DAILY CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
MORNING TRAINING
WORKSHOPS
9:00 AM - 12 PM
LUNCH
9:00 AM - 12 PM
AFTERNOON TRAINING
WORKSHOPS
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
FEBRUARY 5th, 2027
MORNING WORKSHOPS
LISTENING, WRITING, AND WITNESSING: NARRATIVE INFORMED
RESPONSES TO TRAUMA ~ PART 1
Responding to Gender Violence and Trauma: Honouring survivor knowledge, skills, values, and acts of resistance Presenter: Rosa Elena Arteaga (Mexico/Canada) + Interviewed throughout by Julia Gerlitz (Canada)
WORKSHOP ONE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
Rosa has worked with thousands of gender-based violence survivors of diverse backgrounds by honouring women’s knowledge, skills, values, and acts of resistance.
Her workshop demonstrates client session transcripts to explore the therapeutic questions she asks, the intentions, assumptions, and possibilities she considers, and how she tailors her questions to serve each person's stories and experience.
Participants experience the moment-to moment revealing of client knowledge, acts of resistance, expressions of care, and practices of survival that often go unrecognized. By transporting these experiences into the foreground of therapy, survivors strengthen their preferred understandings of themselves, reconnect with values that matter most, and enrich the stories that support their lives beyond violence and oppression.
In this experiential workshop, Julia interviews Rosa about the values, commitments, relational and personal politics that inform her work with survivors: What does Rosa listen for and decide to engage with? What possibilities does she hope to open? How does she draw on her understandings of power, trauma, and resistance to shape her questions? What impact has it had on her listening to these client stores every day. Who does she turn to for support? How does her work influence her everyday life etc.
Throughout the workshop Rosa and Julia invite participants to experience narrative
questioning as a thoughtful and ethical practice in gender-based violence work.
Making Change Livable: How Does a Preferred Story Become a Lived Practice?
Presenter: Christine Dennstedt (Canada)
WORKSHOP TWO
9:00 AM - 12 PM
Christine's pioneering work brings narrative therapy into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Her peer-reviewed framework offers conference participant practitioners a narrative-informed practice approach to preparation, medicine sessions, and integration.
Drawing on Michael White's use of rites of passage, liminality, and the development of preferred stories, she demonstrates how these ideas inform her work in psychedelic-assisted therapy. While integration is often associated with what happens after a psychedelic experience, she has become interested in what it might mean to think about integration more broadly, as the work of carrying change into ordinary life.
Through transcripts from both psychedelic integration and everyday therapeutic conversations, Christine will slow down moments of practice to explore what becomes possible when we attend to the transitions people are navigating between familiar ways of being and emerging possibilities for their lives. What might we begin to notice and listen for differently? What questions might become possible? And how might these understandings influence the conversations we have with the people who consult us?
Participants will be invited to consider the similarities and differences between these therapeutic contexts, and what this way of thinking about integration and change might offer to their own practices.
A Philosophical Framework for Thinking About Narrative Therapy Practice
Presenter: Todd May, (USA)
WORKSHOP THREE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
You might recognize presenter Todd May as the philosopher advisor to the hit TV show The Good Place on NBC, or philosophical consultant on the New York Times best-selling book entitled How to Be Perfect, or the author of eighteen books on philosophy. He’s definitely all that, but to conference participants he'll just be your resident teaching philosopher.
Michael White stated that, "Without an intimate understanding of philosopher Michel Foucault's post-structural ideas a therapist’s understanding of narrative practice would be severely limited."
Todd's interactive workshop challenges ideas, offers alternatives, and takes you on new lines of flight to unravel the conceptual complexities of philosopher Michel Foucault. He'll critique individualism, essentialism and expert knowledge, and walk you through the concept of power and the intersection of practices, values, norms, normalization, and normativity. And, time permitting he'll explain how narrative therapy has sometimes misinterpreted Foucault’s work, and why it was his interest in Foucault got him thrown out of Graduate School – in Psychology.
