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Narrativ Praksis Bergen

Terapeutiske samtaler Konferanse 4.-6. mai 2022

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Image by Lachlan Gowen

KONFERANSEN ER FULLTEGNET! 

Den tredje Nordiske Narrative Konferanse

Bergen, Norge
4.-6. mai 2022

KONFERANSEN ER UTSOLGT.

Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy &

Narrativ Praksis Bergen presenterer:

Teaching Faculty: Mwamini Ali-Sivertsen (Norway), Rosa Arteaga (Canada), Stein Roger Brønseth (Norway), Erling Fidjestøl (Norway), Helene Grau (Denmark), Cecilie Kristiansen (Norway), Cecilie Erichsen Lærkerød (Norway), Stephen Madigan (Canada), David Marsten (USA), Gunnar Martinsen (Norway), Todd May (USA), Aaron Munro (Canada), Ottar Ness (Norway), David Nylund (USA), Siv Sæveraas (Norway), Rolph Sundet (Norway), Dina von Heimburg (Norway). 


Litteraturhuset i Bergen, Østre Skostredet 5, 5017

Bergen, Norway


Max 220 deltakere

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Hjem: Pro Gallery

4. Mai 2022

Dag 1

May 4, Day 1

(Registration 7:45am-8:45am)

MORNING: CONFERENCE TRAINING WORKSHOPS

9:00am – 11:45am

~ Lunch 12:00pm – 1:15pm 

WELCOME: Narrativ Praxis Bergen 

1:00pm-1:30pm

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

1:30pm - 2:15pm

AFTERNOON TRAINING WORKSHOPS

2:30pm – 4:30pm

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MORNING TRAINING WORKSHOPS

9:00am – 11:45am


Workshop A) Foundations of Narrative Therapy Practice

Erling Fidjestøl MA (Norway)

Helene Grau MA (Denmark) 

Stephen Madigan PhD (Canada)

Erling, Helene and Stephen draw upon thousands of Narrative Therapy practice hours to help guide conference participants towards a clear understanding of key political ideas and therapeutic practices at the heart of narrative therapy interviewing. Participants experience Narrative Therapy practice ‘up close’ through client session videos.


Workshop B) Tree of Life: Connecting through Shared Humanity

Siv Sæveraas MA (Norway)


Siv shares her critical intercultural therapy experiences from an impoverished neighbourhood in Nairobi Kenya where she proposed a Tree of Life narrative therapy approach to reach beyond cultural differences and stereotypes. In this workshop Siv skillfully challenges dominant discourses on cultural competence, while exploring shared humanity as a resource in intercultural therapy.

Workshop C) Narrative Therapy with Children and Families (1)

Cecilie Erichsen Lærkerød BA (Norway) 

David Marsten MSW (USA)


Cecilie and David guide participants through a skill based narrative therapy practice experience with children and families. Central ideas are highlighted from the acclaimed book David co-authored - Narrative Therapy in Wonderland: connecting with children’s imaginative know-how (2017). Participants are first led to question taken for granted therapeutic and dominant cultural assumptions about children, youth and mothers who come to therapy. Cecilie and David then demonstrates direct narrative therapy practice transcripts and videos to highlight the beauty, skill and complexity of this work.

~ Lunch 11:45pm – 1:00pm

CONFERENCE WELCOME: Narrativ Praxis Bergen

1:00pm-1:30pm

AFTERNOON OPENING KEYNOTE ADDRESS
1:30pm-2:15pm


Queer and Trans Theory Informed Narrative Therapy Practices
David Rock Nylund PhD (USA)

David presents his ground-breaking work of a Queer and Trans Theory informed narrative therapy practice. He highlights the issues of representation, homonormativity, transgender youth, trauma, violence, gender binaries and more through slides and video session interviews of his work. 

