Training Topics:  Children, Adolescents and Families

If your organisation is interested in approaching me for teaching on children and adolescents, please review the descriptions below of the one or two day presentation topics. You might prefer to use a combination of these workshops or presentations in order to meet the particular needs of your group.

​Making Change Stick in the Work with Children, Young People and Families:
3 one day workshops introducing family work

​The workshop series consists of 3 one day workshops. Participation in a consultation group held between workshops is highly recommended.
Practitioners often avoid working with families. This avoidance is based on a number of fears, such as the fear of being overwhelmed by the number of people with conflicting opinions, the fear of the child being silenced by the adults present, and the fear that parents and/or the young person will say things that are hurtful and damage an already vulnerable relationship.

In these workshops I will support you to feel more confident when working with families. I will do this by demonstrating the following:
  • A systemic, relational enquiry process that provides family members with a new perspective.
  • Ways to playfully engage with young people in the Family context.
  • A process to assist you to address blame and shame.
  • Ways to orientate the conversation toward discovering and using family and individual resources to address problems.

​Introducing  Family Work: Part 1
I am convinced that children and young people are more likely to make sustainable changes when family members or significant carer’s support this change. I have developed these 3 workshops and a consultation group to assist you to feel less overwhelmed and more excited by the prospect of meeting with families.
 
Part One will introduce you to 6 key processes:
  1. Welcoming family members and setting the scene for the conversation
  2. Connecting with each family members willingness to participate in this conversation.
  3. Orienting the conversation toward the families hopes, resources and strengths
  4. Establishing agreement regarding the issues and concerns
  5. Use of age appropriate meaning making tools to ensure full participation of children and young people.
  6. Use of a relational and systemic orientationto generate change promoting possibilities.
​
These 6 processes sound simple however each process requires a relational and systemic perspective. This workshop will highlight the skills that generates this perspective.

​Introducing Family Work: Part 2.
In the ‘Introducing Family Work: Part 2’ workshop, you will be introduced to another 6 processes that are essential for effective family work. I will be discussing and demonstrating the skills that support the following processes.
  • Identifying differences that make a difference, over time.
  • Using the present moment experiential effect of those differences to create new or stronger narrative threads. Strengthening the effect of these differences through a contextual exploration.
  • Identify restraints to change.
  • Review commitment to change.
  • Use the imagination to experiment with change.
  • Draw conversation threads together to create a narrative construction that supports change outside the therapy room. 

​Introducing Family Work: Part 3.
Participation in part 1 and 2, will have increased the confidence you feel when meeting and working with families. Part 3, has a focus on using a variety of mediums to support and make change. I will demonstrate and you will practise noticing   opportunities to playfully use the imagination as a wonderful therapeutic resource.

We will focus on the following:
  • The power of metaphor
  • Story-making and story-telling
  • The transforming potential of play, music and the visual arts
  • An after-session reflection process for practitioners
 
Through this workshop I will draw on examples of the therapeutic work around common concerns, such as fears, worries, anger, stealing.

Group Super-Vision for Participants in the ‘Introducing Family Work’ Workshops.
​There is a significant gap between the 3 workshops. This will hopefully encourage you to practice the skills we have discussed before we meet again. I would also encourage you to join a consultation group that I facilitate. This group will meet between workshops. A change in practice is more likely to occur with support and supporters. A consultation group will hopefully provide this for you.

​Managing Difficult Conversations: finding a point of agreement when parents hold opposing versions of events. 

Half day presentation.
​Practitioners often struggle when they meet with people who have very different versions of an incident, an experience or even the history of the relationship. This presentation will focus on the work with parents where the couple relationship has ended and one parent or an organisation has expressed a concern about a child or children.

In this presentation, I will describe the key strategies I use to invite parents to take up parental responsibility while challenging processes of blame, anger and retribution.
This presentation will highlight practical strategies to address the following -:
  • Constructing a therapeutic process by effectively managing conflict
  • Inviting participation where the focus is on the wellbeing of the child rather than on the past couple relationship. This requires the therapist to do the following -:
    1. Establish a commitment to Parenting v’s replaying the ‘old’ couple injuries.
    2. ​Remaining alert to the appearance of any old relationship injuries.
    3. Reorientating the conversation toward the agreed priorities.
  • Developing strategies to protect the children and the parenting relationship from the emergence of strong feelings attributed to the demise of the couple relationship
  • Creating ways to manage feelings of powerlessness when parents are unable to directly influence the other parents behaviour or priorities.

Using Play, Stories, Letter Writing in the work with Children and their Families

A one day workshop for practitioners working with children 5-12 years and their families.
The imagination can act as a vehicle through which children express the difficulties they’ve encountered while experimenting with change.  This workshop will focus on playfully constructing change.

Running from Fear

A 2 day workshop for practitioners working with children and young people.
Over the years I have worked with children and young people who display an extraordinary sensitivity to tensions most of us have learnt to ignore. These tensions are produced through the following:
  • An exceptional imaginative and empathetic engagement with  the pain of other’s
  • Contradictions between what is said by adults and what is enacted or emotionally expressed
  • Experiences and strong feelings that remain nameless
  • A dissonance between the external world and direct experience e.g. ‘I have so much yet I feel so unhappy, what’s wrong with me?’ or ‘Everyone has said it’s not my fault yet it feels like I am at fault’.
 
Children and young people who are ‘Running from fears’ are often suffering with  anxiety, profound sadness, obsessive behaviour  and outburst of anger.
 
In this 2 day workshop we will explore the processes that assist us to name the unnamed with children and young people. These processes include the following:
  • story making and working with the story
  • creating a climate of experimentation and discovery
  • developing practical supports  for change.
 
Although ‘Running from Fear’ is  a serious issue, this workshop like the therapeutic work I am representing, will engender optimism and hopefully laughter as well as tears.

Listening for Difference  with Young People and their Families

​A one day workshop for practitioners working with adolescents and their families.
Unusual statements young people make can be challenging and confusing, subsequently glossed over or pathologised. Yet when we work from the premise that all language is metaphoric, therapists can use these moments to discover the world a young person is inhabiting and the resources such words contain for change.

In this workshop I will demonstrate the skills that help:
  • shift the way we listen
  • develop an enquiry porcess that sidesteps side taking with parents or advocating for the child
  • evoking young people's imagination
  • resource families for change