Ideas of power

February 17, 2019 Collab Salon: Moving Beyond Multicultural Counseling

Eminent scholars such as Makungu Akinyela and marcela polanco have written about an anti-colonial approach to narrative therapy. Join Travis Heath as he presents: "While this philosophy has traveled with me for some time, I wasn't certain how it was actually translating to practice. This was a rather distressful discovery for me. What good was a spirit that ran along side my practice but wasn’t making its way into the work? Over the last several months I have been spending much time trying to cultivate anti-colonial narrative questions. I will share my initial attempts at an anti-colonial narrative practice by showing questions within practice stories."

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T06:32:11-05:00October 17th, 2018|Comments Off

Delving into Difference Consultation Group 2019- 2020

This consultation group is for people who are interested in having perhaps difficult or uncomfortable conversations around difference with regards to race and privilege in the therapy room. Our hope is that this group will provide clinicians an opportunity to uncover possible blind spots and biases around differences and to work through situations or hiccups that we may have encountered in relationship to our clients and maybe our daily lives.

Peggy Sax2020-01-07T05:38:14-05:00July 8th, 2018|0 Comments

February 19, 2017 Collab Salon – Translating Narrative Therapy

How does narrative therapy translate into different languages and cultures? What are some of the challenges and new discoveries? We scheduled this Collab Salon in response to a keynote by David Epston at A Room Full of Stories, The International Narrative Therapy Conference, Mumbai, India, October 13-18, 2016. We startED in response to some of the postcards at the conference, and from there moveD onto co-creating new questions and responses.

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T07:53:35-05:00November 27th, 2016|1 Comment

November 2016 Collab Salon: Justice-Doing in therapy & community work

Vikki & Michael offer an alternative approach to work with trauma, which focuses on the resistance of victims of violence and oppression. Drawing from a decolonizing and justice-doing stance, their activist analysis resists the neutral and medicalised language of ‘trauma’, and names the contexts of social injustice that create the conditions for suffering. Honouring the wisdom of the people we work alongside in their acts of resistance and responses to trauma brings forward their agency and wisdom - creating identities of knowledge, autonomy and strength, as opposed to victim/survivor identities, or other spoiled identities.We will address structuring safety as the foundation of the work, alternative understandings of the way trauma works, and the duty of the witness to work towards justice-doing, connection of private pain with public issues.

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T08:06:31-05:00July 8th, 2016|Comments Off

September, 2015 Collab Salon: Stories that honor cultural integrity – marcela polanco

marcela polanco from Our Lady of the Lake University was our featured guest for the September Collab Salon. After overcoming some initial techno difficulties, we engaged in a discussion about a question Michael White raised in his work “How is it that people pull the materials of culture together to form an identity and a life, and of the processes by which these cultural knowledges and practices are reworked in people’s expressions of living?” (White, 2001). We focused on the complex ways in which culture shapes the oral traditions that support the fabrication of stories and the assembling of our lives in turn. Marcela's work emphasizes the importance of honoring the cultural integrity of stories by recognizing cultural difference between the person of the therapist and the consultant. She situated the discussion in a narrative therapy framework informed by traditions of her own cultural upbringing in Colombia, including the literary genre of magical realism; and her experiences with bilingualism as an immigrant in the U.S.

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T08:37:18-05:00July 8th, 2016|Comments Off