AFTERNOON TRAINING WORKSHOPS 
2:30pm – 4:30pm

Workshop D: A Philosophical Framework for Thinking About Narrative Therapy Practice
Todd May PhD (USA)

Without a solid understanding of continental philosopher Michel Foucault's theoretical framework, a therapist’s narrative therapy practice will be severely limited. VSNT resident philosopher Todd May makes it easy for participants to enter into the political and ideological complexities of Foucault’s idea, and offers explanations and questions for participants to re-think aspects of their narrative therapy practice and training.  Participants will also learn the all-important links between post-structural theory and narrative therapy practice.

Workshop E: Relational Welfare and Narrative Practice: Dignifying Lives and Practices for Persons with Mental Health Problems

Dina von Heimburg PhD (Norway)
Ottar Ness PhD (Norway)


Relational welfare is a human-centred and collaborative approach premised on human rights, social justice and societal sustainable development. Relational welfare means that welfare is a resource that people co-create together, where personal and collective relationships and environments are placed at the centre of development. Dina and Ottar discuss how narrative practice can promote better lives and communities for people struggling with mental health problems.

Workshop F: Applied Skills for Narrative Practice
Stephen Madigan (Canada)

Rock Nylund (USA)


Rock and Stephen teach participants up-close skill based learning through their LIVE and interactive demonstration narrative therapy counter-story interviews. They make use of a typist - who is typing each of their interview questions up on a screen for all participants to see, evaluate and learn from. After 8-10 questions are thoroughly studied, participants are asked to offer 'the next' interview question in the interview - and these are also typed up on the big screen, and thoroughly discussed. Learning to craft narrative questions is development through this unique style if supervision of participants questions in addition to therapeutic letter writing they will practice.

Hjem: Tekst

5. Mai 2022

Dag 2

MORNING KEYNOTE ADDRESS: 8:30am - 9:15am

MORNING: CONFERENCE TRAINING WORKSHOPS

9:30am- 12pm

~ Lunch 12:00pm – 1:15pm

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

1:15-2pm

AFTERNOON PANEL DISCUSSION WORKSHOPS

2:15pm – 3:30pm

AFTERNOON DISCUSSION WORKSHOPS

 3:45pm – 5:15pm

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MORNING KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

8:30am - 9:15am

Still Alive

Helene Grau (Denmark)

Helene guides participants through her exquisite narrative therapy informed relational interviewing practice that completely turns traditional psychological ideas about grief, loss and death - upside down. Her relationally informed narrative therapy practice involves crafting relational responses to parental and communal grief and loss after the death of a child. She demonstrates an interviewing process of re-storying loss, grief and death while cultivating the continued relationship between the living parents and the dead child.


MORNING TRAINING WORKSHOPS

9:30am – 12 noon


Workshop A) Working with Gender Violence: Rich Stories of Strength, Resistance, Justice and Unique Outcomes Moments

 Rosa Arteaga MA (Canada/Mexico)


Rosa introduces participants to her beautifully crafted narrative therapy informed, feminist, decolonizing practice approach to working with girls and women experiencing gender and sexualized violence. The workshop transports participants beyond current trauma informed practice trends and highlights her twenty years of direct practice as acting Clinical Supervisor of an experienced, all woman, narrative therapy inspired gender violence team in Vancouver, Canada.

Workshop B) Working Relationally and Contextually with Poverty, Homelessness, Drugs and Trauma

Aaron Munro MA (Canada)


The workshop is based entirely on Aaron's extraordinary stories as a queer/trans activist, Agency Director, brilliant mental health advocate and innovator. He introduces participants to his work over the past 18 years in Canadas’ poorest urban neighbourhood. He intends to guide you ‘out on to the streets’ to meet with the vibrant people he works with struggling in relationships with trauma, addiction, violence, poverty, opioid deaths, and mental health stigma.


Workshop C) Relationships are Relational: Relational Relationship Interviewing with Conflicted Couple Relationships 
Stephen Madigan, PhD (Canada)

Participants learn through an experiential closeup study of Stephen’s recent videos interviewing conflicted couple relationships filmed in Canada, Norway and the USA.  Both in theory and in practice his creation of narrative therapy informed Relational Interviewing is refreshingly original, completely relational, decidedly non-individualist and post-structural, and situated within compassion, cultural contexts, practiced values, and a little bit of common sense.


