Our Approach to Customized Training
As experienced practitioners and teachers, our trainings build on narrative therapy’s philosophical foundations, key concepts, and ethical considerations. We enjoy sharing our narrative training knowledge and working together to tailor our offerings to your request. With deep respect for our mentors, we honor the spirit of adventure and innovation envisioned by cofounders Michael White and David Epston, setting the stage to explore new horizons in attending to affect, the body, the effects of trauma, and intercultural considerations in our narrative work with people experiencing difficulties in their lives and relationships. Leaning into various backgrounds, we enjoy cross-pollinating with the arts and other cherished approaches.
Through stories, recorded interviews, and transcripts, we can illustrate narrative therapy in action, including the narrative metaphor, double-listening, the role of questions in narrative inquiry, practices that divide the person from the problem, counter-storying, staying close to the idea that people are the experts of their own lives and witnessing practices that link lives and build community. We pay particular attention to the two-way effects of these powerful conversations that, while counseling others, profoundly shape our lives. As experienced interviewers, we especially love requests that include opportunities to interview people in your work context.
Since 2008, we have explored online possibilities for “Creating a Collaboratory.” While we love meeting in person, we have been exploring Zoom for more than a decade to bring together people worldwide around a particular topic. We also love opportunities to work together in different combinations, with deep respect for our teammates’ unique experiences, knowledge, and callings to what intrigues us and what we enjoy passionately.
Meet our Training Team
We are a team of experienced narrative therapy practitioners across generations offering an engaging, collaborative approach to counseling with individuals, couples, families, and communities. While we love teamwork, we can also respond to a request for an individual trainer. Please give us a topic, and we can work together to customize training for you!
Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin
Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin, Ph.D., directs Skills for Kids, Parents & Schools (SKIPS), a 9-month intense narrative therapy, neurobiology, and mindfulness training program in California where she works with children, adults, families, and school communities. Before immersing herself in narrative therapy in the early 1990s, Marie-Nathalie had trained in Human Biology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. She now brings together fields that have influenced her life and work for the last 30 years, and as a result, has pioneered narrative clinical practices to respond to distressing emotions and traumatic experiences. She has written over 50 professional articles and many books, such as the popular The SKiLL-ionaire in Every Child: Boosting Children’s Socio-emotional Skills using the latest in Brain Research (2010), written for parents, teachers, and counselors (French, English, Spanish). She has also co-authored Collaborative Therapies and neurobiology: Evolving practices in action (Beaudoin & Duvall, 2017), and Mindfulness in a busy world: Lowering barriers for youth & adults to cultivate focus, emotional peace & gratefulness (Beaudoin & Maki, 2021). Her latest book, which was co-authored with Gerald Monk and published by WW Norton, is Narrative Practices and Emotions: 40+ Ways to Support the Emergence of Flourishing Identities. It combines her lifelong passion for the immense possibilities inherent to our bodies and brains with novel narrative practices inspired by Interpersonal Neurobiology, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Positive Psychology. With a background in improvisational theater and dance, Marie-Nathalie is well-known for her thought-provoking and engaging presentations
SuEllen Hamkins
SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist specializing in college mental health and narrative therapy. Her passion is helping people thrive in the face of challenges and difficulties. Her book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013), offers detailed guidance in resiliency-focused, culturally-attuned, collaborative mental health practice, bringing narrative approaches alive through vivid case reports. As Clinical Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School, she cherishes her role in providing psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment to students, as well as offering psychotherapy supervision. She is a co-founder and co-author of The Mother-Daughter Project. SuEllen has presented at professional conferences around the world.
Sarah Beth Hughes
Sarah Beth Hughes works as a Couple and Family Therapist in Nelson, BC Canada. She was introduced to Narrative ideas through her work as the North American Distributor of Dulwich Publications throughout the 1990’s. She got the privilege of attending many of Michael White’s training and got inspired to do this kind of work herself. Along the way she also met many of Michael’s colleagues and friends including Peggy Sax who have helped her feed her passion for this work.
