Em-BODY-ing Conversations: Integrating Narrative Practice, EMDR Therapy, and Somatic-oriented Therapies

Course Description

Em-BODY-ing Conversations integrates somatic and affective-inspired EMDR Therapy, interpersonal neurobiology, and somatic therapies with a narrative therapy approach. Lynne Rosen builds on the philosophical tenets of a narrative therapy approach to explore what becomes possible when we enter the realm of the nonlinear, creating different kinds of scaffolding through sensations, images, gestures, affect, dreams, movement, and imagination. Richly illustrated with client stories, Lynne explores ideas around embodiment, memory theory, and interpersonal neurobiology as frames for discernment, helping inform the pacing and movement between safety and risk and helping clients move from constriction to greater spaciousness, agency, and freedom. Throughout, Lynne seeks ways to guard against imposing Western embodiment ideas on others, to explore ancestral and cultural wisdom and knowledge, and to make visible and heal bodily inheritances from abuse, colonization, and other forms of oppression.

Most importantly, Lynne hopes that the dialogues clients have so generously agreed to share and the ideas shared by colleagues, authors, and professional and personal ancestors, on whose shoulders she stands, engage us in dialogue, envisioning, and collectively imaging different pathways forward that support relational being, greater justice, and collective healing.

Course Instructor, Lynne Rosen

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Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Pasadena, California) has been engaged in therapeutic work for over 25 years in medical, residential, inpatient, community and private practice settings. She found her therapeutic and philosophical home in the early 90’s when she traveled to New York to hear Michael White and David Epston. Most recently, she has focused her attention on integrating Narrative Therapy with EMDR, Somatic Therapies and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) with clients who are living with the effects of Trauma, Eating Problems and other difficulties that compromise relational well-being. Her favorite proverb is an African one: “Until lions have historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Lynne has had a long-standing interest in bringing forward lions’ tales, stories and experiences at the margins, where there is wisdom and knowledge that can transport us all. She continues to feel passionate about teaching, supervising and public conversation work and for many years, she had the privilege of working as Core Faculty and Director of the Postmodern Therapy Training Program at PGI and Co-Founder of WPLA (Women’s Project Los Angeles).

Registration

Now in Active Development – Not Yet Open for Registration.

Earn 14 CEs

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Sliding Fee Structure

Course tuition and donations fund our website and community development. We offer tiered pricing to make our courses accessible while sustaining our Narrative Therapy community.

Re-Authoring Teaching Members receive a 10% discount on all rates. Sign up for a membership here.

Please select the highest rate you can afford:

Subsidized Rate: $120 ($108 for RT Members)
For those facing financial barriers, including international exchange rates
Sustaining Rate: $240 ($216 for RT Members)
Helps cover course production and website costs
Patron Rate: $350 ($315 for RT Members)
Provides additional support for community resources
Donation: Any amount to support our nonprofit’s future development

Continuing Education Credits

Pending approval, Mental health professionals can earn 16 APA-approved CEs through Alliant International University for an additional $40 fee.

To earn credits:

Pass the end-of-course quiz
Complete the Alliant evaluation
Submit via our Contact form

We’ll email your certificate upon completion.

After Purchase

You’ll receive an email with your course access link
You’ll have opportunities to contribute your reflections and questions on each lesson

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

Construct language and practices around integrating somatic-inspired EMDR Therapy and somatic practices with a Narrative Therapy Approach, both philosophically and practically.
Describe how to ethically and collaboratively experiment with integrative practices.
Identify frames for discernment (Memory Theory, Polyvagal theory, Interpersonal Neurobiology/window of tolerance) in moving between risk and safety as we work with implicit memories.
Apply somatic-inspired practices and EMDR in-the-moment experiences in ways that stay connected to curiosity, invitation, transparency, and client authorship.
Synthesize how to interrupt the body’s survival habits so space opens up for co-research, curiosity, and agency of responding (preferred ways of enacting gesture, movement, and affect).
Describe scaffolding with direct, in-the-moment somatic and affective experiences that support Re-Authoring and Re-Membering practices that are aligned with clients’ moral and ethical positions.
Demonstrate through clinical examples what reclamation, radical imagination, and embodied resistance look like in our work as we move between discursive and non-discursive landscapes

