essentially, we build up a series of micro-stories about ourselves and our place in the world and this autobiographical conglomeration gives rise to the illusion of a central self simply due to the fact that all these stories happen to a single body. However, this “bundle view” of the self has important philosophical ramifications simply because it calls into question ideas concerning responsibility and agency. As Dennett phrases it, “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them;they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source”. - Ministry of Truth

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The class struggle still exists; it exists more intensely. - Michel Foucault

These days there's nothing more common than money. -- Yet sometimes it seems that the very ubiquity of money robs economics of any intrinsic interest as a topic for cultural discussion: there's more and there's less, what else is there to say? -- I think the main reason that most people, most humanities academics especially, don't want to talk about economics is not because it's a political hot potato, because it's so controversial, but precisely because of this commonality or banality. The very all encompassing presence of money seems to solicit just as predictable modes of response: celebration, denunciation, or some hand-wringing combination of the two. - Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault

Narrative & Pizza

This Friday John Winslade will be hosting another Narrative & Pizza on the campus of CSUSB. This friday's topic will be Narrative Practice & Sexual Violation facilitated Dr. Lorraine Hedtke. Sexual violation includes, rape, molestation, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment. This seminar will offer ways for counselors and other professionals to respond to these issues that is ethical, non-pathologizing, and respectful. The seminar will start at 6pm and is located in the College of Education Building, California State University San Bernardino, Room CE 120 (The Institute for Research, Assessment & Professional Development). Anne and I will be going so we hope to see you!

 

Supershrinks - Outcome Measures and Narrative Therapy

Training clinicians in 'evidence-based,' manualized therapies, diagnosis, and even the alliance has little if any impact on outcome - Scott Miller

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending the day-long workshop, Supershrinks presented by Scott Miller, the founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence. Scott's presentation basically covered several themes, what works in therapy, how clinical excellence is achieved, creating a culture of feedback from clients, and what deliberate practice looks like. All of which nicely book-ended some of what I heard at David Epston's and Stephen Madigan's recent workshop. They had additional ideas about excellence, apprenticeship, practice, reflection, and more practice before and after sessions.

As the day progressed I was asking myself if these ideas about generating feedback fit with my poststructural leanings in therapy. As the day progressed I gradually became more and more comfortable with trying them out, and actually believed that they could be an effective tool for several reasons:

1. The ORS & SRS could go a long way toward flattening the hierarchy in the room. It seemed that tools like these could really put skin on the idea that the people who consult with us direct the treatment they receive, rather than the other way around.

2. Scott Miller was great about naming, and re-naming our fields go-to position of blaming the client if things don't work out in therapy, or people don't come back, etc. Tools like these would shift the burden of helpful therapy back to the therapist, where it belongs. But rather than a "beat up the therapist" evaluative tool, the ORS/SRS could in fact make us all better clinicians and more closely align us with peoples hopes and dreams.

3. How about using the OTRS/SRS in University training clinics or in supervision settings? Are trainees and interns getting what they need? Do you want to know supervisors? Have you created a culture where feedback is given, or have your trainees and interns "gone underground?" Once again, maybe a helpful tool to begin to flatten hierarchy, dissolve power in supervision settings, or at least start to have a conversation.

4. And what about excellence? What are our thoughts about being a more helpful clinician? How do we apprentice? What is our accountability to those we work with?

5. I also found it interesting, and it raised my curiousity, that a few of the people involved with ICCE including lead U.S. Trainer Julie Tilsen, are narratively inclined.

I have been using the ORS/SRS sparingly over the last few months at CYS. This week I intend to be more deliberate in using the ORS/SRS and begin to track my results. I am currently looking for a tool like Myoutcomes.com to track and hopefully share the results. For those that have shied away from tools like this because it would "kill the creativity" in the work. I get it, but this is something you do in the beginning and toward the end, and not necessarily in every session. I still will be able to stay very creative in my question development or narrative inquiry, but these tools seem to be a pretty effective resource at moving me closer to people's experiences, hopes, and dreams.

I am really interested in asking those I work with to help me become a better clinician. I mean really, who is more qualified for the task?

The Radical Therapist

I've been watching the occupy Wall Street gatherings recently and have been reflecting on my own political leanings. As a former punk rocker who lived by the motto "never trust a hippie" I have always tended to view these kind of movements as suspect, or as the Who would say,“Here’s to the new boss, same as the old boss.” I mean, the hippies sold out eventually right?

This weekend I found myself wandering into a used book store. I purchased two books, both with politics in the title. The first The Politics of Therapy by Seymour Halleck and the second R.D. Laing's The Politics of the Family. I started reading Hallecks' The Politics of Therapy this weekend and have found myself captivated. Written in 1971 during a time of much political upheaval, Halleck argues that any psychiatric intervention, even when treating a voluntary person, will have an impact on the distribution of power within the various social systems in which the person travels. Who knew that someone was writing about power operations in therapy in the U.S. that long ago? And I thought it all began with narrative practice.

I'm still early in the book but Halleck did introduce me to the Radical Therapist, a journal that emerged in the early 1970s. I have had fun learning about this journal and the Radical Therapy collective which can still be found in northern California alive and well.

Politics are in the air, I have been doing lots of reading and reflecting. I'm not sure where I sit with this new movement gaining traction in the U.S., but I have found myself recently with a few good ideas for signs.

The following is part of the Radical Therapist Manifesto (written 1971). Good stuff:

Therapy today has become a commodity, a means of social control. We reject such an approach to people's distress. we reject the pleasant careers with which the system rewards its adherents. The social system must change and we will be workers toward such change. But to be true instruments of change, therapy and therapists must be liberated from their own forms of oppression. Nor is it enough to pursue a medical model and try and develop popular programs to 'treat the masses.' Therapists must understand their place in the changing social and political reality; thus therapy must become politically aware. No therapist, no person, can claim detachment from social contact. Each human act is a social act and moral statement: a political fact. It then becomes important which values we hold and which of them comes first. This awareness must structure all radical therapy today; for liberation from within has to be accompanied by liberation from with out.

