A604 Narrative Therapy: The Clinical Legacy of Michael White

Many popular current therapies, including mindfulness-based and cognitive approaches, encourage us to become aware of the constant conversations inside our brains. But few locate the source of these self-defeating, critical, and exhausting stories anywhere but in our family life and early experience. By contrast, in Narrative Therapy, Michael White pioneered a way of investigating the hidden political, familial, and institutional influences behind our “private” internal conversations. This Telecourse will explore the practical therapeutic legacy of his work by focusing on the seven foundations of narrative therapy, including how to ask questions that get clients curious about how they get seduced into doing the biddings of a culture obsessed with striving and consumption. You’ll also learn how to externalize conversations, use “feed-forward” and redescription questions, and employ therapeutic letter-writing in your practice.

Meet The Instructor

Stephen Madigan, M.S.W., Ph.D., opened the first Narrative Therapy training clinic in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s presently writing a book about Narrative Therapy for the American Psychological Association and developing a seven-part DVD series showcasing his Narrative Therapy work with clients. His newest book, Chitter-Chatter: The Eight Conversational Habits of Highly Effective Problems, will be out in 2009.

Course Contents

Session 1: Explanation of Narrative Therapy • Brief history of Michael White and his work • Reconsidering ideas about identity • How to help clients avoid privatizing their problems within their bodies

Session 2: Understandings externalizing conversations • Mapping the influence of problems on clients and relationships • Navigating unique outcomes • Bringing forth alternative stories

Session 3: Asking Narrative Therapy questions to draw out redescriptions of clients’ problems and elicit new viewpoints about future activities • Understanding the grammar, construction, and meaning of narrative questions

Session 4: Michel Foucault and the three objectifications of the self • Considering how structural inequalities and issues of power and culture are central to our understanding and treatment of problems

Session 5: Using the written word in therapy: therapeutic letters, therapeutic letter-writing campaigns, summits of remembering • Establishing “counter” files • Understanding the sociohistorical context of clients’ narratives

Session 6: Outside-witness practices: The vital contribution of the “audience” to the re-development of the language of inner life

Learning Objectives

1. Acquire a basic understanding of Narrative Therapy theory and how to put it into practice
2. Demonstrate the importance of narrative questions to Narrative Therapy
3. Find new ways to explain identity, problems, and the function of therapy