Addressing questions like these is central to Lynne Rosen’s practice. With a keen interest in the social construction of identities and the politics of experience, Lynne bridges cherished narrative ideas and practices with her understanding of somatic-inspired EMDR, somatic therapies, Memory Theory, and Interpersonal Neurobiology. Through video, audio, text, experiential exercises, and client tales, she shows us what becomes possible when we create different kinds of scaffolding using sensations, images, and memories in non-discursive ways.

Course Overview

Our lives and body/mind/spirit are multi-storied, some of which find expression beyond words. Michael White talked about how people would tell half stories about traumatic and oppressive experiences. We learned to honor what clients shared and make visible the absent but implicit, people’s responses to trauma and oppressive experiences that were absent from dominant storylines. We then could explore the foundations of these responses and how they spoke to important values in life and relationships that were threatened or diminished. We can explore the absent but implicit with clients’ affective, imaginal, and somatic responses, making visible these half-stories; how sadness (a tear or the silent refusal of tears) or a gesture, for example, might be protest, reclamation, or testimony to what one holds as precious that has been threatened or diminished. We can also interrogate nonverbal dominant body norms that maintain oppression and the status quo. Lynne Rosen

Here Lynne introduces her work to SuEllen Hamkins and Maggie Carey.

Lesson One: Getting Situated

Welcoming you to the course, we introduce Lynne and her team of contributors, describe Narrative Therapy & The Affective Turn, grapple with philosophical congruence, explore the meaning of Embodiment and its relationship to challenging power and tactics of oppression using a Cultural Somatic Lens, and illustrate the importance of politicizing experiences of the body, placing somatic and non-verbal experiences back into socio-political, cultural, and historical contexts.

Lesson Two: Bridging Narrative Therapy with EMDR and Somatic Therapies

We build on Lynne’s description of her approach to integrating EMDR and somatic-oriented approaches with narrative therapy, as captured by the 2018 Radical Therapist interview with Chris Hoff. Lynne explores considerations for ethically and collaboratively exploring imaginal, somatic, and body-based practices and identifies frames for discernment that shape moving between discursive and affective landscapes.

Lesson Three: Norm

We devote an entire lesson to Lynne’s EMDR and somatic work with Norm – a cis-gender 60-year-old man with a deep passion for music, an enormous heart, and an incredible wit. Referred to Lynne by her colleague Larry Zucker, Norm challenged so-called facts and “NORM-alizing” judgment shaped by traumatic early experiences, opening space for alternative ways of understanding the effects of history, moral judgment, and a sense of agency. We explore audio recordings and transcripts alongside Lynne and Larry’s reflections on their collaboration, teachable moments, and learnings from this experience.

Lesson Four: Weaving in Somatic Landscapes

In the fourth lesson, Lynne Rosen introduces additional somatic therapies and practices that help clients move toward reclaiming or creating novel preferred somatic and non-verbal bodily- experiences, responses, movements, and experiences. Engaging the language of sensations, images, movements, dreams, moral imagination, and memories reconnects clients with moral virtues and courage, a language for the inner life, and new possibilities for acting and relating that are aligned with cherished intentions, values, hopes, dreams, beliefs, purposes, and commitments.

Lesson Five: P.J. Illustration with Outsider Witness Practices

Lynne shares her work with P.J. to illustrate creative possibilities that emerge when integrating somatic-inspired EMDR Therapy, and Narrative Therapy. This work explores the effects of making clients’ creative and sustaining practices visible and engaging radical imagination around suicidal ideation, connection, agency, and hope. Outsider Witness practices are integrated.

Lesson Six: Additional Somatic & EMDR Illustrations

Lynne further explores moving between different modalities and landscapes in negotiating and co-searching relational safety, working with dissociation, and exploring creative resources like art, movement, music, poetry, and writing.