 

Equal Couples

I wanted to point all the DB readers to my friend Aimee Galick's (pic) blog Equal Couples. This blog is written by Aimee who is in the PhD in MFT program at Loma Linda University, along with Carmen Knudson-Martin, the Dean of the program, and other members of the clinical research team. The Equal Couples blog is interested in gender equality in relationships. Born out of Knudson-Martin's book Couples, Gender, and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships this blog is for couples, and professionals who work with couples, and who want to dialogue with others who are concerned about the issue of gender and power. Please bookmark it and go back often for several views on the topic.

Conversations

Today we kicked off a new series of Postmodern Conversations and our special guest was John Winslade. Our topic today was Conflict Coaching from a Narrative Perspective, and It was a great day. I could have listened to John all day. I especially enjoyed his understanding of power via Foucault and Deleuze. Interesting factoid - most of Foucault's writing was not yet translated when the early narrative therapy writing was coming out. Winslade's understanding of power via Foucault provided a lot of space for agency, rather than the deterministic bent It can take in some discussions I've been exposed. I have some more reading to do! Thanks to all that came out and for those that couldn't make it, there will be more great conversations coming. Some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postmodern Conversations - Featuring John Winslade, Ph.D.

I'm happy to report that the next postmodern conversation in the new series is set. Please join the Narrative Project of Orange County on Sunday September 25th at my place as we host one of the early pioneers of narrative practice and theory, John Winslade, Ph.D. John will be facilitating a conversation on Mediation and Conflict Resolution From a Narrative Perspective. You will not want to miss this event. Contact me for details. Hope to see you there!

More about John:

John is an Associate Professor at California State University San Bernardino. He also teaches a mediation course at Cal State Dominguez Hills University and at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Until 2003, he was Director of Counselor Education at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He still returns regularly to New Zealand to work part-time at Waikato University, including a Masters course on mediation in the School of Education. He is a member of the editorial board of the Conflict Resolution Quarterly journal. John has authored four important books in the narrative field. Two of his texts has been written with Gerald Monk, including Narrative mediation: A new approach in conflict resolution (2000, Jossey Bass). Along with Lorraine Hedtke, he is the Co-author of Re-membering Lives: Conversations with the dying and the bereaved (2004, Baywood). He has taught workshops in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Denmark.

To display alternative investments is to become suspect in the eyes of ones comrades, and thus to oneself--With threats to sincerity pervasive, one is invited to intensify the level of commitment. One must compensate for all the alternative investments by demonstrating either how little they mean, or how central the cause is to one's life. -Ken Gergen

Story

I define storytelling as the untangling of, and bringing order to, the chaos of actual experience and packaging it in a way that is usable for yourself and other people going forward. There is an interesting psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, who studies post-traumatic stress by comparing the experience of Iraq war veterans with heroes from ancient Greek tragedies coming home from war. He concludes that what is missing now is the crucial decompression period of the soldiers’ journey home. In ancient Greece after battle, soldiers had a two-month boat trip home during which they could compartmentalize experience into stories, so they could be ready to reintegrate with their families and share the experience in a very mythical, well-understood way. Now, as a soldier coming back from Iraq, without that time to create a story, you’re rocked by that chaos. So, I think that’s something stories can do—prepare their way of finding meaning in this madness and bringing some order to the chaos. - Jonathan Harris

Read More Here..

The Future of Narrative Practice or What's Our Antenarrative?

This weekend I read a timely review of the Venice Biennale by New York magazine's Jerry Saltz. Earlier that day I had put down a book on narrative practice saying to myself, "there's nothing new here." In Saltz's review of this years Biennale, he called most of the work stuck in a cul-de-sac of regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. He went on to warn about the conformity, calling it a super-attenuated gene pool of ideas which could lead to nothing more than coded language, and a safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas leading to a new orthodoxy.

Yes it was an art review, but it caught my attention because of some questions I had been chewing on myself. Could narrative practice be accused of the same rehashing of received ideas? Are we headed to a closed coded language, a fixed orthodoxy?

There have been a couple of solid books released this year by Stephen Madigan, and Jim Duvall & Laura Beres that have either solidified narrative foundations or attempted to introduce new practices to narrative work. In my area, I know that John Winslade is attempting to generate new ideas via his experimental e-journal, or with his own writing that introduced the work of Gilles Deleuze. But I'm still left very curious what ideas, or writers, other narrative practitioners may be paying attention to? Are there people currently living that can add much to the practice? Are we looking? Would we welcome a little chaos to narrative practice?

In my own work I have recently begun to experiment, so far successfully, with the idea of sideshadowing written about by Gary Saul Morson. I've also become interested in the ideas of David Boje and his work around Antenarrative. Borje's has written about narrative therapy in storytelling organizational work and is familiar with our foundations. But his ideas around Antenarrative and its possibilities in helping people we work with develop a "pre-narrative," and then "bet" (ante) that you can co-create an antenarrative that will become a living story, holds interesting promise. I will attempt to write more about Boje's work here in the future.

I still look to the arts for much of my inspiration. I have been a fan of Jerry Saltz's writing for some time, and this most recent piece has again caused me to pause and reflect. I would be very interested to hear from others, who they might be reading, or who might be influencing their work. And I would also enjoy the collaboration of looking forward, as we wager that a proper narrative future can be constituted.

I Love DFW..

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

— David Foster Wallace

Derrida

This is what one of those cranky old French postmodern dudes looks like. Notice anything absent but implicit?