Advanced Psychotherapy Training

Level Two Narrative Sand Therapy Certificate Program: Advanced Skill Development with Core Practice and Case Consultations

Program Includes:

• 6 Two-Hour Workshops
• 6 Case Consultations

Workshop Schedule:

• Sunday, October 27, 2024: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• Sunday, November 10, 2024: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• Sunday, November 24, 2024: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• Sunday, December 8, 2024: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• Sunday, December 22, 2024: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• Sunday, January 5, 2025: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time

Case Consultation Dates:

• To be scheduled based on the availability of participants and the instructor.

Join us for a comprehensive learning experience that fits your schedule and professional development needs!

Cost:

$2,160 one-time payment or choose to use our payment plan.

An Advanced Series: Imagination and Symbolism in Therapy

This advanced series delves into techniques for engaging the imagination through symbols, metaphors, and storytelling. Our approach is rooted in phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative, constructionist, and existential therapies. Participants will explore:

• Therapeutic Process: Enhancing the therapeutic journey through imaginative and symbolic engagement.
• Accessing the Therapist’s Imagination: Utilizing your own creativity to enrich therapeutic practice.
• Shifting States of Awareness: Supporting transitions between different states of consciousness.
• Mind-Body-Cultural Collaboration: Integrating mind, body, and cultural perspectives in therapy.

For those already trained in existential and narrative therapies, Level 2 is available without the prerequisite of Level 1.

Our play therapy sessions are designed to embody the core principles, practices, and competencies of the field. We focus on key areas to enhance your understanding and skills, including:

• The Therapeutic Powers of Play: Exploring how play can be a powerful tool for healing and growth.
• The Play Therapy Process: Gaining insight into the stages and techniques of effective play therapy.
• Therapeutic Relationship: Building strong, supportive relationships within the play therapy context.
• Ethical Practices and Scope: Navigating the ethical standards and boundaries of play therapy.
• Childhood Trauma: Addressing the neurobiological, systemic, and social impacts of trauma on children.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Understanding and integrating social-cultural and multicultural aspects into the therapy process.
• Therapist Self-Care: Emphasizing the importance of self-care for therapists to maintain effective practice.

Through these focus areas, we aim to deepen your knowledge, enhance your skills, and support your professional development in play therapy.

Advanced Therapeutic Skills and Imagination

Overview:
Level 2 delves into enhancing your therapeutic practice through deepening awareness and refining core skills. This level focuses on crucial elements such as permission, protection, empowerment, presence, and projection. We explore how the person of the therapist can enrich therapy through authenticity, congruence, spontaneity, and meaningful engagement with clients.

Session Content:

• The Imagination: Engage with projection, permission, portals, and practice. Explore poetics, immersion, images, and metaphors, along with the concepts of injunctions, bracketing, and metaphorical thinking.
• Active Presence: Develop skills in protection, authenticity, congruence, and deep listening. Learn to witness and cultivate wonderment, immediacy, resonance, shifting conscious awareness, and process hypnosis.
• Reclamation: Utilize active imagination, symbol activation, and narrative engagement. Practice Gestalt and I-Thou dialogues, grounded immediacy, and spontaneous innovation-in-the-moment.
• Empowerment: Address culture, identity, freedom, and intersubjectivity. Engage with social justice, the experience of being the cultural other, and the dynamics of power, validation, and collaboration. Examine theory-practice-environmental presuppositions and their manipulation.
• Existential: Explore concepts of being/not-being, meaning/purpose, flow, silence, grief, and grounding.
• Integration: Synthesize narrative layers, depth, the house, the tribe, and the story into a cohesive therapeutic approach.

This advanced series is designed to elevate your therapeutic skills by integrating imagination and profound theoretical concepts into your practice.

Sessions 1 & 2: The Therapist’s Imagination

Focus: Explore the therapist’s imagination to enhance therapeutic practice through active presence, resonance, wonderment, and flow in states of awareness.

Session 1 Objectives:

• Projection, Injunctions, and Permission: Understand these key elements in play therapy, drama, art, and expressive therapies.
• Connection Between Therapist and Client Imagination: Learn how to bridge and utilize both imaginations effectively.
• Therapist Immersion: Discover methods for grounding existential experiences through therapist immersion.
• Portals, Bracketing, Metaphors, and Image Activation: Identify four types of portals and learn how to use bracketing, metaphors, and image activation within play therapy and existential processes.

Session 2 Objectives:

• Active Listening and Engaging Healing: Explore stages of active listening, and how play, poetics, metaphor, and story facilitate healing.
• Active Presence and Protection: Understand how to maintain active presence and protect emerging stories and voices during shifts in states of awareness.
• Resonance and Wonderment: Learn how resonance enhances client storytelling through wonderment.
• Ogden’s Process Hypnosis: Describe Ogden’s process hypnosis and its application in symbol activation.

Description: Strengthening the therapist’s imagination involves embracing non-prescribed therapeutic explorations and focusing energy and attention on the present moment. Sessions will delve into Ogden’s approach to spontaneous play and innovation to access the inner child of both the client and therapist.

Participants will practice calm patience and accept the ambiguity of the therapeutic process, cultivating a willingness to “stay in the question” and suspend disbelief. Emphasis will be placed on balancing therapist curiosity with fluidity, safety, and depth in active presence. We will reflect on how injunctions, judgments, and shame can distort early creativity, and engage in image and symbol activation, while exploring existential depth and self-reflection during shifting states of awareness.

Sessions 3 & 4: The Therapist’s Collaboration

Focus:
Explore the collaborative dynamics between therapist and client through active imagination, symbol activation, and cultural narratives. Emphasize the integration of Gestalt, I-Thou dialogues, and innovative techniques in therapeutic practice.

