Workshops
Industry Leading Faculty, Current Topics
Programming will not be offered for the October 2023-2024 season. After 20 years of running the program, John will be taking this year as a sabbatical. He looks forward to resuming in the October 2024-2025 season. Please contact him at jstillman@caspertx.com to get on a list of those interested.
Please view last year's workshops below to get an idea of what we will be offering then:
Caspersen workshop presenters are internationally-known speakers, authors, therapists and social workers practicing in a range of settings. Attend workshops online from anywhere or view a recording.
Your Magic Wand Is Ready for Pick-up: Incorporating Narrative Ideas into Your Practice
Friday, October 7, 2022, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Diane Jorgensen (Live Online from Minnesota)
Participate Live Online, On-Site at Caspersen or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Sept 30), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Description:
Narrative therapy is a post-modern approach to direct practice with individuals, couples, families and groups. The Narrative Worldview affirms that all of us have inherent strengths and abilities. Practitioners in Narrative Therapy assist in determining people's values, hopes, and dreams and enhancing aspects of their lives that support their personal agency and their preferred ways of being in the world. Narrative therapy sees problems as external to people, and works toward understanding how individuals and support systems can work together to fight the negative impact of problems. Narrative therapy is a good fit for those in the helping professions who want to learn compassionate, respectful, non-pathologizing ways to creatively work with people struggling against problems.
Narrative Therapy principles and the narrative therapy worldview are versatile across behavioral health/ mental health, medical, and social work settings and can improve the efficacy of your practice. This workshop will present a summary of the Narrative Worldview as well as some of the primary principles of Narrative Therapy. The workshop is intended for professionals with a wide range of experiences using narrative ideas, from those with a newfound curiosity to this modality as well as those with previous training in Narrative Therapy.
Objectives:
(1) Have a good understanding of the Narrative World View
(2) Be able to identify several key principles of Narrative Therapy
(3) Be able to incorporate at least one Narrative Therapy technique immediately into your practice
About the Speaker:
Diane Jorgensen, LICSW, is a medical social worker and clinical social work supervisor in Minneapolis. She has been using Narrative Therapy principles for over a decade and considers the Narrative Perspective to be the foundation of her practice. It resonates with her understanding of people, problems, and systems, and fits well with her spiritual awareness and beliefs. Diane has an Advance Training Certificate in Narrative Therapy from the Caspersen Training Center. She has a passion for bringing Narrative Ideas out of the confines of the private therapists' office and into the broader world of interdisciplinary professionals who work all kinds of people dealing with all kinds of problems.
Time, Narrative and Practices of Radical Subjectivity
Friday, December 2, 2022, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Alfonso Diaz (Live Online from Mexico)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Nov 11), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
For narrative to exist, we need to create a sequence between events in a story—there is no story without a notion of time. However, our relationship with time is a dominant story we rarely reflect upon and the way we understand time replicates cultural values that often go unnoticed.
In this workshop we will do a brief overview of Narrative Practices in order to explore different stories of time and the effects they have on the relationships we have with ourselves, each other, the land, memory, imagination and work. We will practice exercises that weave together narrative practices with different considerations of time in order to generate change.
Examples will be shared on how when we understand time differently we can create interesting strategies to subvert the dominant push to objectify otherness, opening up spaces for practices of radical subjectivity.
By the end of the workshop participants will have:
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A new perspective on how their understanding of time affects their work as narrative practitioners.
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A practical experience than can be replicated and adapted for their work settings
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A critical understanding of practices of objectification and radical subjectivity.
About the Speaker:
Alfonso Díaz is the founder of the Colectivo de Prácticas Narrativas. He works as a community worker, a therapist and a teacher. In his community work Alfonso has collaboratively developed community projects to promote autonomy and territory, as well as projects to respond to gender and State violence.
As a teacher he created and coordinates the International Diploma in Narrative Practice, in collaboration with the Universidad Campesina Indígena the Masters in Narrative Practice in Community Work and Education, and in collaboration with the with the Universidad del Medio Ambiente the masters in Narrative Practices in Therapy.
In addition to teaching in Mexico, Alfonso teaches and has lead training teams in Canada, the United States, Chile, Argentina, India, Nepal, Sweden, and Spain.
He has been involved in community projects in different parts of Mexico, Canada and the United States. In Mexico City he does individual, couple and family therapy.
Grief: The Forever Reminder
Friday, February 3, 2022, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Theo Page, LICSW (Live Online from Minnesota)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Jan 20), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
The description for grief in this workshop will focus on the experience after a death. There are challenges in United States of America (USA) culture when we talk about death and dying. Our USA culture has produced feelings of death denial and avoidance of the dying experience. It is important to explore a therapist’s view of death and dying. How these views impact the way we serve our grieving clients, will be talked about.
Grief and the models of narrative therapy can open new avenues to talk about death. There are images of death and dying on media platforms might be the only way therapists and clients view death and grief. Drawing on the client’s own story of how death and grief is from their voice and their family or community has affected them despite the dominant culture’s influence. The dominant culture in the United States can leave our clients searching for meaning. The dominant culture can distance the grief experience from our clients.
