“There Is Always Process” - Online 2024”

This experiential training is the latest in the series on “Working with Process.” 

This new training takes another step into building your skill and fluency in identifying your clients’ “process” and creating collaborative ways to work effectively.  It will help you identify and work with the places where both your client and you may tend to disconnect, even subtly. This can also help you stay more confidently engaged.  

Participants’ questions about how to work effectively with challenging dynamics will guide our agenda.

This is an opportunity to bring forward your toughest moments as a therapist in an intimate environment where everyone is wanting to be better and more confident in this complex work.

You are encouraged to think about your practice and clarify your challenges - both in client presentations and in your own reactions - before this training.  Please send Craig your thoughts ahead of time so he can organize the agenda.  It is especially helpful if you have case scenarios that you’d be willing to role play in the training. CraigPenner2@gmail.com

We will all be in the “unknown” together, finding ways to stay engaged with processes that have not been so evident. It can be a vulnerable proposition to bring in your hardest moments, and a different vulnerability when we keep them private.  We are all coming to learn, and everyone benefits from each others’ exposure.  Just as it’s hard for our clients to see their own process, it’s hard for us as therapists as well. This small intimate training facilitates a supportive environment to help facilitate growth while facing moments that may have “thrown you off.”

Role Plays 

We will have some discussion, exercises, and demonstration sessions, and we’ll primarily use role plays to get into dynamics that are hard to articulate until we meet them in the moment.  You can play your client, and either Craig will be the therapist, or group members will take turns in the therapist role.  Craig can also play your client, with you and others working as the therapist.  Past participants have reported that the edges of their learning were best expanded when they could feel themselves become unsure or get stuck, with the chance to find workable dynamics to get through differently.  

Think of situations where it’s hard to:

• Establish presence, and tell if clients are in the window of tolerance/presence at any moment

• Create a clear focus 

• Shift from clients’ “complaints” to finding traction to establish a meaningful focus

• Get clear agreements

• Fine tune agreements as the work progresses

• Deal with your own frustration with clients

• Notice disconnections and the dynamics of how they occur

• Adjust pacing as a client’s activation shifts

• Notice clients’ overrides and later it is harder to feel any traction in the session

• Track clients’ shifting focus

• Go from “talking about” to more meaningful processing

• Cope with feeling protective of your clients

• Manage your own discomfort when clients are facing tragic or impossible situations

• Assess if the work is helpful

• Assess if you and your client are on the same page

• Assess if you are working harder than your client

• Assess where to go in the session, or in the therapy

• Not be drawn into using psychoeducation to get through tough moments

• Feel confident about what you are doing

Use the button below to see a video of role play from a recent consultation.  The first 21 minutes are the role play, and the remaining is a discussion about dynamics in the session and therapist’s choice points.  This displays some of the difficulties and frustrations we encounter in sessions, and ways to position ourselves to work effectively.

This somatically-based process-oriented approach gives therapists a window into dynamics of “non-presenting problems” that can impede therapy if they are not addressed. The ability to “trust the process” more deeply opens doors to more effective and satisfying therapy.  We will look at how observing the “drive for completion” together with dynamics of “being present or overwhelmed” offer a lens into seeing and working with process.

Prerequisites:

This advanced training has a prerequisite of completing NP 1 & 2, so everyone will have the foundation of working from the Natural Processing perspective. 

Participants who have taken our prior “Process” trainings say that each training has helped their them to further develop a keener lens on process.