Brief Description of the Series
Narrative practices have evolved in many ways over the decades in response to changing professional, social and cultural contexts. The founders of the Narrative Therapy approach, Michael White and David Epston, gave voice to the hope and intention that we would continue to try out different modes of inquiry, come up with new practices, and integrate these cherished ways of being with people that fit with our own local experiences and socio-political contexts. Now, the affective turn- as described by Gerald Monk and Navid Zamani -invites us to explore the mind, brain, and body, and their connection to the language of feelings, intentions, and choices. The Turn to Affect pays attention to what is beyond language and the discursive, focusing on what is located within the body.
Many therapists, especially the younger generation of narrative therapists, are asking for integrative therapeutic resources and practices that engage narrative meaning-making while building on non-verbal embodied healing experiences. What began as one of our 12 Hot Topics for the New Decade has now become a new series exploring how Narrative Therapy can honor its history and core values while bridging with other embodied approaches.
While waiting for this series, please review our playlist and other resources.
Series Contributors

Maggie Carey

Danielle Drake
Danielle Drake, Ph.D., is Program Chair, Associate Professor, and an alum of the Counseling Psychology Expressive Arts Therapy program at CIIS. She received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Fielding Graduate University, where her dissertation explored the use of creativity and spirituality among African Americans. Her research led to an initial validation of the Black Spiritual Creativity Scale (BSCS) which is now used in several research projects and studies. Her post-doctoral internship at the Rafiki Coalition focused on holistic health and wellness in the Bayview/Hunters Point community of San Francisco.
Dr. Drake’s clinical work engages clients in creative writing, music, and visual arts processes. She has also worked in Human Resources as a corporate recruiter and HR administrator, and in nonprofit management as a Grant Writer, Fund Developer, Program Director, and Executive Director. She is the author of Cast Iron Life: A Collection of Poems and Recipes, a spoken word artist, a former Oakland Poetry Slam Champion, and the host of a Public Programs conversation with Angela Davis.

SuEllen Hamkins
SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist and author, as well as queer, cis-gender white woman who loves to dance, swim and lie around the living room with her partner, kids and friends. SuEllen’s passion is helping people cultivate their values and strengths in the face of challenges and difficulties. She fell in love with narrative therapy after attending a workshop by Michael White in 1998 and dove into intensive training in narrative therapy at the Family Institute of Cambridge. Since then, SuEllen has sought to bring narrative practices to the professional and personal arenas of her life, including narrative psychiatry, narrative approaches to college student mental health and narrative-informed activism to help mothers, daughters and their relationships flourish. SuEllen’s narrative peer supervision group, with whom she has met for twenty years, has provided treasured guidance and support in staying true to the core values of narrative therapy. Her book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry, published by Oxford University Press, 2013, offers a lively and practical introduction to bringing narrative practices to work with people facing mental health challenges, identifying emotional attunement as a key feature of narrative practice. For thirty years, SuEllen has worked as a psychiatrist for college and university counseling centers. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry UMass Chan Medical School and cherishes her role providing psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment to medical students and teaching narrative therapy and offering psychotherapy supervision to psychiatry residents. SuEllen is a co-founder and co-author of The Mother-Daughter Project, and has created a series of videos on helping mothers and daughter thrive. As a faculty member of Reauthoring Teaching, SuEllen gave the 2015 workshop, Working with people facing severe and persistent problems, and has presented at the Collab Salon.

Gerald Monk

Laure Maurin
Laure trained in narrative therapy at the Fabrique Narrative in Bordeaux, in Paris and with David Epston, David Denborough and Jill Freedman. She accompanies young people and teenagers in narrative therapy. Laure has been practicing yoga for over twenty years, trained at the French Yoga School for four years, and leads meditation and yoga workshops. She likes to accompany people with disabilities through body language and narrative practices. She hopes that each person can find, at his or her own pace, a better knowledge of his or her body, breath and being in its entirety.
Laure conducts workshops in France and Belgium to train narrative practitioners in her work.For the past three years, she has created a method of conversation based on the relationship one has with his body, linking her practice of narrative ideas, and her experience in yoga and hypnosis. She first proposes a narrative conversation about the relationship the person has with their body, following this conversation and after a protocol of re-association of the person with their body.She then interviews the body, as an outsider witness of the conversation it has just heard.At the end of the interview, the person in turn reacts to the words of the body that she has just heard.

David Pare
David has maintained a mindfulness practice for the past 30 years. Along with Ian Percy, he co-presented a Collab Salon on Narrative & Mindfulness Practice, which is now available to Collab members in our library of Past Salons. We are thrilled to welcome David & Ian as co-presenters for a June 13, 2017 workshop in Shelburne Vermont: Integrating Mindfulness & Narrative Practice.

Ian Percy

Lynne Rosen

Shona Russell
Shona Russell (Adelaide, South Australia) made narrative approaches to therapy and community work her focus for 25 years through her work in non-government organizations and in independent practice. Along with Gaye Stockell and Peggy Sax, Shona presented two workshops in Vermont, and is involved in the development of our Rich Story Development series. She 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 taught workshops on narrative supervision for many years and was particularly interested in bringing to life the practices of narrative therapy in supervision contexts. She has authored and co-authored a range of articles. While Shona is now retired, her influence on our field will continue for many years into the future.

