Dear
CREATIVE WRITING IN THE THERAPEUTIC ENCOUNTER
Dates: Tuesday 5th and Wednesday 6th July 2022
Times: Tuesday 5th 9.30am – 4.00pm and Wednesday 6th 9.30am – 4.00pm
Location: Online
Tutor: Claire Williamson (MA, SFHEA)
This experiential 2-day course focuses on creative writing and its use within therapy, therapeutic settings and self-supervision.
Therapists often work with client’s writing, or encourage clients to create within, or between, sessions. Some therapists have trained to be ‘poetry therapists’ and divide sessions between writing and discussion of the text, accelerating the process, or evincing new strands to the therapeutic work.
There is a risk to introducing writing, as it is revealing and sometimes walks the line between vulnerability and healing; there can be concerns about ‘quality’, which therapists can allay with a good understanding of creative writing as both a magnifying and softening tool, to say the ‘unsayable’, or to understand experience in a more tangible form.
Some counsellors and psychotherapists use creative writing as part of their own reflective practice to understand transferential relationships, create boundaries between sessions, and for personal and professional development.
Through experiential practice, this workshop will explore some helpful techniques and raise confidence in using the written (and spoken) word.
The workshop will focus on a range of applications, including:
- Supporting client metaphors
- Concrete and abstract images into words – poetry as resource
- Narratives and counter-narratives
- Reflective practice – employing form for clients and self-supervision
- Autobiographical fiction
- Applications and limitations
An empathic, relational approach will be experienced firsthand as the process of the training is trauma-informed.
CLAIRE WILLIAMSON
Claire brings an integrative approach to using creative writing in the therapeutic encounter. She’s the former Director of Studies for Metanoia Institute’s MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP), with over 20 years experience in the field of CWTP, including work in bereavement, mental health, addiction recovery, self-injury, cancer care, plus many educational and artistic settings.
Claire has facilitated training for counsellors at City of Bristol College’s FD in Counselling and UWE’s Diploma in Counselling. She also works with medical students at University of Bristol and Queen Mary University in London, exploring how creativity can support people within healthcare settings.
She’s a Senior Fellow of the higher education academy, with a Masters degree in Literary Studies (exploring the life sustaining effects of writing) and studying at Cardiff University for a PhD in Creative Writing (Writing the 21st century grief novel), with a Counselling Skills qualification (UWE).
Claire is the author of four poetry/narrative books, Visiting the Minotaur (Seren, 2018) Split Ends (Eyewear, 2016), The Soulwater Pool (2008) and Ride On (PoTA, 2005).
WHO THIS WORKSHOP IS DESIGNED FOR: Counsellors, psychotherapists, coaches and health workers are welcome to attend this workshop.
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