FEBRUARY 5th, 2027
AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS
LISTENING, WRITING, AND WITNESSING: NARRATIVE INFORMED RESPONSES TO TRAUMA ~ PART 2
Responding to Trauma through Narrative Letter Writing Practices Presenter: Julia Gerlitz (Canada) + Interviewed throughout by Rosa Artega (Mexico/Canada)
WORKSHOP FOUR
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
The purpose of Julia’s Linking Lives/Group Letter Writing Practices was to create an alternative to the medicalizing, individualizing, and isolating methods of popular trauma informed therapies.
Participants learn how the practice intention of Linking Lives groups transports the once isolated stories of trauma outside the individual therapy room and affords opportunities for people to share: their insider knowledge and experience of trauma; counter isolation through connection; learn from one another; co-create safe and anonymous documents of care and support; and build long lasting communities of concern. The purpose of this letter writing practice is uniting people together - not because of the trauma, but because of what they have learned from lived experiences of the trauma along the way.
Rosa interviews Julia throughout the workshop and questions what she is caring about, valuing, and responding to by inviting people to write letters to one another and - explain the personal experience of witnessing these letters, the inspiration and learning that created the practices, what it feels like to work with people in these ways, and why this framework of working is so exciting, sustaining, and fulfilling.
Participants are engaged to consider their personal experience of sitting alone with clients as stories of trauma fill the therapy room, the kind of effects this has on them, and ways to potentially sustain their own work.
Questions Matter Most: Becoming Close Up and Personal with Narrative Questions Presenters: Helené Grau Kristensen (Denmark), Stephen Madigan (Canada)
WORKSHOP FIVE
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Building a long term healthy relationship with your therapeutic questions is enormously important to the narrative work we do and admittedly - takes a lot of time, practice and failure (as most creative endeavours do). Commiting to your narrative questions relationship involves continually – reviewing, inventing, discussing, creating, trying the new ones out, experiencing how clients respond and - revising.
The payoff for all your time and effort far outwieghs the pain as therapists report gaining a greater sense of ease, comfort and confidence inside the therapy room. Therapists also experience: serving their clients better (which afterall is our primary task), taking more accountability for the work they do, and experiencing much less gut-wrenching doubt when you haven’t a clue how to proceed in the session.
Welcome to our highly interactive Questions Matter Most workshop where participants learn, taste, interact, and genuinely feel the art and craft of question making through a close-up study of the ecology of ideas and practices behind the narrative questions we ask.
Questions come alive for participants through Helené and Stephen’s LIVE in-the-room therapy counter-story demonstration interviews. Live interviews where every question they ask of the ‘client’ is simultaneously typed up and shown on the big screen for everyone to see and respond to (in real time) regarding the intentions, direction, politics, and purpose behind each therapeutic question asked.
Poetics in Everyday Narrative Therapy Practice
Presenter: Todd Disney (USA)
WORKSHOP SIX
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Part theory, part practice, Todd’s workshop on poetics (treating ordinary moments, routines, and objects not as background noise, but as a source of beauty, meaning, and attention) is meant to inspire clinicians to take up the “experience of experience” in their clients’ daily existence that is so often neglected.
The workshop guides participants through a brief history of poetics in narrative therapy and will discuss how this fits with the work of continental philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, whose writings analyze the influence of modern power on peoples lived experience, as well as accounts of aesthetics (intentional and voluntary actions where individuals set rules of conduct for themselves, shaping their lives according to stylistic and ethical criteria rather than obeying an external moral code.)
Todd connects the discussion on theory to practice through demonstrations of his session transcripts to highlight how poetics draws the therapist’s attention to what we listen for, what we focus on, and how we formulate our questions. Participants will look closely at session examples to illustrate this process and as a means to bring forth what Michael White referred to as "those little events lie in the shadows of the dominant plots of people’s lives, those events that are so often neglected, but that might come to be regarded with reverence and at times with awe.”
The participant group is further engaged through interviewing Todd regarding questions like, what it is like for him to engage in poetic conversations with clients, what sustains him in his work, and what inspires his interviews/questions.
