Our online teaching faculty is comprised of some of the best narrative therapy teachers in the world. Everyone is also an experienced practitioner.
Maggie Carey, (Adelaide, South Australia) is a founding member of the “Narrative Practices Adelaide” teaching faculty. She has been involved in the practice of narrative therapy since the early 90′s and in the teaching of it for the past 10 years. Maggie’s therapeutic practice has seen her working alongside young people at risk, with women and children who live with the effects of violence and abuse, and with people having experienced trauma, particularly as refugees. (You can read more about Maggie by clicking here)
David Epston (Auckland, New Zealand)is the co-originator with Michael White of what has come to be known as ‘narrative therapy and community work’. The collaboration between David and Michael began in the late 1970s, as continued for many years. David’s best known publications are White and Epston(1990), Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends; Freeman, Epston and Lobovits(1997), Playful Approaches to Serious Problems: Narrative Therapy with Children and their Families and Maisel, Epston and Borden(2004), Biting The Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia along with other collections of papers and book chapters. David is especially intrigued by the poetics of inquiry: What is a good question? Where do questions come from? How are good questions related to good stories? What guides inquiry in narrative therapy? For further information, please visit narrativeapproaches.com
Jenny Freeman has met with people ages 3 to 93 in collaborative practice, group, school, and inpatient settings since 1984, and still loves going to work each day. An international speaker, she has been an instructor and director of Arts and Healing at John F. Kennedy University and provides consultation and training for students at California Institute of Integral Studies as well as private groups. She currently works with Walden School in Berkeley, CA, on community psychology needs. To learn more about Jenny, click here.
Rob Hall (Adelaide, Australia), a social worker, has been working in the area of gender violence and abuse since 1980. He first worked in an emergency counselling service exploring approaches to inviting men to take responsibility for their violence and to find ways to ensure the safety and well being of people they had abused. He then joined a colleague, Alan Jenkins, in the further development of work with men who have perpetrated abuse. They formed a partnership, in this work, with Maxine Joy and Alison Newton and established an independent therapy centre. Since 1994, Rob has also been working with adolescents who have been sexually abused with a focus on Aboriginal adolescents, their families and communities. Rob has shared these explorations of practice in many seminars and workshops. In 2008, Michael White invited Rob to be an associate with his Adelaide Narrative Therapy Centre. Michael’s associates Maggie Carey, Shona Russell and Rob formed Narrative Practices Adelaide after Michael’s untimely death. You can read about Rob’s work in the online article posted on the Pratiquesnarratives.com website: Pitfalls and challenges in work with men who use violence against their partners.
SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist and author. Her passion is helping people cultivate their values and strengths in the face of challenges and difficulties. Her work centers on three main areas: narrative psychiatry, college student mental health and mother-daughter relationships. She is Assistant Director of the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. SuEllen is a co-founder of the Mother-Daughter Project, and has created a series of videos on helping mothers and daughter thrive. Her most recent book is The Art of Narrative Psychiatry, published by Oxford University Press. To read more, click here.
Sarah Hughes (Nelson, British Columbia, Canada) is in independent practice, and also works for a community mental health service. Sarah came into narrative studies through the back door as she began in the 1990’s to work and travel with Michael White as a bookseller. After absorbing his training from this perspective for over ten years, she decided to formalize her education and got a Master’s in Couple and Family Therapy. She now works as a therapist and loves to continue to develop her ideas and thinking. She lives in a beautiful mountain town with her three children.
Kay Ingamells M.A., (Auckland, New Zealand) has been working with individuals, children, young people and families since 1990. She began her career working with troubled young people and children and their parents in specialist agencies, and spent six years working in child and adolescent mental health. For the past five years she has lectured in counselling in higher education at undergraduate and post-graduate level. She also runs a private therapy and counselling practice for adults, couples, children, families and young people. Since the beginning of her career, she has always worked with imaginative and respectful approaches that invite possibility and hope. For the last 7 years she has been supervised and trained by the internationally acclaimed therapist and co-inventor of Narrative Therapy, David Epston. She also draws on a number of other collaborative approaches in her work including training as a Journey Practitioner, which helps specifically to free people of ‘stories’ that have become stuck in the body.
