A Resource-Centred Approach

Johnella Bird is a counselling practitioner and co-director of The Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand. She consults to, and facilitates teaching programs for, mental health practitioners, social workers, psychiatrists, counsellors, psychologists and nurses throughout Europe, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

The theoretical and technical development of her clinical work continues to be founded on an extensive counselling practice with individuals, couples and families. Johnella is the author of The Heart’s Narrative (2000), Talk That Sings (2004) and Constructing The Narrative In Super-vision (2006). Johnella has recently completed a new teaching resource of three DVDs and a workbook titled Constructing Narratives To Make A Difference (2008).

Throughout this workshop I will draw on examples of individual, couple and family work.

I will demonstrate those practical skills that enable us to discover people’s resources, strengths and abilities while also incorporating their struggles, disappointments and despair.

I will particularly focus on creating therapeutic change by doing the following:

• Positioning people’s experience within a contextual environment. I do this through an exploration of feelings, thoughts, experiences, actions, the body and relationships.
• Finding and developing people’s resources through emphasising a relational style of listening and questioning.
• Developing a style of enquiry which creates change-making possibilities by using the imagination and movement over time.
• Developing the technical ability to use the therapeutic relationship as a site for discovery. This includes positioning ourselves to make discovery with people even in those difficult circumstances where change seems elusive.
• Situating respect and collaboration as a living practice that is negotiated within the therapeutic conversation.
• Holding change-making discoveries in and outside of sessions. This includes letter-writing.

Prerequisite
Viewing the 3 DVDs Constructing Narratives To Make A Difference before attending the workshop.

Cost
Workshop........................................................$ 680.00 (GST incl.)
3 DVDs and workbook.....................................$ 110.00 (GST incl.)
normally $150 but with a 25% discount for workshop participants

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We often meet couples who are struggling to find any common ground in respect to understanding past events. Consequently, we can find ourselves managing a conversation shaped by accusation and counter-accusation. In this workshop I will discuss and demonstrate a conversational process that allows us to step away from accusation in order to find a third way. The third way incorporates each person’s experience while exploring the sometimes complex and contradictory moments which occur within relationships.

By using a process that emphasises a relational perspective, we can explore and renegotiate the taken-for-granted notions which act to shape relationships.

Throughout this presentation I will demonstrate a therapeutic process where I engage couples in addressing serious concerns such as, significant betrayals of trust, longstanding conflicts, the impact of losses and grief, and the negotiation of change in relationships.

Clinicians often comment that there is barely enough time in super-vision to briefly overview the dilemmas, struggles and joys they’ve encountered in therapeutic work. Clinicians generally settle on using the limited super-vision time to review those issues that feel urgent. Consequently, the commonly uttered lament, ‘I don’t have enough time to reflect on my work,’ attests to many lost opportunities to reflect on both, what’s working and what’s not.

This precarious situation can be avoided by employing practices that position us (the clinician) as reflecting on the relational environment. In super-vision, I use prismatic dialogue to advance this reflective position. However in this workshop I will be discussing a process that I’ve developed to enable clinicians to ethically review and extend therapeutic practice between super-vision sessions. This vital reflection tool will enable you to review the presuppositions that are shaping therapeutic or super-vision conversations while developing new directions for enquiry.

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Talking about living in the present moment is easier than experientially inhabiting the present moment.

In this workshop I will discuss and demonstrate the method I use to notice, describe and re-search present moment experience. Noticing and then finding expressions to represent feelings and experiences (including body experiences) provides us with the opportunity to narrow the ‘meaning gulf’ between all participants in therapeutic and super-vision relationships. This in turn allows people to both connect with their resources and address their problems.

Working with present moment experience is particularly relevant in the work with people who have suffered traumatic injuries in past and present relationships.

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Advancing Therapeutic Conversations is orientated toward enhancing participants therapeutic skills. Consequently, people can and have attended this workshop many times with the intention of extending and developing particular therapeutic practices in a safe environment. Throughout this workshop I will discuss and demonstrate the practices I use to develop a context where possibilities for change are made or constructed with people.

These practices include the following:

• Discovering new possibilities through a focus on present-moment experience.
• Creating the experience of movement and thus change through the therapeutic conversation.
• Moving the theoretical constructs held by the therapist into a living practice.
• Exposing the binary positions that trap people within pathologising narratives.
• Negotiating and exploring the contradictory experiences that challenge rigid gender, class and culture categories.
• Extending the therapist’s imaginative resource.
• Negotiating ethical positions with people (clients), eg, therapeutic relationship boundaries.
• Working with stuck places in the therapy..

The practical skills we need to conduct a resource-centred interview will be emphasised through the use of DVDs, transcripts and prismatic dialogue.

Prerequisite
Participants of this workshop will have previously attended an intensive with Johnella. Participants will also be familiar with the practices outlined in Constructing Narratives To Make A Difference (three tutorial DVDs with a detailed workbook).

Cost
Workshop....................................................$ 680.00 (GST incl.)
3 DVDs and workbook.................................$ 110.00 (GST incl.)
normally $150 but with a 25% discount for workshop participants

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I have experienced many challenges while facilitating super-vision relationships. The situations that I have found most taxing involved my use of the power relation to address ethical concerns. In these instances a relational perspective supported me to navigate a process that could have easily floundered in a mire of defensiveness, accusation, shame, anger and subsequent detachment. Through the years, I have at times struggled to construct environments that promoted extension and challenge while at the same time affirming competence. I now feel easier about the ability I have to maintain this balance. I hope the ideas presented here will assist people to facilitate environments where there is a balance between nourishment and extension.

Throughout the workshop I will discuss and demonstrate the following:

• The use of Prismatic dialogue as a reflective practice.
• Ways to negotiate accountability within a power relation.
• The use of imaginative abilities to support new therapeutic directions.
• Ethical review through a conversational process.

This workshop is relevant to people who facilitate super-vision relationships or participate in peer consultation processes.

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Registration Form

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Workshops

Talk That Sings: Extending The Narrative Tradition .........................$ 680.00

Working With Couples:
We Talk, We Listen, But Do We Understand? ..................................$ 340.00

Vital Reflection: A Tool For People Working With People .................$ 170.00

Creating Storylines in the Here and Now:
Working With Individuals .................................................................$ 170.00

Advancing Therapeutic Conversations .............................................$ 680.00

Extending Practice Through Super-Vision ........................................$ 170.00

Payment enclosed

For the workshops .......................................................................... $

For the DVDs & Workbook ($110)..................................................... $

    Total (all costs already include GST).................................................... $

Signed ...................................................................................

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For more information, please contact:
The Family Therapy Centre
PO Box 80089, Green Bay, Auckland, New Zealand
Email: edgepress@xtra.co.nz