Pre-Conference Workshops

1. Full day, Wednesday July 8^th, Jill Freedman and Gene Combs

Hope and Determination in the Face of the Gathering Storm

Cost: £145, 20% off if self-funded (£116)

As narrative practitioners we are buoyed by the knowledge that people are always responding to problems and hardship. Keeping this in mind, we hope to name and expose discourses seeking to dominate and crush our lives and worlds.  The challenge is how to stay in touch with purposes and values that support possible responses and generate hope. We will tell some stories and describe some possibilities inspired through narrative ideas and practice.

Bio:

Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, who live in the Chicago area, are co-directors of Evanston Family Therapy Center. They teach locally and internationally, and have co-authored three books including Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities, and more than 30 papers and book chapters. They have been practicing narrative therapy and supervision, as well as consulting to schools and social service agencies, for 35 years. Jill and Gene are Honorary Associates of the Taos Institute, and they were awarded the Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy Award of the American Family Therapy Academy.

2. Half day, afternoon, Wednesday July 8^th, Helen Grau:

A Narrative Approach to parents who are grieving a Child – how to help the bereaved to develop and grow a continuing present relationship to the deceased. 

Cost: £80, 20% 0f if self funded (£64)

For decades conventional grief therapy and the accompanying social practices for grieving in our Western Society has been shaped by Freud’s grief hypothesis to reduce the deceased to a set of memories in the past and working towards the acceptance of letting go of the relationship.  This often leaves the bereaved parents to suffer the total loss of the relationship. A loss that makes it even harder and more painful to navigate the territory of grief and life. When we lose someone deeply significant, we cannot simply end the relationship; we cannot not relate. When what we are allowed to relate to is restricted  to static memories of the past, the relationship becomes painful, as every memory speaks to what have been lost, a reminder of the absence –  of what can no longer be.

In this workshop I will demonstrate a narrative approach to grief. One that views people whose grief does not subside but continues to grow, as a testimony of protest to let to of the relationship, longing for the deceased felt presence in their continuing life.

I will demonstrate by use of transcription, to show how these responses can be recognized and dignified as a reflection of parents’ preferred identity and create openings to a continuing and active relationship to the deceased child. I will demonstrate how we can construct those relationshipthrough delicate questions that allows the parents to sense the child’s physical presence in the relationship and experience their child as their closest ally in how to navigate in their ongoing life. This approach reveals how grief changes as they get access to a continuing relationship. This approach to grief will be useful in responding not only to parents but people who are grieving a close relationship.

Bio:

Helene Grau Kristensen is a psychologist who has specialized in working with families who lives with grief due to the loss of significant family member. Especially her work with parents who are grieving a child has become internationally known. She has been trained by Michael White, Lorraine Hedtke, David Nylund, and David Marsten and has for years developed the Narrative Approach to grief in significant ways, that helps bereaved develop and experience a continuing present and active relationship to the deceased.

She has been teaching Narrative Therapy at the Vancouver School, held keynotes and workshops at Narrative Conference around the world. Recently taught a master class on grief at the Dulwich Center. You can read her articles:

https://www.journalcnt.com/uploads/9/4/4/5/94454805/4._the_politics_of_saying_hullo_again.pdf

https://rememberingpractices.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/still-alive-counselling-conversations-with-parents-whose-child-has-died-during-or-soon-after-pregnancy-Helene-Grau-Kristensen-and-Lorraine-Hedtke.pdf