Lisa Johnson (Adelaide, S. Australia) is a psychologist and trained teacher using narrative practices in therapy and teaching contexts across community, private practice and education settings. Lisa’s interest in narrative ideas began in the late 90’s working with young people who found themselves navigating juvenile justice and foster care systems. Lisa has continued to work with children, young people and families responding to a wide range of problems and dilemmas and currently works as a psychologist in school communities. Lisa is keen to uncover creative ways with narrative practices and appreciates her involvement in teaching narrative practises locally and internationally and is involved in a writing project with David Epston (co-founder of Narrative Therapy, Unitec, NZ) and David Marsten (Uni Southern California, Director of Miracle Mile).
Charley Lang, M.A., MFT (Los Angeles, California) is co-founder of The Narrative Counseling Center, providing resource-oriented consultation services for individuals, couples, and families, in addition to strength-based psychotherapy training for interns and therapists. As Director of the BA Psychology Program at Antioch University, he teaches numerous graduate and undergraduate courses, including Human Sexualities, Psychology of Addiction, and Madness in American History & Film. For many years he was Director of the Postmodern Therapy Training Program at the California Family Counseling Center and mental health supervisor at the AIDS Service Center in Pasadena. Always on the lookout for new and engaging alternative stories, Lang produced and directed several acclaimed documentary films, including the HBO award-winning Gay Cops: Pride Behind the Badge (dakotafilmworks.com).
Dean Lobovits, M.A. is a Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in Berkeley California and an Adjunct Professor at John F. Kennedy University. He authored legislation governing MFT’s in California and served for 14 years on the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists Ethics Committee including six years as Chairperson. He has published a website www.narrativeapproaches.com and authored a book and articles on Narrative Therapy and Ethics and Law for psychotherapists. Other publications include (1995) Public Practices: An Ethic of Circulation. with R. Maisel and J. Freeman. In S. Freidman, (Ed.), The Reflecting Team in Action. New York: Guilford Press;
Course Title: Dilemma, Distraction, and Discourse: Ethically Informed Psychotherapy Practices.
David Marsten first stumbled upon Narrative Therapy in 1991 while training in Brief Therapy at MRI in Palo Alto, CA. Over a period of months he became intrigued by Narrative and has since made it his bookish and imaginative home. He developed a Narrative training program at Jewish Family Service of Santa Monica in 1992, and in 1998 moved on to establish a non-profit training and counseling center, Miracle Mile Community Practice, with the aim of furthering Narrative ideas in the Los Angeles area. He has taught for many years and presented internationally on topics ranging from internalized patriarchy to couples, and young people and families. He has co-authored several articles and is currently nearing the completion of a book: “Through the Looking Glass: Narrative Therapy in Wonderland” with David Epston and Laurie Markham.
Shona Russell, M.A. (Adelaide, South Australia), has made narrative approaches to therapy and community work her focus for 20 years through her work in non-government organizations and in independent practice. Shona was an active member of The Dulwich Centre teaching faculty, where she and her close colleague Maggie Carey played a primary role in developing the skills practice component of the International Training programme. In 2008, Shona joined Michael White, Maggie Carey and Rob Hall in Narrative Practices Adelaide. Shona continues to be inspired by those with whom she works both in counseling and teaching contexts including in Bangladesh, Columbia, Mongolia, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Canada and France. She has written and co-authored numerous articles and books
Peggy Sax, Ph.D. (Middlebury, Vermont), is in independent practice as a Licensed Psychologist, consultant, international teacher and international trainer. She has apprenticed herself to narrative therapy since the early 1990s. She is the author of several articles, the book, Re-authoring Teaching: Creating a Collaboratory, this companion Re-authoring Teaching website and founder of “The Collab.” It gives her great joy to bring together favorite people, ideas and practices – to learn, engage, play and replenish together within her beautiful home state of Vermont.
Larry Zucker, LCSW, has been practicing therapy and training therapists for over 30 years. His background in social work and community organizing led him to see people in context, and to focus on strength and resiliency. He is committed to escaping blaming frames of reference in a field that encourage therapists to see people and relationships as problematic. He prefers seeing people as embedded in normal problems of living, full of untapped skill and knowledge for creating the lives and relationships they want, despite difficulties encountered, and to seeing therapy as a relationship that helps bring forth that knowledge.