WHAT CAN FICTION WRITING TEACH THERAPISTS?

Writing can be a valuable, empowering and co-creative part of therapy.  It can scaffold and shape the therapy for both therapist and client at the beginning, middle and end.  A few minutes of writing to a specific memory, feeling, or moment (or part of the map) which is followed by reading it out loud can bring new, validating and compassionate points of view and voices.  Writing between sessions can help sustain a therapeutic formulation and focus.   

There will be an introduction to the utility of the ideas from fiction writing of plot or structure, points of view, world building, authenticity and a reliable narrator and inhabiting a story and a character  

This introductory evening webinar will involve participants trying out for themselves a series of short micro-writing exercises lasting five minutes each and focused and carefully addressed to: 

• a place and a moment in time in my career 
• one characteristic of being a therapist or helper 
• a role I played or others played in my professional life 
• an ideal or valued idea that has guided or shaped my work
• the creative writer within me

The exercises bring in to focus the rich potential of writing to discover and connect with myself and others and the world (in this case the professional world) around me.  The value of such discovery and relationally focused writing will be discussed as an integral part of Cognitive Analytic Therapy's versatile and co-creative approach. 

It will be an engaging and creative evening with opportunities for a follow up by attending a more detailed therapeutic writing skills workshop and the supervision of such work for therapists.   Whilst the workshop is influenced by the values, methods and concepts of Cognitive Analytic Therapy those attending the webinar do not need a background in this approach.  

The webinar is facilitated by Steve Potter who uses a variety of ways of writing with, from and for clients as part of the Cognitive Analytic therapeutic process.  He thinks there is an enormous amount we have yet to discover about the therapeutic and co creative use of writing as part of a CAT relational and integrative approach.