Session 3 Objectives:

• Collaboration and Co-Transference: Understand how collaboration and co-transference impact metaphors, story construction, symbol voices, and sand scenes, particularly in play therapy with miniatures and sand therapy.
• Ogden’s Innovation-in-the-Moment: Provide an example of how active imagination and spontaneity play a role in Ogden’s innovative approach.
• Personal and Cultural Injunctions: Identify two personal and cultural injunctions that hinder creativity and resonance in therapy.
• Therapeutic Powers of Play: Name three Therapeutic Powers of Play engaged during I-Thou dialogues, Gestalt work, and the use of active imagination.
• Engaging the Therapist’s Imagination: Describe two methods for enhancing the therapist’s imagination, flow with play, spontaneity, and collaborative symbol processes.
• Existential Threads: Explain how existential elements connect mind-body, breath, culture, and story within imaginative immersion.
• Competency Preparations: Describe two essential preparations for therapist competency in handling images, symbols, and cultural stories.
• Staying-in-the-Question: Clarify the importance of maintaining curiosity and protection while curbing undue therapist curiosity.

Session 4 Objectives:

• Wonderment and Cultural Competency: Explain how wonderment transforms the concept of interpretation, especially concerning cultural competency.
• Facilitating Dialogues: Describe how therapists facilitate I-Thou dialogues and Gestalt therapy with images and culturally appropriate symbols.
• Play Therapist Competencies: Identify three competencies necessary for the safe facilitation of imaginative engagement.
• Guiding Principles: Name two principles that ensure safety and support during Gestalt and I-Thou dialogues.
• Existential and Socio-Cultural Concerns: Discuss how existential psychotherapy and socio-cultural-political issues manifest during narrative symbol exploration.
• Cultural Layers in Sand Scenes: Describe four cultural layers evident in sand scenes.
• Cultural Awareness: Identify three crucial aspects of cultural awareness essential for play therapists and expressive therapy.
• Symbols and Cultural Experience: Explain how symbols and stories help clients represent and externalize cultural experiences and trauma.
• Culturally Relevant Experiences: State three aspects of culturally relevant existential experiences depicted in sand scenes.
• Symbol Categories: Name four symbol categories important for maintaining culturally attuned representations.
• Social Justice and Existential Experience: Describe two connections between social justice and existential experience in sand scenes.
• Culturally Informed Dynamics: Explain two essential aspects of play therapy dynamics enhanced by culturally informed I-Thou dialogues.
• Play Therapy Competencies: State two competencies necessary for culturally informed ethical practice in play therapy.

Description:
In these sessions, we focus on attuning the therapist to silence and voice, fostering patience, non-judgmental acceptance, and stillness to guide and amplify symbol voices. We practice mindfulness and wonderment while addressing projections and cultivating intuition, resonance, and discernment, paying particular attention to cultural countertransference and fluid boundaries.

We explore applications from play therapy, existential stories, narrative therapy, and Gestalt therapy to enhance I-Thou dialogues. Emphasis is placed on permission, protection, freedom, innovation, spontaneity, safety, and trust to overcome limiting injunctions. We also reflect on existential themes such as grief and transformation, integrating these through active imagination and hermeneutic circles of healing stories.

Culture, Social Justice, and Existential Engagement:
Culture profoundly influences therapy systems, including the culture of psychotherapy, clinician and client cultures, and the symbols emerging during sand scenes and imaginative engagement. Cultural awareness encompasses power dynamics, political manipulation, sensory experiences, survival instincts, and human relational experiences.

Culture is constructed and represented through myths, symbols, rituals, and stories, reflecting existential struggles with identity, freedom, mortality, and responsibility. We examine how cultural representations impact therapeutic practice and the importance of play across cultures.

We explore the therapist’s awareness of cultural symbols, client-symbol connections, and the cultural aspects of sand therapy. Cultural attunement involves immersion in culturally relevant play, studying cultural symbols, and engaging with the cultural Other. By honoring real, imagined, and remembered stories, we seek to balance responsibility with hope, reflecting deep existential meanings that heal and transform.

Sessions 5 & 6: The Therapist’s Depth

Focus:
Explore the integration of existential depth and therapeutic practice, emphasizing concepts such as being/not-being, meaning/purpose, flow, silence, grief, grounding, and narrative layers.

Overview:
Sessions 5 and 6 will build on the skills and knowledge from the previous sessions, focusing on integrating these concepts into a cohesive therapeutic practice.

Objectives for Sessions 5 & 6:

• Images of Integration: Explore how images of integration reflect self, culture, and the therapeutic process, and how they contribute to a holistic approach.
• Therapist Immersion and Depth: Examine the limits and benefits of therapist immersion and how it contributes to depth in therapeutic practice.
• Mind-Body-Culture-Imagination Integration: Learn how to integrate mind, body, culture, and imagination to enhance therapeutic processes and personal growth.
• Scope of Practice: Understand the scope of practice for play and expressive therapists, and how to blend existential and narrative therapies with traditional professional practices.
• Perceptual Shifts: Describe the perceptual shifts needed for clinicians to engage symbols as a third presence in therapy, and how this training supports the grounding of the Person of the Therapist.

These sessions will facilitate a deeper understanding of how to integrate existential and narrative approaches with practical therapeutic skills, enhancing both the therapist’s and the client’s growth.

 

 

 

This training is approved by APT. Approved Provider 05-161.

 

 

 

The Sand Therapy Training Institute (TSTTI) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. TSTTI maintains responsibility for this program and its content.