~ Lunch 12:00pm – 1:15pm

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

1:15 - 2pm

Self-Deception

 Todd May PhD (USA)


Most views about self-deception are rooted in psychoanalysis, which individualizes self-deception and neglects its social roots. Todd’s keynote offers a unique framework for thinking about self-deception from within a larger social context, allowing narrative practice to integrate the ideas without betraying the important understandings of the practice.

AFTERNOON PANEL DISCUSSION WORKSHOPS 
2:15pm – 3:30pm

Workshop 1) That’s a Good Question! (Part 1)

What is the significance of questions in narrative therapy? 
Mwamini Ali-Sivertsen BA (Norway), 
Cecilie Kristiansen BA (Norway)

Mwamini and Cecilie take participants through a riveting discussion about narrative therapy questions related to problems that bring clients into therapy, the use of metaphors, and how to relationally externalize internalized problems. 
(**Discussion presented in Norwegian)

Workshop 2) Bridging the Gap
Erling Fidjestøl MA (Norway),

Gunnar Martinsen  (Norway)

Participants are taught how to move therapeutic conversations  beyond the problem story and into the realms of alternative and preferred client stories. Presenters demonstrate narrative therapy through use of unaltered transcripts and video tape of their practice work. 
(**Discussion presented in Norwegian)

Workshop 3) Power Relations and Problems with Othering
Rosa Arteaga MA (Canada)
Aaron Munro MA (Canada)

Dichotomies of otherness are set up as being ‘natural’ and are taken for granted. But ‘social identities’ are not natural – they represent an established social order – a hierarchy where certain groups are established as being superior to other groups. Aaron and Rosa lead a reflective discussion on their work with refugees, homeless, queer and other marginalized persons and groups who are 'othered'.

AFTERNOON DISCUSSION WORKSHOPS 
3:45pm – 5:15pm

Workshop 4) New Therapeutic Letter Writing Practices
Nina Tejs Jorring MD (Denmark)

Nina will discuss her new book (published in 2022) and share how she uses therapeutic letters as a supervisor at mental health units and to psychiatry and family therapy trainees. The participants experience how therapeutic letter writing supports the individual author of the letters to formulate much better questions and to express themselves with respect and love through small and fun exercises. 

Workshop 5) That’s a Good Question! (Part 2)
Values and identity Making
Mwamini Ali-Sivertsen (BA (Norway), 
Cecilie Kristiansen BA (Norway)

Mwamini and Cecilie guide participants towards asking specific sets of narrative therapy questions related to the client stories behind A) Who were you before? B) Who are you today? C) Who do you see yourself becoming in the future? 
(**Discussion presented in Norwegian)

Workshop 6) Discussions on Difference and Identity
Todd May PhD (USA)
Rolph Sundet PhD (Norway)

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggests nothing has a stable identity and it is difference that precedes identity. Rolph and Todd discuss these ideas and what they might mean to the practice of narrative therapy.

Hjem: Tekst

6. Mai 2022

Dag 3

MORNING: CONFERENCE TRAINING WORKSHOPS

9:15am- 12pm

~ Lunch 12:00pm – 1:15pm

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

1:15-2pm

AFTERNOON

2:15pm – 4pm

CLOSING KEYNOTE

4:15PM – 5:15PM


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MORNING 9:15am – 12pm

Workshop A) Therapeutic Letter Writing + Live Demonstration Interview
Nina Tejs Jorring MD (Denmark),

David Rock Nylund PhD (USA)


Rock & Nina are some of narrative therapy's world class letter writers. They introduce conference participants to the historical roots, writing frameworks, unique practices and categories within the craft of therapeutic letter writing. They follow up their discussion with Rock doing a superbly textured Live counter-story interview demonstration with Nina responding. Participants are then invited into a Live practice experience of crafting their own therapeutic letter to the interviewee (In Norwegian or English) in response to the narrative therapy conversation they have just witnessed.