FEBRUARY 6th, 2027
MORNING WORKSHOPS
NARRATIVE INFORMED RELATIONAL INTERVIEWING ~ PART 1
Relational Interviewing with Conflicted Couple Relationships Presenter: Stephen Madigan (Canada) + Interviewed throughout by Helené Grau Kristensen (Denmark)
WORKSHOP ONE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
In the Third Edition Narrative Therapy, Stephen writes: "Couple relationships we see in our therapy rooms did not individually create the ways they practice love, care, or the relational conflict they are suffering - all on their own. It is ludicrous for therapists to divide couple relationships off from relational, cultural, and contextual influences they are imbedded within and shaping of everything they do"
The workshop guides participants through the practice 'map' of NIRI sessions that dignify the experience of modern/ultra busy couple relationships he works with - and most if not all of us are currently living within - through client transcripts, therapeutic letters and video sessions with conflicted couple relationships he worked with in Canada, Norway, and USA. Helené raises questions throughout regarding Stephen's personal, familial, professional, therapeutic, political and relational experiences that created and continue to shape this work with couples.
Participants learn new ways to conceptualize and work with high conflict, how the emergence of new information is created through double description that is fundamental for creating relational change, and the use of relational interviewing questions and letters that challenge the relationships relationship to individualism by locating them within powerfully shaping cultural influences, governing norms, gender expectations, child and extended familial obligations, and work and financial responsibilities.
Participants are brought into the conversation to personally reflect on the influences that shape how they generally view couple relationships, what usually brings couples to therapy, and how they might begin to experience their personal and intimate relationships - differently.
Who Are We Becoming? Stories of Narrative Practice, Identity, and the Supervision Conversations Between Us
Presenters: Tommy Spence (Canada) and Rock Nylund (USA)
WORKSHOP THREE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
The workshop begins with the story of why Vancouver based narrative therapist Tommy sought out Sacramento based narrative therapist Rock for supervision. Together they explore their thoughts on why supervision is of primary importance for therapists and supervisors, and the purpose and intention of why their conversations are structured the way they are.
Tommy and Rock discuss how the progressive relational movement from doubt and vulnerability to trust and discovery—have shaped their narrative practice and identities. They will guide participants through a Live, line-by-line transcript supervision demonstration that brings their collaborative approach to supervision into view.
The workshops intention is to illustrate for participants how supervision is viewed as a practice of accountability, creates a creative space to think expansively, explores uncertainty without judgment, and imagines possibilities that might otherwise remain unexplored. Together with participants, they will consider how shared inquiry can enrich therapeutic practice and ongoing ways of learning.
Darkening the Landscape Presenter: David Marsten (USA)
WORKSHOP TWO
9:00 AM - 12 PM
David always seems to be transporting his therapy room experiences with clients into creating new narratve practice. His ideas on 'darkening the landscape' offers an important practice often overlooked.
His workshop moves participants to consider how: once problems establish a foothold in people’s lives, they can be difficult to dislodge. Take inadequacy and self-loathing as examples. These do not function benignly and are augmented by normalizing standards delivered through social media, podcasts, TV, film, bestsellers, and professional mental health disciplines.
Power in the form of normalizing judgment is everywhere and, before we can defend against it, it has made a home with us. It is this ominous bedfellow we would hope to evict.
David leads participants into work he developed that looks at those dark discursive forces and how we as therapists might hope to confront them. He will avoid the “ritual banality” of such practices as assessment and diagnosis and, instead, recognize the titanic struggle just ahead.
This is no less than a monumental endeavor—a drama. Where to begin? He starts with the establishment of the protagonist and his workshop will demonstrate, with the use of slides, discussion, Live interviews, and therapeutic letters, how a darkened landscape—rather than something to be minimized—is just what is needed to inspire hope and the dignity of those who consult us.
FEBRUARY 6th, 2027
AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS
NARRATIVE INFORMED RELATIONAL INTERVIEWING ~ PART 2
When Relationships Outlive Death: How deceased persons live on as significant allies to support the bereaved in was to navigate grief and life Presenter: Helené Grau Kristensen (Denmark) + Interviewed throughout by Stephen Madigan (Canada)
WORKSHOP FOUR
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Helenés workshop demonstrates her ground-breaking work for re-membering the deceased – especially when responding to parents experiencing the death of a child. Her alternative practice understandings are based on post structural relational understanding of identity that helps to grow the relationship towards the deceased into an allyship, where the deceased can continue as a living influence to form, influence and help the bereaved in responding to the complexities of grief and loss.
