The therapy room as a workshop for change to the better: Stories of desire, gender and sexual turn-on patterns Through our bodies we exist as systems in interaction with interacting systems, both inner and outer ones. Bodies, relations, networks and cultures are in constant interactions of appraisal and denial; understanding and misunderstanding; acceptance and rejection. Interactions of appraisal and understanding lay grounds for good belonging. Longing arises when motivations and desire is met with resistance like misunderstanding, silence, rejection and pathologization. Lack of affirmation and belonging give rise to problems and sufferings that bring clients to the therapy rooms. This workshop aims to give insights as to how we can develop the therapy room into a workshop where individuals and couples can learn to appreciate their own and each others’ talents for desire, gender and sexual turn-on patterns. The task of the therapist is to develop tools through language and skills to interact with signals from the body that are of importance for being sexual and to perform gender. There is a need to expand the boundaries of normativity and see how people develop both on grounds of their inborn talents and on grounds of cultural offers of expression. Sexuality is usually expressed in private and intimate rooms. The therapy room should therefore be a place to explore that which is vulnerable. That requires the therapy room to be a place where one is given safe space for exploring intimate and vulnerable areas of life.
Price: 340 euro, 2500 dkk.
Responding to the Colonizing Panopticon within Narrative Practice I am the Director of a non-profit responding to violence and a full-time “front line” worker. My everyday conversations are within non-profit outreach settings, in a large rural region of Nova Scotia, Canada. These conversations often, in part, attend to people’s responses to colonization, across social achievements of class, culture, race, DSM diagnoses, personal and family identity, gender, sexuality, literacy, ability... The conversations often make many complexities visible, including the re-colonization and re-traumatization many folks experience within services they may be court-ordered to access. The conversations also make visible widespread systemic unaccountability within the very government-funded services holding these people and families accountable for their participation in “violence”. Therefore, the significance of “Narrative” ideas, in practice with individuals, families, and communities, especially in settings where perceived problems are “unacceptable” or “life-threatening”, such as “Domestic Violence Intervention” (DVI), is complex.
Narrative began as a resistance movement, built largely on a dichotomous social justice discourse about “dominant” vs. “alternative” practices. This traditional dichotomy locates modern power primarily as an operation of “dominant” culture. “Alternative” Narrative practices of resistance are therefore easily romanticized. Unwittingly perhaps, this Narrative resistance movement, precisely because of its productive promises of “non-colonization” and “social justice”, can become a very incongruous Foucauldian Panopticon of colonizing modern power.
In order to experience “hope” or “social justice” in my work, I have to acknowledge and respond to this colonization that can be so effectively achievable through the “alternative” Narrative promise “not to colonize”. I’m emphasizing this aspect of my work in part because in Canada, the United States, and Australia, I am noticing increasing Narrative applications and teachings of my early Visual Narrative map-making, note-taking, and digital document-making. I find some of these interpretations disheartening: First, my reflexive concern about attending to the worker’s power to define, a worry that shaped my early Visual Narrative practices, often appears sabotaged in applications that maintain a modernist Narrative focus on perceived social/therapeutic instrumentality. Second, I’m often not referenced, which provides me with a visceral personal experience of the colonizing harm achievable within a Narrative Panopticon. Therefore, this workshop will not promise Narrative practices that do not harm. The workshop will not offer “effective” linear Narrative techniques for moving folks “away from abuse and toward respect.” Also, the workshop will not support the seductive, modern Feminist/Narrative politic that says “dominant masculinity” is the pre-defineable “problem” fueling men’s violence against women.
Workshop outline: The workshop will consist of four intensive participatory sessions in total, over two days. Each session will offer opportunity for: frequent participant conversations in a language of choice, questions, exploring together in large and small group practice, and reflections/witnessings.
Session One: Unfolding the “present but invisible”…
The “present but invisible” is a Visual Narrative practice concept that attends to replications of colonization within Narrative work. I developed this line of enquiry in response to sitting so often with very marginalized women, men, and families, within a pre-defined “context” of “responding to violence”. In this field, both modern and post-modern workers may assume a colonial right to evaluate and predefine “the problem” and “solution”. Instead, the “present but invisible” offers to unfold the possible significance of socially “unacceptable” responses to life. This first session will provide an overview of the conceptual background of this Visual Narrative development, ethical complexities, and clarifying practice examples.
Session Two: The “problem” as response knowledge and skill…
The “present but invisible” is intended to enhance complexities of meaning-making in response to socially unacceptable or life-threatening problem definitions. It extends Michael White’s “absent but implicit” explorations, and Maggie Carey’s articulation of Michael’s work. Here we will explore practices for enquiry into the “problem” expression as knowledge about life, and, skill at responding.
Session Three: The “problem” as positioning…
When I took up Narrative in my early practice, I was expected to assume, for example, that men took me back to “the problem saturated story” because of the influence of “dominant masculinity”. In this session on positioning, we will consider some of the ways this Narrative colonization can replicate in folks lives the same double binds and crazy-making that 1980’s feminism made visible in women’s experience of patriarchy. In practice, we will explore complexities of the “centered/decentered” dichotomy, particularly in response to socially unacceptable problem definitions. We will consider lines of enquiry that may visibilize unexpected reasons for people to take us back to “the problem story”, and, unfold their positioning skills within perceived “problem” territories.
Session Four: The “problem” as possible expression of passionate, embodied commitment…
Traditional Narrative practices informed an early commandment in my mind around “thickening the preferred story” and “not thickening the problem saturated story”. In this final session of the workshop we will explore the opposite: We will consider ways of unfolding people’s knowledge about normalized, colonial visions of hope, love, family life, possibility…”, and their skill at responding to these norms. We will explore ways of unfolding, within perceived “problem territories”, expressions of passion and purpose. We will consider people’s knowledge of, and skill at responding to, the limits of their embodied agency in community. We will consider their knowledge of therapeutic and holistic social responses that may be helpful to them.
Please note: Because my own work operates across multiple categories of: collaboration with government, organizational leadership, teaching, practice supervision, and individual/family/community conversations, my practice examples can respond to some of this complexity of my experience if participants prefer. The workshop will be followed up with distribution of referenced readings, the PowerPoint, and related documents. Price: 340 euro, 2500 dkk.