Charley Lang
Poh Lin Lee
Rocio Ocampo-Giancola
Rocio was born in Mexico. As a young child, Rocio migrated to California and lived as an undocumented person in California. Rocio's status and journey as an immigrant have informed her work with communities in California. Rocio has been involved in community work for most of her life. She obtained her master's in counseling in 2006 from San Diego State University and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, She is passionate about questioning colonial practices in mental health and depathologizing mental health practices. For many years, Rocio worked at a non-profit community clinic, helping serve the most marginalized and impoverished communities. She has extensive practice with adolescents, having been a school counselor for 15 years. Rocio also provided short-term therapy for 15 years at an immigrant detention facility. Rocio has provided training, served as an adjunct professor, and supervised and worked with families and children. Helping people on the brink of Suicide and listening to people process sexual assault and trauma has been a focus of her work. Rocio is passionate about using narrative inquiry and practices while she supervises and trains future therapists at a women's substance facility where women are trying to reclaim their lives from substance use. She currently has a private practice and works with youth, their families, and individuals seeking to live a life they prefer. Rocio enjoys time on the beach, baking with her husband and daughters, and walking her dog Sahara.
marcela polanco
My ancestry es Muisca, African and South European de Colombia. Como inmigrante en los United States (U.S.), I am a part of the faculty team in the family therapy and Spanglish decolonial healing programs at San Diego State university located in Kumeyay land. Mi trabajo de supervisión, teaching, research, and therapy in my immigrant English are informed by the Australasian narrative therapy and U.S. Black feminism. En my Español Colombiano y Spanglish, I am particularly interested in Andean decoloniality, decolonial feminismos and Chicanx borderland activismo as a response to Eurocentrism. I am a practicing licensed Marriage and Family Therapist en los Estados de California and Texas and Supervisor.
Lynne Rosen
Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Pasadena, California) has been engaged in therapeutic work for over 36 years in medical, residential, inpatient, community, and private practice settings. She found her therapeutic and philosophical home in the early 90s when she traveled to New York to hear Michael White and David Epston. During the past several decades, she has focused her attention on integrating somatic-inspired EMDR, Somatic Therapies, and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) with a Narrative approach in a way that remains philosophically and ethically aligned. Lynne has worked toward unsettling Western ideologies and practices related to body-based/somatic therapies and ecotherapy, moving toward more inclusive anti-racist and decolonizing practices and cultural somatics. Co-constructing different kinds of scaffolding using sensations, images/visual metaphors, dreams, radical imagination, and memories in less linear ways creates space for greater agency, reclamation, a sense of aliveness, and new possibilities for relating to ourselves, community members, and the other-than-human world. An Embodying Conversations course is in process for Re-Authoring Teaching. Lynne 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).
Peggy Sax
Kitty Thatcher
Akansha Bye-Vaswani
Akansha Vaswani-Bye, PhD is a licensed counseling psychologist born and raised in Mumbai and currently lives in Seattle. She is a principal faculty member in the SPIRIT (Supporting Psychosis Innovation through Research, Implementation, & Training) Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Her current research and training efforts are focused on developing and supporting the family peer community who care for loved ones living with the effects of problematic psychotic states. She is also an attending psychologist at an HIV primary care clinic located in a public hospital in Seattle. She is leading and co-leading research projects that are adapting a single-session narrative therapy approach aimed at improving access to mental health care among people living with HIV and at risk for HIV in integrated and community-based care settings. As a doctoral scholar, her research focused on the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in psychiatry due to academic-industry relationships and solutions for reform. She was first introduced to narrative practices when she worked at Ummeed Child Development Center in Mumbai where she was fortunate to learn these ideas from Peggy Sax, Shona Russell, Maggie Carey, and Jehanzeb Baldiwala. She has been a Board Member of Re-Authoring Teaching since 2016.
Navid Zamani
Navid Zamani, PhD is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in supporting Middle Eastern refugees dealing with domestic violence. As a Persian-American based in San Diego, CA, he integrates decolonial poststructural feminism within a narrative therapy framework. Dr. Zamani also serves as a lecturer at San Diego State University and is the Clinical Director at License to Freedom, a nonprofit organization focused on helping Middle Eastern refugees impacted by domestic violence. He provides clinical supervision to a team of therapist trainees at License to Freedom. His research and scholarship emphasizes the role of affect in narrative therapy, working with couples experiencing violence and high conflict, and linguistic justice for multilingual communities.