University of Toronto

This training program offers participants the opportunity to fully explore the many exciting ideas and practices that inform Narrative Therapy. This experience will involve 36 hours of thorough examination of narrative ways of thinking and being, presented in clear useable ways that can be taken into everyday therapeutic practice.

Participants will be encouraged and inspired to use their new knowledge, experience, and imaginations to create a narrative therapy that is uniquely their own. The option for an extended program that includes practicing at a walk-in clinic with the trainer is available.

The process will involve a presentation of ideas, conversation, and handouts; experiential practice exercises, a unique process for the review of video-taped sessions of the trainer's work, which involves the participants in the art of question development; letter writing practice, and participation in outsider witness practices.

Participants will leave with:

• Ways of thinking and being that will make it possible to take narrative ideas and practices into your everyday work.
• A clear understanding of how to enrich your practice using theory from Foucault, Vygotsky, Bruner, James and Gadamer.
• An understanding of how specific ways of being curious can create more useful and meaningful therapeutic conversations within any therapy approach.
• A uniquely detailed map for therapy conversation that can be used in any setting with any presenting concern, including diagnoses and histories of trauma.

Participants will learn:

• A broad range of applications for outsider witness practices, including how to situate people in therapy sessions as witnesses to each other
• How to use these practices in brief settings
• What clients have reported in new research about what is meaningful and useful in narrative therapy

Interested participants may apply to practice their newly learned techniques at a walk-in therapy clinic in Burlington at Reach Out Centre for Kids (ROCK). Students work alongside the course instructor and walk-in clinic staff as an outsider witness and co-therapist for an agreed-upon frequency and duration of time.

Location: Burlington Campus, Brief Therapy Training Centre - International/Hincks-Dellcrest Institute at Reach Out Centre for Kids (ROCK).

Students must register for this program through The Hincks-Dellcrest Centre. Visit www.hincksdellcrest.org/brief-therapy-training and click on 'Externships and Certificates Programs'.