Workshop B) Relational Supervision with High Conflict Couple Therapy Teams

Elin Bjøru MA (Norway),

Stein-Roger Brønseth MA (Norway),

Stephen Madigan PhD (Canada)

Elin and Stein-Roger are Norwegian family therapists and senior members of the High Couple Conflict Team from Trondheim, Norway. For the past 5 years Stephen has worked as the Teams Supervisor. They discuss how the Team has come to value and more fully appreciates cultural and language differences in narrative therapy and supervision and their unique 5-step narrative therapy informed Relational Supervision model through videos of: Live therapy sessions, one way mirror Response Teams, the value and use of unaltered session transcripts, and more . . .

Workshop C) Narrative Therapy with Children and Families 

David Marsten MSW (USA)


The workshop demonstrates an incredibly textured and complex  relationally informed narrative therapy practice - focused on rich characterization of the story received by the therapist. Participants learn through David's new and original interviewing practice of darkening the landscape of therapy through the questions he asks. What this means is that rather than providing simple and unique solutions of hope, the way forward is to bring problems out in the open and up close by further darkening the client's relationship with the problem in order to bring forth more provocative distinctions, of difference.

~ Lunch 12:00pm – 1:15pm

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS– 1:15pm-2pm

Living-Experiences

 Aaron Munro MA (Canada)


The keynote explores Aaron’s lived experience as a trans man and how he unifies narrative therapy practice with mental health justice and activism. His experience has led him to many ‘mental health firsts’ in Canada – including opening the first trans youth homeless housing project in Canada and more recently, the first homeless trans adult housing project staffed entirely by trans identified people. Issues of poverty, racism, mental health stigma and finding novelty, creativity and integrity in the work are discussed.


AFTERNOON 2:15 pm – 4pm


Workshop D) Re-establishing Relationships with the Body: Narrative Conversations about Trauma & Violence

Rosa Arteaga MA (Canada/Mexico)

Cecilie Erichsen Lærkerød BA (Norway)


Cecilie begins by introducing conceptualizations of the body and imbedded experience through the complex philosophical ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whew!). Rosa then guides participants inside a distinctively new narrative therapy approach to working with girls and women survivors of gender and sexual violence. Putting all this together, participants experience a new theoretical, relational, political and contextual reconnection with the woman’s body and the practice of - directly interviewing the woman’s body.


Workshop E) Narrative Therapy with Couples and Children: Death, Grief and Loss

Helene Grau MA (Denmark)

Helene teaches participants practical skills and relational understandings when working with couples about grief, death, and loss through relational re-membering conversations. Her session transcripts with grieving couples demonstrate narrative practices that re-connect and enliven the dead child and contest, challenge and change what parents, the child, and the community experience about loss, grief and death.

Workshop F) Addressing the Effects of Bullying and Exclusion: Not alone but sharing together

Erling Fidjestøl MA (Norway)

Gunnar Martinsen  (Norway)


Four previously unacquainted girls (age 12 to 14) have all individually faced years of bullying and exclusion. Introduced to narrative practice ideas of definitional ceremony they have all accepted the invitation to come together in a shared sense of solidarity. Through videotape excerpts workshop participants receive a glimpse into the possibilities non-individualist narrative practices have to offer when working with problems that often leave therapists feeling impotent and powerless.

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4:15PM – 5:15PM

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Thinking With Deleuze: How to Move on in the Age of Evidenced Based Practice

Rolph Sundet PhD (Norway)


Collaboration is a necessary part of what is named as psychotherapy. At the same time political forces are strong in demanding that this collaboration must follow standardised principles embedded in a perspective on knowledge that puts a specific view on evidence at the centre. In this, the unique person seems to be lost in a Neoliberal haze using sameness as a central weapon. The keynote investigates the thinking of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the primacy of difference in itself can help us manoeuvre in this ideological landscape, and bring singularity and uniqueness as necessary parts of our collaborative work together with people in mental health services. 



FINAL WORDS AND THANKS FROM

NARRATIV PRAXIS BERGEN

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