An In-Person Writing Workshop Uniquely Created for Therapists
With therapists and award-winning writers Stella Duffy and Chris Cleave
NOW CLOSED
Saturday 24 September 2022
CPD Credits: 3.5 hours
- This event will not be recorded
- Maximum Participants: 50
- Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 21 September
Writing is an integral part of life for therapists – to record experiences with clients, communicate ideas and respond creatively to the work. But for something so valuable, it rarely gets the focused attention it deserves.
READ MORE...This workshop, led by two skilled facilitators and award-winning writers, is an invitation to explore your relationship with writing, in your practice and more broadly. You will be offered practical exercises and useful tips to make your writing enjoyable, satisfying, and playful.
The spaces therapists and counsellors create with their clients hold many stories, and not just the client’s: those that therapist and client develop together, those that belong to the therapist, and those the therapists tell themselves of their work. We do this narrative work every day in the consulting room, yet for many of us writing itself can seem daunting; hard to start, hard to finish, and worryingly like putting ourselves up for investigation.
This workshop allows you to take meaningful steps towards writing fluently and confidently as therapists. Bring pen, paper, and yourself.
FULL PROGRAMME
14:00 BST
Welcome & introduction
A quick look at some of writing’s endless possibilities for this unique audience. Therapeutic writing, narrative work, case studies and self-discovery writing are all available to us, along with the more traditional avenues of writing about therapy – from novels and memoirs to academic papers and text books. Having surveyed the immense writing territory available to therapists, we want to bring the focus back to you. What will be your writing process? How will you resource yourself and grow through your relationship with your writing? What will move you to begin, to navigate writer’s block and imposter syndrome, to relate to the work itself and to love it? How will you bring your whole life to your writing, including shadows, disowned parts, and aspects not included or welcomed by the mainstream? These will be our themes for the day.
14:15
Experiential writing exercises & feedback
Two popular and enjoyable exercises will work with the idea of writing as process, not product. Following a warm-up and focusing, you will be directed through a systematic process of welcoming things to come up and find form on the page. This is about allowing a sense of experiment and wonder back into the act of writing, which for many of us in the therapeutic and academic communities has become sedimented by the constant requirement to finish with a text fit-for-purpose. You won’t be asked to produce careful work here! You won’t be asked to share it! We do the exercises together to benefit from the unique energy of a workshop space, but what comes up for you is your own to hold and reflect on.
15:30
Break
15:45
Experiential writing exercises & feedback
Two exercises focused on the unique tendency of this particular group to notice, to be empathetic, to be sensitive to what is (and isn’t) said, to be curious, to always seek clarity but to accept ambiguity and tension. These are some of the big axes along which therapy processes and writing processes align and energise each other. By bringing these therapeutic attunements consciously into the writing process, we invite participants to notice the hard-earned wisdom and skill they already possess as writers.
17:00
Break
17:15
Final exercise
An exploration of the factors that stop us realising the potential of our writing process. We look at writer’s block, procrastination, imposter syndrome, too-busyness, under-preparedness, over-planning and perfectionism just as we might consider them in therapy: as phenomena that reveal something about our writing process, rather than as ‘symptoms’ to be ‘cured’ before we can begin. While the aim of today’s earlier exercises was to let us notice and celebrate our writing processes, this final exercise lets us notice how we host those powerful processes within our busy, complex, embodied lives.
17:45
Q&A with Stella and Chris
18.00
End