Representations of Existential Meaning: Activating Symbols, Engaging with Stories

Schedule:
This course consists of two virtual sessions on Fridays, November 15 and 22, 2024, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. (ET). 

Cost: 

$210.

Instructor:
Dee Preston-Dillon, MA, Ph.D. 

Continuing Education:
4 CE Credits (APA)

Existential psychotherapy delves deeply into human experience. This course is designed to explore how these profound experiences come alive through symbol activation, image engagement, and externalizing existential meaning within stories. 

Through brief case vignettes and participant active engagement we’ll address existential concerns such as the search for meaning, cultural identity, restraints to freedom, authentic human connection, and realizing one’s mortality, one’s thrownness, one’s courage and responsibility to Be.

Following the tenants of existential psychotherapy, this course is grounded in the phenomenology of experience, hermeneutic process, immediacy and heightened presence. We will touch on the role of the therapist regarding power and authenticity, invention and imagination, openness and congruence. 

We will explore symbol activation for voice, I-Thou dialogues, landscapes in sand scenes, developmental memories in miniature houses, and a circle of existential symbols shifting time and meaning. Through wonderment, we open memories and voices of being nested between birth and death. Integrating narrative therapy, process hypnosis, and active imagination we balance verbal and non-verbal expression for safe, in-depth exploration.

Key Questions:

• How do existential psychotherapy, hermeneutics, and phenomenology guide symbol activation?
• What competencies support therapeutic process with existential representations of grief, aloneness, mortality, fear and hope?
• How do we set safe boundaries, attentive witnessing, and patient silence, to safely engage symbol voices?
• What practice exercises enhance presence and active imagination, lean into a pacing breath, engage mind-body resonance, maintain presence in silence, open creative sensibilities, and maintain immediacy for existential therapy?

Objectives:

1. Describe three symbol and story methods to receive and validate existential experience.
2. Identify three clinical competencies that enhance presence, empathy, and safe engagement with symbol voices in existential psychotherapy.
3. State two aspects of narrative psychology, within an existential framework, to help externalize and amplify individual, developmental, and cultural lived experience.
4. State one example of symbol engagement that demonstrates collaborative, culturally attuned existential psychotherapy.
5. Describe how existential symbol engagement and story immersion require therapist presence, personal immersion, and creative sensibilities.
6. State two principles of existential psychotherapy that deepen experiential therapies.
7. Describe two exercises to build existential acumen through personal practice.
8. Describe how existential meaning is present in dreams, sand therapy, and cultural myths, symbols and rituals.

Bibliography:

• Alegria, S., Carvalho, I., Sousa, D., et al. (2016). Process and outcome research in existential psychotherapy. Existential Analysis, 27(1), 78-92.
• Correia, E., Cooper, M., Berdondini, L., & Correia, K. (2016). Existential psychotherapies: Similarities and differences among the main branches. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Doi: 10.1177/0022167816653223
• Craig, E. (2015). The lost language of being: Ontology’s perilous destiny in existential psychotherapy. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 22(2), 79-92.
• Georganda, E. T. (2020). Eros, Thanatos and the awakening of Oistros: Being in love with life and ‘our world’. The Humanistic Psychologist, 48(2), 133-141. http://dx.dol.org/10.1037/hum000014
• Gavin, V. J. (2013). Creative existential therapy for children, adolescents and adults. Existential Analysis, 24(2), 318-341.
• Rogers, J. L., Luke, M., & Darkis, J. T. (2020). Meet me in the sand: Stories and self-expression in sand tray work with older adults. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/15401383.2020.1734513
• Schneider, K. J. (2016). Existential-integrative therapy: Foundational implications for integrative practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 26(1), 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039632
• Schneider, K. J. (2015). Presence: The contextual core of effective therapy. PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/e602052010-001

 

 

 

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.