Shoshana Simons
Shoshana Simons, (she/her/femme) PhD, RDT (Registered Drama Therapist) is a Professor and former Program Chair of CIIS’s MA in Counseling Psychology, Expressive Arts Concentration, and Interim Chair of the Community Mental Health Concentration, where she teaches Family & Couple Dynamics, Multicultural Counseling & the Therapeutic Relationship & Narrative Expressive Arts Family Therapy, a voice actor and arts-based coach & consultant with Key of Life Academy. She is also adjunct faculty at the Northwest Creative & Expressive Arts Institute, Seattle, WA, where she offers a Certificate in NarrARTive Expressive Arts in Coaching. Shoshana has 35+ years of experience working in multicultural settings with children and adults in the fields of play, education, antiracism, counseling psychology, organizational development, and community work.
Originally from London, UK, Shoshana came to the USA in 1990 to complete a clinical traineeship at The Stone Center, Wellesley College, MA. She returned to the Stone Center in 1998 as Training Director for The Open Circle Program, training elementary school teachers to implement a ground-breaking SEL curriculum using a whole systems approach.
Shoshana has worked as a therapist in the UK and USA. She has taught in the fields of counseling psychology and intercultural relations at Goddard College, VT, University of Vermont, and Lesley University, MA.
Shoshana’s interests include narrative and systemic expressive arts practices, indigenous healing traditions, Jewish mysticism and Jewish shamanic healing, the role of expressive arts in leadership, and arts-based research methods.
Shoshana holds a MA degree in Sociology & Social Policy from London Metropolitan University, a MA degree in Human Development, and a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems from The Fielding Graduate Institute, CA. She graduated from the Omega Transpersonal Drama Therapy Program in Boston, MA and Wisdom of the Whole Coaching Academy.

Navid Zamani
There are threads in my life that have been constant, and initiatives that have developed due to opportunities at the time and/or my location. Music has always been a big part of my life, and I continue to enjoy playing the piano/keys and the drum kit. I am an avid surfer, and enjoy outdoor activities with my wife, such as camping, hiking and biking around San Diego. Reading and writing have always been a pleasure of mine, and academia became a natural fit in this way. Gardening is also one of my obsessions and I also really love my dog. All of these hobbies are situated within a framework of experiences that come along with identifying as a heterosexual male, an Iranian-American and the experiences of biculturalism that accompany that, my ability to speak Farsi and English, my education, and the values I hold.
I grew up observing the charitableness of my family, and connected with the sense of urgency and gratitude that they experienced from helping others. I watched my mom always donate her time and money to the underprivileged and underserved. I watched my aunts (who are educators in Iran) advocate and stand up for students who often didn’t have a voice. I am continuously grounded by the love and compassion my wife models in her daily life. I truly believe that my community’s health impacts my health, and I am dedicated in supporting those in need.”

Narrative Practice & Somatic-Oriented Therapies
First Course in Series
The first course in our series builds on our deep respect for the evolution of Narrative Therapy while creating spaces for an interplay with other treasured approaches to working with people experiencing serious difficulties in their lives and relationships. Please join us as we honor our narrative roots while bringing forward specific therapeutic practices that engage narrative meaning-making while cultivating healing embodied experiences. Integrative work opens up possibilities for responding to habits of the body, re-contextualizing dilemmas, engaging moral imagination, and re-populating lives in ways that support agency and movement toward preferences for living and relating. Through six lessons, we draw from philosophy and practices associated with The Affective Turn, bringing together understandings of rich story development, trauma and its effects, memory theory, attunement practices, and applications of mindfulness, EMDR, and somatic therapies. We strongly recommend taking this course before the second course in the series.
The following link will take you to our draft course now under active construction.
Em-BODY-ing Conversations:
Integrating Narrative Practice, EMDR, and Somatic-oriented Practices
Second Course in Series
Severe and early trauma seems to rob clients of memories and cast sensations, images and memories as the enemy, and can disconnect people from what has shaped moral virtues, intentions, and a sense of “myself” across time. we explore how integrating alternative approaches can make visible the complexities of lived experiences, allowing for the discovery of different metaphors, new associations and a shift in a felt sense of bodily experiences. These discoveries help reinvigorate a re-connection with moral virtues, a language for inner life, and new possibilities for action and movement in accordance with cherished intentions, values, hopes, dreams, beliefs, purposes and commitments. When the language of sensations, images, and memories are engaged in this way, people—with child-like creativity—connect with real and imagined allies, responsibility for abuse is assigned where it belongs, and preferred solutions and subordinate stories emerge. This sense of “aliveness” and agency creates new possibilities for relating.
Lynne Rosen
This course will explore on Lynne Rosen’s approach to integrating alternative approaches that can make visible the complexities of lived experiences, allowing for the discovery of different metaphors, new associations and a shift in a felt sense of bodily experiences. With a keen interest in the social construction of identities and the politics of experience, Lynne will bridge cherished narrative ideas and practices with understandings of EMDR and somatic therapies. 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.
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