Mourning and grief are different processes, we will touch upon the differences. A Narrative approach to grieving can serve our bereaved in the forms of double listening, externalization, identity proclamation and a cultural perspective.
Objectives:
Participants will come to an understanding of their own beliefs/values and how this might affect the grieving process of our clients and incorporate these into sessions with their clients.
Participants will be introduced to Narrative approaches, double listening, outside witness, positioning, absent but implicit and identity proclamation that can assist in our bereaved clients
Participants will be able to construct a pathway of understanding to reach their bereaved clients.
About the Speaker, Theo Page, MSW, LICSW:
Death, dying and grief have been a deep interest of mine for many years. In my undergraduate program a self-study was set up with an Irish Hospice in Galway. A thesis in my Master of Social Work program was focused on social workers working with dying prisoners. Attending the first Death Café in the State of Minnesota was enlightening and gave a space for death topics to be explored. In 2014 I wrote and performed a one person play about my experiences with death and dying.
Serving on the State Hospice Board of Directors in 2000 gave me the experience of reviewing policies and implementing a grass roots effort to separate the State’s inspections of Hospice and Home Care programs. Working in Hospice for 7 years provided the much-needed perspective of how we die and the effects of death on a family and community.
While working with for the State of MN as a social worker working with citizens who were committed as mentally ill and chemically dependent, the need for our older citizens with extensive medical needs and addressing end of life. I led a team to address end of life care for these citizens with family, community, and hospitals
Narrative therapy has been a part of my practice through all the aforementioned. A narrative approach allows for me be present to those experiencing grief. I look forward to sharing these experiences with you.
I believe death, dying and grief unites us as human beings. I am ever grateful to all the deaths that I have witnessed, the acts of bravery in the dying process and those who are left behind to start a new life without their loved ones.
Helpful Narrative Therapy Practices in Human Services Organizations
Friday, March 3, 2022, 9 AM - 12:30 PM Central
Guadalupe Morelos (Live Online from Massachusetts)
Participate Live Online or Access Recording
Early Registration rate of $85 (ends Feb 17), Regular Registration, $99
Student, Group and Foreign Currency Discounts Available
3.5 CEUs, See registration page for details
Workshop Description:
Are you interested in finding ways to respond to the frustration, dissonance, tiredness and other challenges experienced often in our work within organizations/workplaces? Are you interested in promoting and support change in these organizations? If so, this is the conversation you might want to participate in.
I have 25 years of experience working with others in the helping profession and in multiple organizations such schools, community based organizations, health centers etc. I will be talking about some of the frequent and shared challenges we face in our work and their influence on the sense of ourselves as helpers, on our preferred way of helping and on our relationship with people we meet who seek our help.
We will be talking about the narrative worldview and its principles. I will be talking about some helpful narrative practices that seek collaboration, Humility and Curiosity as individual skills and attitudes, and as part of collective/ organizational practices.
You will be invited to the narrative revolution, to the sharing of stories. Stories where you faced the normative discourses of our culture and its effects, we will invite you to share the multiple stories where you and others responded resistedand changed the narrative of your organizations.
you will be invited to re-member the values you care about and invited to the practice of the community actions that support your shared goals/purposes in your organization.
Participants who attend the workshop will be able:
1. Participants will be able to transfer some relational skills commonly used in therapy into the culture of their organization or workplace.
2. Participants will engage in deep reflections of their preferred role as helpers and be able to identify organizational themes that support their preferred way of helping.
3. Participants will be able to identify areas of collective influence or personal agency in organizations and practice it.
About the Speaker:
Guadalupe Morelos, M.S.W., LICSW
Guadalupe is a clinical social worker in Boston Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry. She is an outpatient adult psychotherapist. She has an extensive experience working in community-based agencies, youth centers, and health centers in the Boston area. Her psychotherapy and teaching practices emphasize attitudes of humility, collaboration, and curiosity. She relates with each person with the assumption each person has a vast cultural knowledge, and story repertory of their life, their values and themes they care about and she encourages each person to notice her/his skills of survival, resistance, and protest to poverty, racism, and other social injustices.
Guadalupe attended the University of Baja California in Mexico and obtained a psychologist degree. She also attended Boston College, where she earned her MSW. She has attended multiple national and international courses and conferences on Narrative Therapy, including the Narrative therapy and community work conference in Oaxaca Mexico with Michael White, David Epston and the Just therapy Team Kiwi Tamasese and Charles Waldegrave in 2004. She is a graduate of Narrative Therapy Initiative's first Narrative Certificate Program in 2018.NTI is an organization funded by Steve Gaddis. Guadalupe is the Chair of Diversity and Inclusion for NTI and a faculty member beginning in October 2020. Guadalupe leads a narrative consultation group for Spanish-speaking social workers. She can be reached at gmorelos66@yahoo.com.