Narrative and the Body

with SuEllen Hamkins (Northampton, Massachusetts),
Laure Maurin  (Bordeaux, France), and Lynne Rosen (Pasadena, California).

Tuesday Morning, June 18, 2019; 9:00-12:30 pm (3 CEs)

Thompson’s Point Cottage, Charlotte Vermont

(Exact location to be determined)

We are simultaneously engaged in meaning-making and living in and among bodies. The Affective/Discursive Turn in psychotherapy invites us to explore the relationship between politics, culture, memory and embodiment in the context of decolonizing practices. Integrative work opens up possibilities for responding to habits of body, re-contextualizing dilemmas, engaging moral imagination, and re-populating lives in ways that support agency and movement toward preferences for living and relating.  We seek to bring forward therapeutic resources and practices that engage narrative meaning-making and cultivate healing somatic experiences.

Each of the presenters will present case stories and offer experiential exercises to explore these themes, with ample time for conversation and discussion.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  1. Describe how to construct different forms of scaffolding using visual and somatic openings in ways that make visible the complexities of lived experiences and generate and thicken preferred and subordinate stories.
  2. Construct language and practices around integrating EMDR, IPNB and somatic practices with a Narrative Approach both philosophically and practically, while escaping recruitment into interiority ideas and binaries of body/mind, inside/outside, thinking/feeling and resources/deficits.
  3. Describe how to ethically and collaboratively experiment with alternative practices, considering both potential benefits and possible contraindications.
  4. Cultivate narratives of resilience about using resources such as psychotropic medications

Presenters

SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist and author, and her passion is helping people cultivate their resiliency in the face of challenges. Her work centers on narrative psychiatry, college student mental health and mother-daughter relationships. Her book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013) offers detailed guidance in resiliency-focused, culturally-attuned, collaborative psychiatric practice, bringing narrative approaches alive through vivid case reports.  SuEllen regularly presents at narrative and other professional conferences around the world, including Narrative Camp in Vermont in 2015 and A Room Full of Stories in Mumbai in 2016. SuEllen is Assistant Director of the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. SuEllen is a co-founder of The Mother-Daughter Project, a grassroots initiative to empower mothers to join together to promote the wellbeing of adolescent girls, mothers, and mother-daughter relationships.  She co-authored The Mother-Daughter Project: How Mothers and Daughters Can Band Together, Beat the Odds, and Thrive Through Adolescence (Penguin, 2007) and mother-daughter groups based on the model she helped develop have formed throughout the world. Dr. Hamkins is a dynamic speaker and workshop presenter, has appeared on the Today show and NPR, and is a featured expert on Kids in the House.

Laure Maurin (Bordeaux, France) specializes in education and early childhood. For more than 10 years, she has worked as an educator for children with disabilities in a day hospital, a therapeutic and educational institute, and an emergency hostel for
juvenile offenders.   Having trained in the early childhood sector, she has taught for more than 7 years for Bordeaux GRETA for child-minders on child development, caring education,  welcoming children and having a child with a disability. She is the mother of four children.Throughout, Laure shares her experience and skills for a positive and caring education.

Laure trained in the narrative approach at the Narrative Factory in Bordeaux and Paris. She welcomes and receives by appointment in cabinet in Ares. Laure has been practicing yoga for over twenty years, trained at the French School of Yoga (EFY) for four years, and runs meditation and yoga workshops. She enjoys accompanying people with disabilities through body language (yoga) and the narrative approach. She wishes that everyone can find at his/her own pace, a better knowledge of their body, breath, and being in its entirety.

Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Los Angeles, Pasadena, CA) has been engaged in therapeutic work, teaching, training, and supervising for over 27 years in medical, residential, inpatient, community, and private practice settings. She found her therapeutic and philosophical home in the early 90s when she discovered Narrative Therapy. Current work has focused on integrating EMDR Therapy, other somatic-based therapies, and mindfulness practices with a Narrative Therapy approach philosophically and practically. She is excited about what becomes possible when different kinds of scaffolding are created using imagination, images, habits and expressions of the body, sensations, and memories, in non-discursive ways. Lynne is a board and faculty member of Re-Authoring Teaching, an international learning community of Narrative Therapy enthusiasts, where she is currently facilitating an Em-BODY-ing Conversations Consultation Group. For many years, Lynne worked as Core Faculty and Director of the Postmodern Therapy Training Program at a graduate school (Phllips Graduate Institute) and Co-Founder of WPLA (Women’s Project Los Angeles).

Resources

SuEllen Hamkins’ official website offers many resources including:

Laure Maurin wrote the following paper in French. Here it is translated into English:

Collab Salons

Tales of Integration- Lynne Rosen & Larry Zucker
Tales of Integration- Lynne Rosen & Larry Zucker
 Narrative and Mindfulness Practice - David Paré & Ian Percy
Narrative & Mindfulness Practice – David Paré & Ian Percy
Honoring histories and creating spaces for emerging practices: December 2016 Collab Salon
Honoring histories and creating spaces for emerging practices: Jenny Freeman, Ian Percy & Lynne Rosen