Em-BODY-ing Conversations: Integrating EMDR and somatic-oriented practices...

Friday, October 12th: 9 AM - 5 PM

and

Saturday, October 13th: 9 AM - 1 PM

San Diego, CA

About the workshop:

Having started her training in a milieu that offered movement therapy, art therapy and psychodrama, Lynne’s appreciation for approaches that accessed wisdom outside of spoken language and story, has always been close at hand.

The intention of this workshop is to explore how we can put language and understanding around an integration that resonates both practically and philosophically, and that supports the social construction of identities and the politics of experience, while escaping recruitment into interiority ideas and binaries of body/mind, inside/outside, thinking/feeling and resources/deficits.

Through didactic presentation, experiential exercises and client tales, we will explore what becomes possible when we create different kinds of scaffolding using sensations, images and memories in non-discursive ways. What alternative forms of meaning making emerge that helps to re-contextualize dilemmas? How do we engage other relational stories, told by the habits and expressions of the body? How do Narrative Therapy practices influence how we use other modalities? What keeps us connected to curiosity, invitation, transparency, and client authorship, while resisting taking up expert ways of knowing?

Severe and early trauma seems to rob clients of memories and cast sensations, images and memories as the enemy, and can disconnect people from what has shaped moral virtues, intentions, and a sense of “myself” across time. We will explore how integrating alternative approaches can make visible the complexities of lived experiences, allowing for the discovery of different metaphors, new associations and a shift in a felt sense of bodily experiences. These discoveries help reinvigorate a re-connection with moral virtues, a language for inner life, and new possibilities for action and movement in accordance with cherished intentions, values, hopes, dreams, beliefs, purposes and commitments.

When the language of sensations, images, and memories are engaged in this way, people—with child-like creativity—connect with real and imagined allies, responsibility for abuse is assigned where it belongs, and preferred solutions and subordinate stories emerge. This sense of “aliveness” and agency creates new possibilities for relating.

(This workshop will draw from the work of Russell Meares, Lev Vygotsky, Micahel White, David Epston, Tom Andersen, Johnella Bird, Bessel Van der Kolk, Kenneth Gergen, Sandra Paulsen, Katie O’Shea, and Pat Ogden)

Biography:

Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Los Angeles, California) has been practicing therapy for over 28 years, and found her way to Narrative Therapy, her philosophical home, in the early 90’s. For many years, she was core faculty and director of the postmodern therapy training program at PGI and co-founder of WPLA, Women’s Project Los Angeles. She continues to enjoy teaching, training and supervising in many contexts. She aims to stay close to the message of her favorite African proverb: “Until lions have historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter” believing that in bringing forward lions tales, stories and experiences at the margins, there is wisdom and knowledge that can transport us all. She is working to create bridges, both practically and philosophically, between Narrative Therapy, IPNB, EMDR and Somatic Therapies in her work with those living with the effects of trauma and other difficulties that are corrosive of relational lives. Lynne is a Re-Authoring Teaching Faculty and Board, where she looks forward to collaborating with narrative practice enthusiasts from around the world.