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.
Trained in play, art, family, and feminist therapies, Jenny developed a “child-focused family therapy” model in conversation with families and with David Epston and Davida Cohen. She co-founded and guided Artist Therapists of Northern California, which fed into the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association. She pioneered an integrative process blending narrative therapy with multi-modal arts, and has invented family therapy games in collaboration with families. She joined a Samoan-lead team developing disaster relief services for families recovering from the 2009 tsunami.
Jenny has contributed to the literature on child and family therapy, with chapters in edited volumes for Guilford and Norton, and invited David Epson and Dean Lobovits to collaborate on Playful Approaches to Serous Problems: Narrative Therapy With Children
and Their Families (W.W. Norton 1997), now translated into several languages and widely used in university courses and programs. She developed a booklet and CD to assist children with sleep problems. Jenny collaborated on the development of ethics for narrative practice and is co-publisher of the website www.narrativeapproaches.com.
Jenny is passionately interested in integrating Narrative and Just therapies with Interpersonal Neurobiology, mindfulness, EMDR and Brain-spotting, and an array of Energy Psychology methods such as the Emotional Freedom Technique and The Emotion Code. She is currently focused on trauma treatment and holistic healing for illness.