Throughout the workshop Helené uses numerous session transcripts to demonstrate relationally informed questions that strengthen the reciprocity of the relationship between the deceased, the bereaved, and others, so that the reality of the relationship can withstand the dominant discourses of death and grief that reduces it.
Participants engage how grief psychology continues to mandate how one should grieve, what expressions of grief mean, and how these expressions are conceptualized as individual symptoms of grief. Helenés practice of relational interviewing questions will show how expressions of grief and loss become relational responses, creating openings for protest, connection, and love.
Stephen interviews Helené on how her therapeutic beliefs allow her to sit among the living and the dead each day; how she would describe what the relationship between herself, the living, and the persons who are no longer breathing creates, what cultural, political and policy changes she hopes might change in the future, and why she continues to train as hard as she does to improve her therapy practice.
OUTSIDER WITNESSING AND DEFINITIONAL CEREMONIES IN NARRATIVE PRACTICE & LIVE DEMONSTRATION
Bringing Personal Responses into Outsider Witnessing Presenters: Julia Gerlitz (Canada) and David (Rock) Nylund (USA)
WORKSHOP FIVE
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Julia and Rock draw extensively on outsider-witness practices and definitional ceremonies in their therapeutic work, particularly when responding to the consequences of trauma.
The work is influenced by Michael White and anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. Participants learn how these practices create opportunities for people’s stories to be witnessed, responded to, and carried forward by others. Therapeutic letters often follow an outsider-witness structure, bringing forward what stood out in a person’s story, why it resonated, and what it revealed about their preferred identity. They also include the personal impact a person’s story has had on them—not only as therapists, but as people.
These practices invite questions about dominant ideas concerning therapist self-disclosure, professional boundaries, and what might become possible when therapists acknowledge the personal ways, they are touched by the people they meet. Julia also uses outsider-witness with practicum students.
Participants are invited to experience a live definitional ceremony, in which one participant shares a story and audience members respond through outsider-witness questions. The ceremony will also incorporate letter writing, inviting audience members to offer written responses to the person whose story they have witnessed.
Care: What is it? How does it work? Is it really important?
Presenter: Todd May, (USA)
WORKSHOP SIX
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Therapists are in a caring profession, or so we’re told. We care about our clients, or care for our clients, or maybe care alongside our clients. But whatever it is that therapists do, care is central aspect of it.
But what is care? Is it some kind of emotion? Is it a way of moving through the world? Is it both or is it something else? And what role does it play, not only in therapeutic work, but in our lives?
Todd's workshop will investigate these questions from a reflective angle. Participants will be guided through different philosophical views of what care is, and then at the feminist view that has come to be called “care ethics.” Finally, we will ask what role care plays in both therapeutic work and in how we navigate our lives.
FEBRUARY 7th, 2027
MORNING WORKSHOPS
WORDS, WONDER AND OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS ~ PART 1
The People Behind the Practices: Discovery, doubt, relationships, and becoming a narrative therapist – Part One
Presenters: Christine Dennstedt (Canada), David Marsten (USA), David Rock Nylund (USA)
WORKSHOP ONE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
Throughout their decades long relationship, Christine, David and Rock have grown a deep and mutual appreciation for one another as people and the marvel they experience looking on to the ever evolving creativity their colleagues bring to narrative therapy. So, however strange this may seem, they have never before had an opportunity to present and connect their ideas together inside a workshop room.
Their interactive workshop offers participants a window into their personal, relational, and political journeys in narrative therapy up to the present moment, ideas that are currently capturing their interest, and experience what might happen when they are (finally) in the same room interacting, interviewing one another, and presenting together.
Participants engage how Christine has discovered rich possibilities at the intersection of narrative practice and psychedelic medicine. How David is finding new possibilities for Wonderfulness interviewing and the establishment (from the outset of therapy) of the worth and dignity of the persons consulting him. Anf how Rock has become interested in the ally industrial complex and why in positioning oneself as an ally to historically oppressed communities may serve to reproduce privilege more than serve the mission of those communities.
