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The Brief Therapy Institute of Sydney will be offering a program of training again in 2012.
The two-day course Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A Comprehensive Introduction will be offered on four occasions in Parramatta, once in Orange, in the Central-West of NSW, and at least once in Melbourne.
Dates for these courses are available HERE. Please note that the February course in Parramatta is already filling rapidly.
Other training details and dates will be available soon.
Solution-Focused Training in Melbourne 2012
In 2012, we will be offering the two-day course Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A Comprehensive Introduction in Melbourne in late April. This follows the course running successfully in Melbourne twice in 2011.
This course will be particularly suitable for psychologists, social workers, counsellors, mental health nurses and others who may already have had some exposure to Solution-Focused Brief Therapy but would benefit from a comprehensive framework for conceptualising and practising the approach. The course rests on a number of REAL clinical examples which demonstrate the application of the various Solution-Focused techniques.
The course will be held on 26 & 27 April at The Centre Ivanhoe. Walking distance from Ivanhoe station, the venue is convenient for public transport and also has on-site parking.
Details are available HERE
Frances Huber presents at European Brief Therapy Conference
Brief Therapy Institute Senior Associate, Frances Huber, presented a workshop at the European Brief Therapy Conference, in Dresden, Germany, last October. The conference venue was the historic church, Dreikönigskirche, in Dresden. Originally the capital city for the kings of Saxony, Dresden is an historic city on the banks of the Elbe River, with baroque architecture and a colourful history. It is also only a couple of hours from Prague in the Czech Republic (and Frances, along with Michael Durrant and Ian Johnsen, spent a couple of days exploring Prague before the conference).
Along with Swedish colleague, Dr Harry Korman, Frances' presentation was "To break, or not to break ... THAT is the question". Frances and Harry explored the role and power of the "end-of-session break" in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy — the break that therapists sometimes take towards the end of the session, before returning and giving the end-of-session summary, or "message", to the client.
The break stems from the days when therapists routinely worked with teams, behind a one-way mirror. However, both Harry and Frances routinely take an end-of-session break, although they rarely, if ever, have a team.
Frances reviewed the history and development of "the break" and suggested we might make sense of it in terms of cognitive psychology's research about the "primacy and recency effect" — that is, in any encounter or episode, we are most likely to remember the last (or most recent) aspects or information and the first (primacy) aspects. Thus, how we finish a therapy session, and how we start a therapy session, may be the two most important considerations in terms of what will have ongoing impact for the client — hence our emphasis on our opening question (Harry Korman refers to it as the Common Project question — "How will you know that coming and talking to me has been helpful for you?") and on the final summary or message — the break and what we say after the break..
Frances and Harry both talked about their own experiences of taking a break and the various ways in which they find it helpful. Harry talked about how a client described the importance of the break ... "It made me know that you cared!"
Frances shared the preliminary results of a qualitative research study she has done — how do clients experience me taking a break in our therapy sessions?
At the end of the third session, clients were asked, "You remember that, each time we have met, I have taken a short break towards the end of our session, thought about what you'd said to me and then come back and shared some ideas with you. You know that I find it helpful to take that break. I'm wondering how helpful my taking that break has been FOR YOU."
"On a scale of 0 to 10, where zero is 'Not helpful at all' and 10 is 'Extremely helpful', how helpful TO YOU has my taking a break towards the end of each of our sessions been?"
With an initial sample of 18 clients, the average rating of how helpful the break was, was 8.6.
CLIENTS found it helpful that the therapist took a break!
Details of all the things clients said were helpful will be forthcoming.
A longer version of this report is available in the NEWS section of our web site.
Solution-Focused Training in Orange 2012
In 2012, we will be offering the two-day course Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A Comprehensive Introduction in Orange in June.
This course will be particularly suitable for psychologists, social workers, counsellors, mental health nurses and others who may already have had some exposure to Solution-Focused Brief Therapy but would benefit from a comprehensive framework for conceptualising and practising the approach — or who have had no previous exposure to the approach. The course rests on a number of REAL clinical examples which demonstrate the application of the various Solution-Focused techniques.
Details are available HERE
Allan Wade workshop EXTREMELY successful!
100 people squeezed into a conference room at SMC Conference Centre, in the city of Sydney, for two days early last December, to hear Dr Allan Wade from Canada. Allan's workshop, "Small Acts of Living: Violence, Resistance and the Power of Language" was widely praised as informative, entertaining and extremely useful.
In his irreverent, but simultaneously profoundly respectful style, Allan took people on a journey through philosophy, the mechanics of language and its constructive power and the practicalities of having MEANINGFUL conversations with people who have experienced violence.
Allan's major thesis is that the language we use — in talking with our clients — but ALSO in talking with colleagues and other professionals, in writing reports, and so on — has a profound effect on people's experience and perspective.
In particular, Allan demonstrated how a focus on "the effects of the violence" or "the impact of the violence" is profoundly different from a focus on "responses to the violence".
Thus, if we consider the effects of violence and abuse, our language constructs the person who endured the violence as a passive "thing". However, if we consider how the person RESPONDED to the violence, we are curious about what the person DID and, in particular, about the ways in which they showed RESISTANCE to the violence ... and our language is constructing them as an agent, which is a much more helpful perspective.
Further, Allan and his colleagues suggest that Resistance is ubiquitous — if we explore carefully, we will always discover that people who experience violence have resisted in some way. This focus may lead to the possibility of ways in which the person has maintained her or his dignity even in the face of the perpetrator's efforts to remove it.
Allan showed video of actual interviews with people who had experienced violence or oppression in which the story of being a victim of the effects of the violence was transformed into a story of being someone who took action, resisted and maintained (at least internally) some dignity. Participants saw how such stories became empowering for the people involved.
Allan also examined the ways in which the language we use to describe violent acts conveys a great deal of assumption about the nature if the acts. For example, he contrasted the descriptions "... and he kissed her." with "... and he forced his mouth onto her lips and forced his tongue into her mouth." In the first description, the verb "kissed" refers to a mutual, sexual action. In the second, the verb "forced" refers to a unilateral, violent action.
This is only one example of the way that the descriptions we use affect the implicit understanding of the action we are seeking to describe.
Participants' feedback
Workshop participants were asked for feedback on the two days.
On two scales, they rated the workshop highly. "Overall, how helpful was this workshop?" — mean rating was 9.3. "How much do you think the ideas discussed in the workshop will make a difference in your work?" mean rating was 8.9.
More from Allan
Plans are under way for Allan to return to Sydney later in 2012 and present again. We will keep you posted!
A longer version of this report — including some detailed participants' comments — is available in the NEWS section of our web site.
The Brief Therapy Institute of Sydney has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with Compass Ltd for the last six years. Compass is New Zealand's leading professional development training provider for professionals who work with Children, Young People and Families.
Over the last six years, Michael has presented a one-day seminar in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy on eighteen different occasions, in different cities around the country. The three-day "Intensive" course has been sold-out all ten times it has been offered — in Dunedin, Hamilton, Christchurch, Auckland, Palmerston North and Wellington. In 2010 and 2011, Michael also conducted two-day training, Supervision: Building Strengths, Developing Competence. This course was sold-out each time it was offered.
In 2012, Michael will be conducting further Solution-Focused Brief Therapy training — AND supervision training — in New Zealand for Compass.
Details HERE.
Read our previous newsletter — August 2011.
Go to main Brief Therapy Institute of Sydney web site.
Details of training are available on our web site at http://www.brieftherapysydney.com.au
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THANK YOU for your support of the Brief Therapy Institute of Sydney ... and for reading this far!
