Dates
May 3, 4, 10, 17
Cost
$775, 15% discount for groups of 3 or more & for CityU Alumni
Delivery Mode
Synchronous online
Course Description
Most psycho-therapeutic modalities focus on single aspects of clients, which limit their access to “the whole of the client.” Somatic therapists privilege what they think of as “the body.” CBT therapists focus on cognitions. EFT therapists are most interested in the emotional lives of their clients. Etc.
In this course students will learn 11 entry points to client problems. The course begins with an overview of experience and subjectivity as gateways into the therapeutic encounter. We will address the contributions of various specializations — including CBT, EFT, AEDP, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Depth Psychology — as defining and implementing diverse points. We will then problematize the notion of specialization from humanistic/posthumanistic and decolonizing perspectives.
The course then moves into a detailed exploration of both the theory and application of 11 “Entry Points.” Participants will learn how, why, and when to probe across these diverse spectra of human experience and will develop an understanding of the meanings to expect from these distinct orders of information. At the end of the course, participants will have gained a broad, non specialized toolkit that can serve as a sound foundation for any client with any problem.
Instructors
Shane Trudell is a Founding Director of Nightingale Counselling. Shane’s counselling practice is rooted in critical theory and an emancipatory ethic, and his aspirational vision of what private practice can and should be guides this introduction to the business of counselling therapy. Shane’s work and research in his role as Director are about elevating the potential of private practice counselling therapy, for the benefit of clients, other counsellors, and counselling therapy itself. He works as a mentor, consultant, and instructor on how to contribute to the mental health community through ethical, muscular counselling practice.
Hart Caplan fundamental orientation to counselling is existential. At its heart, this approach doesn’t distinguish between cognitions (thinking) and affect (emotions) and the somatic (body). Instead, it (and I) attempt to make contact with the whole of one’s being. After all, we don’t refer to ourselves as “human brains” or “human bodies” but as human beings. This is why talk therapy participates in healing the body, but it also explains why attention to the body can help heal what we generally call mental illness. And in the midst of it all, feelings are the endlessly rich source of information that help connect thinking to the body.
In this way, I don’t think of my practice as curative. Rather, I think of the movement that is achieved in therapy as-being-towards-authenticity: i.e., when one’s interior and exterior and thinking, feeling, and bodily experiences are in concert. The task of therapy, then, is simply to learn to speak in and with one’s own voice.One of the great therapists of the last 50 years, Irvin Yalom, wrote that “the relationship is the therapy.” This is the cornerstone of my own thinking and practice.
