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Join Sonja Baram for a compelling introduction to Narrative Therapy. For curious counsellors, mental health and community workers and all others looking to expand their understanding and practice into Narrative and Invitational ways of working with others. ​ The three days will help you make sense of Narrative therapy theory and practice with a touch on how Narrative fits into the vast landscape of helping conversations to date. Assess and develop a therapeutic position, maps of narrative practice and find richly creative voices to support the clients valued hopes and acts of living. Finally practice, practice, practice skills with consideration to your own work contexts. ​ Day I: Intro and Overview of Narrative Therapy ​ Day II: Maps of Narrative Practice: Where Theory and Practice provide a helpful orientation to prepare for helping clients. Skills, Practice and Your Contexts. ​ Cost $260.00

Hardly a day seems to go by without neuroscience making the news for claiming to explain yet one more aspect of human behaviour. Who has not been enchanted by multi-coloured images of brain scans suggesting the precise locations of fear, anger, empathy, even love? This one-day workshop will critically explore the relationships between narrative and neuroscience. It will loiter around the benefits and hazards of neuroscientific discoveries for narrative therapy. Important distinctions between mind, brain, body, affect and feeling will be probed. Tantalising new paradigms of neuroscience, which may be more resonant with the philosophical bases of narrative practices, will be presented. Most importantly, time will be given throughout to practice skills for embodying stories and storying affect. ​ Cost $145

The ethics and politics of engagement with people who use gendered violence and abuse is teased out and tried out in this three day workshop

What makes a story? Why does story matter in personal and communal identities? What kinds of stories support a person’s preferred journey through life? And what kinds interrupt that journey? These and other questions will be thoroughly explored in this week-long adventure into the ideas and skills of a narrative approach. The following maps of narrative practice will be outlined – Externalising the Problem (‘the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem); Statement of Position Map (Invitations to ‘take a position’ on the predicaments in a person’s life in light of what is valued); Reauthoring Map (a teasing out of the ideas and skills that support a ‘rich and thick’ alternative story); Re-membering practices (looking into relational identity and trying out skills that bring into focus the contributions of significant persons, places and things). The use of documents and media as ways of ‘capturing he said from the saying’ will also be explored. This invigorating workshop will also invite the sharing of passages of work and transcripts from the presenter and participants. While mornings will be spent in teaching and conversation, afternoons will settle into intensive hands-on reflective practice of skills. ​ Cost $850

Climate change has real effects not only on a planetary scale, but on the personal and collective ecology of mind, body, soul and spirit. How do we and those who consult with us respond to such an overwhelming emergency? How might concern, fear, anger, despair or action be unfolded to speak to a sense of hope in the future? This workshop draws on narrative maps of practice to explore ideas and skills in ‘restorying’ climate change: What are the effects of climate change on my relationship to deeply held values and commitments? How does climate change impact on my sense of the future, not only for myself, but my children and grandchildren? How is climate change influencing my relationship with the earth?. How might re-membering practices be extended to include the storying of places and times that evoke specific personal and collective experiences of caring or wonder-ful connections with the earth, sea, plants, animals, insects? What are the dominant discourses around climate change? How do we extend irresistible invitations to ecological responsibility? To what uses might a Migration of Identity Map be put in tracing journeys toward ethical and political action to address climate change paralysis? These and other questions will be explored in conversation and practice through this one day workshop. ​ Cost $145

The idea that a person is always responding in the face of trauma is central to Narrative Therapy. This workshop gives an opportunity to reflect on the complex personal and relational dilemmas faced by survivors of childhood sexual abuse with three experienced practitioners in the field.