Dates: Thursdays — February 6, 13 and 20, 2025
Time: Noon to 2:30 p.m. EST
CEs: 7.5
Format: Live, Virtual
Cost: $195
Description
One’s theoretical lens and interventions guide how we understand and respond to clients. Yet, it is the therapist’s proficiency with imagination that grounds essential therapy skills. Imagination is key to trauma work to develop new neural pathways, to externalize and reframe experience, to reclaim memory and life story. When clients feel safe, when they have permission to break through rote, alienating patterns, they can process grief and loss and access creative resources for resilience.
Imagination is essential to hone therapeutic presence, maintain immediacy, nurture a trusting alliance, enhance intuition, and engage with flow and flexibility. Collaborative engagement with imagination balances power and deepens therapeutic process.
Hope and healing are nested in imagination. We must be able to imagine new possibilities to explore new ways of being. We can enliven expressive therapeutic approaches such as art and drama therapy, poetry and puppets, doll house and landscape images, music and movement therapies, and symbol engagement when we practice imagining. When we practice active imagination, we improve our ability to resonate, innovate, and validate client experience.
This is an experiential workshop. In this three-session series participants will explore ways to activate imagination for safe, deepening therapeutic process.
Learning Objectives
- Describe two aspects of imagination that enhance psychotherapy.
- Describe three competencies for safe use of the imagination.
- State three challenges across mental health disciplines that limit use of the imagination for clients and for therapists.
- Describe the relevance of culture and intersubjectivity in active imagination.
- Explain three exercises to practice innovation, depth, flow and attunement
- State three ways to integrate use of the imagination into therapy, supervision and training.