Workshop participants will be similarly invited to reflect on their own journeys in tracing back in time the events and values that brought them to this work and to the commitments they hold.
How to Respond Relationally to Trauma Presenter: Helené Grau Kristensen (Denmark)
WORKSHOP TWO
9:00 AM - 12 PM
Helenés workshop explores relational interviewing practices to assist clients who have experienced the traumatic death of a loved one, and the traumatic events surrounding that death. This narrative informed relational framework challenges mainstream individualist approaches that treat trauma and PTSD symptoms as an inner condition of the self, that is most often located in the brain and/or the body and focuses treatment on the individual alone.
However well-intended these therapeutic approaches are they often reinforce the very helplessness the trauma has imposed, leaving clients alone with the memory of what they cannot do. Helenés workshop offers conference participants a relational response to trauma that situates trauma within the relationships where it played out, including the relationship with the loved one who died. A relational response to trauma restores a client’s authority over their own story by recognizing the actions they took, even in the most overwhelming moments.
Through demonstrations of her session transcripts of recent therapeutic conversations, conference participants experience how unfolding relational responses to traumatic events undermines the trauma story of powerlessness. They will also learn how significant loved ones, including those who have died, can be recruited as allies in responding to the effects of trauma.
From Story to Strength: Narrative Pathways in Trauma Work Presenter: Rosa Elena Arteaga
WORKSHOP THREE
9:00 AM - 12 PM
Through an intimate and interactive, step-by-step approach, presenter Rosa Elana guides participants through a race, gender, and violence-informed therapeutic practice grounded in narrative therapy. She demonstrates her innovative approach to exploring the often-unrecognized survival strategies that women develop in response to gender-based violence and its ongoing impacts.
Drawing on transcript excerpts, narrative interviewing structures, and interactive engagement, Rosa Elena will invite participants to explore how these strategies can be externalized, understood, and re-situated within the broader social and relational contexts in which they emerge. She will introduce her original approach to bringing into view what she calls “invisible strategies for ongoing survival,” offering participants practical ways to recognize and honor the knowledge, creativity, and resourcefulness embedded in survivors’ responses to traumatic events.
FEBRUARY 7th, 2027
AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS
WORDS, WONDER AND OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS ~ PART 2
Trauma: The Practices Behind the Possibilities Presenters: Christine Dennstedt (Canada), David Marsten (USA), David Rock Nylund (USA)
WORKSHOP FOUR
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Of late, discourses that would direct our attention to trauma have proliferated in culture, academia, and clinical practice. What was once a relatively specialized area of practice has become an increasingly prominent component of clinical training (Boel-Studt et al., 2022; Cook et al., 2019).
In this workshop, Christine, Rock and David concentrate their discussion on two issues:
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the inflationary phenomenon and the social and discursive conditions that contribute to the ever-growing frequency with which we—discover? produce?—trauma “in” the people who consult us.
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Narrative’s interest in persons’ responses to trauma in real time and how responses in the midst of trauma often lend themselves to rich story development. Such story development can serve as a shield to potential shame or other interlopers that can capture and attach themselves to the effects of traumatic events.
The presenters discuss their current practices as they relate to trauma. They will share slides, demonstrate the use of therapeutic letters, and conduct Live interviews. Participants will engage in multiple exercises and break-out groups.
WORKSHOP FIVE
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Hanging Out with Michael White: A video tribute.
Host Stephen Madigan (Canada) + Guests
Stephen and guests host a casual, super fun, interesting and interactive final conference afternoon workshop to reflect, discuss, jump with joy and celebrate Michael White's history, vast ecology of theortical influences, practice influences and innovations, and the very cool human being he was (or rather is - since he is constantly showing up in our threapy room sessions!)
Participants are guided through a breathtaking range of Michael's interviews, workshop teaching, sessions, and shared personal stories of what the relationship with has meant.
The videos act as a reflective surface to demonstrate the influence he's had on the field of mental health, as well their practice, values, and every day lives. Participants are encouraged to jump in, reflect, make meaning, marvel, and enjoy his narrative practice together.
This is definitely a BYOB paper bag event . . .