Centre for Narrative Practice
COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH MULTI-STRESSED FAMILIES
William Madsen, Ph.D.
Family Institute of Cambridge
Watertown, MA USA
617-868-9044 – madsen1@comcast.net
Venue:
Manchester October 15th 2007
Prices: London, £165; Manchester, £85
For application form click here
In
an effort to reclaim the hope and passion that brought many of us into this
field, this workshop offers an alternative approach to thinking about and
working with “difficult” families. Beginning
with a conviction that families are more than the problems in their lives,
we’ll expand our focus from simply identifying and correcting immediate
problems to helping families envision and develop new lives.
Drawing on ideas from Appreciative Inquiry, Solution-Focused Therapy, and
Narrative Therapy, the workshop offers a therapeutic framework designed to
engage “reluctant” clients and help them envision preferred directions in
life, externalize and shift their relationship to long-standing problems that
serve as obstacles, and develop evoked and actual communities of support for the
enactment of desired lives. The
workshop is conceptually grounded in a commitment to possibilities,
collaboration and accountability. It
highlights practices that reposition counsellors and therapists
as “appreciative allies” who elicit, elaborate and acknowledge threads of
competence, connection, and hope in families in order to minimize
“resistance” and maximize client participation.
William Madsen is the Director of the Narrative Therapy Program at Family Institute of Cambridge. He also started the Family-Centered Services Project, an organizational change initiative dedicated to helping community agencies develop more respectful and responsive ways of interacting with clients and families. He has developed and administered innovative home-based programs and mental health clinics and currently provides national and international training and consultation regarding collaborative approaches to therapy and the development of institutional cultures that support family-centered work. Bill is known for his relaxed, clear, and inspiring teaching style and for the ways in which his teaching embodies the spirit of collaborative approaches. He has a long-standing commitment to making narrative and collaborative ideas immediately accessible and applicable to front-line practitioners working with poor and marginalized families and has written a number of articles in this vein. He recently completed the second edition of Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families (Guilford, 2007).