Category: Professional Development

The Power of Narrative Therapy

Last month, Dr. Hugh Marr, a longtime trainer on the SASSI and clinical psychologist in the private practice of psychotherapy in the Washington, DC area gave an interview on the Shrink Rap Radio podcast. Dr. Marr has taught both substance abuse counseling and psychotherapy at area universities; and has worked in all phases of community mental health, culminating in running a partial hospital program for clients with the co-occurring disorders of substance use and major mental illness. He is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Co-changing Narratives, Co-changing Lives (Routledge, 2020); and the coauthor of the books What Story Are You Living? (CAPT, 2009) and Introduction to Archetypes (CAPT, 2002). His forthcoming workbook for a general audience, also to be published by CAPT, will be titled Finding Your Story. You can view a clip from that interview here or a link to the interview in its entirety can be found here.

The SASSI Institute is excited that Dr. Marr has developed a workshop based on his five-star rated book: A Clinician’s Guide to Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Co-changing Narratives, Co-changing Lives. This workshop is being offered through The SASSI Institute’s Professional Development Platform. A link to a flyer with additional information on the workshop can be viewed here.

We hope you enjoy the interview and that you will join us for this informative webinar.

To register for the webinar and see our other titles, click here.

Healing the Family: Conjoint Family Therapy for Addicted and Dysfunctional Families

Please join us for this insightful live webinar presented by Dr. Donald Osborne. Following is a description of what will be discussed:

Addiction is a Family Disease
Families are systems of relationships with each member playing their part to maintain a homeostasis or equilibrium. This is true of addicted and dysfunctional families as well as healthy ones. Individual family members assume roles within the system. Families with an addicted member may point to the addict as the troubled one and fail to recognize the damage being done to everyone in the family. Families very often unintentionally contribute to the addiction. Roles and behavior follow predictable patterns. Children are particularly vulnerable to developing life-long dysfunctional ways of coping, including developing serious mental health issues or becoming alcoholic or drug dependent themselves. Treating an alcoholic or otherwise addicted individual and not helping the entire family change as a unit frequently leads to treatment failure. Family education is not enough. Conjoint family therapy or multiple families group therapy has worked well in disrupting the dysfunctional homeostasis of addicted families, and then helping them construct a much healthier system of relationships. The chance of addicts recovering increases as their whole family recovers. Dr. Don Osborne delivers a webinar on counseling the family unit as a focus of addiction treatment.

What You Will Learn:
• An Introduction to systems theory
• Systems theory’s application to understanding human interaction
• How to get family members to participate in therapy
• An introduction to transaction analysis as a communication tool for changing family interactions
• A historical perspective of the special application of systems to addicted and dysfunctional families
• Family roles
• Family Scripts
• How to use genograms to identify life scripts and repeated patterns of behavior
• How to use Olsen’s Circumplex family model to help families change
• How to help families contract for new behavior

Please click here for registration information.

Foundational Story Psychotherapy Webinar

We are happy to announce the next in our line of Professional Development webinars: Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Understanding and Co-Changing Clients’ Stories (Part 1) presented by Dr. Hugh Marr. Below is additional information on this workshop:

We humans are narrative creatures. Much of our communication, our cognition, our memory, and even our understanding of our self is storied. By late adolescence virtually all of us have developed a life story, a story that helps determine what we expect from others, in which settings we are most comfortable, how we treat ourselves and what we can hope for. Our life story is comprised of smaller vignettes or foundational stories. As a result, the coin of psychotherapy is narrative, and clients tell an average of 4.1 stories in each session.

Despite the ubiquity of narrative, most of us receive very little education in the structure of narrative and its application to substance abuse and mental health counseling. Given our narrative bones, all therapies must deal with narrative, although most of them do so implicitly, focusing on only a limited number of aspects of story.

In this workshop, we will examine the narrative underpinnings of substance abuse counseling and psychotherapy; and we will broaden our understanding and use of different approaches to alter both foundational and life narratives. We will look at the special impact of trauma on clients’ life stories and the resultant substance abuse and emotional struggles. Participants will come away with greater ease and more tools to understand and help clients change the problematic stories they live.

This workshop is designed to enable participants to:

  • Define foundational and life stories and describe the relationship between the two
  • Gather and use client’s stories to help them understand and change substance abuse and emotional problems
  • Describe the importance of witnessing and demonstrate thematic listening
  • Identify the relationship among substance use, mental illness, and trauma
  • Describe one use of story-based ritual to assist therapists in creating healthy boundaries between work life and home life

Visit www.sassi.com/other-training-online for registration information, provides 4 CEs. 

New Professional Development Webinars Available

The SASSI Institute is pleased to announce that we are launching a line of Professional Development webinars. We will be doing these in partnership with guest lecturers on topics that may be of interest to professionals in the addiction field.

Our first such webinar is Comprehensive Screening & Advanced Assessment of Addiction presented by Dr. Don Osborne. Below is additional information on this workshop:

The Screening and assessment processes are critical to effective addiction treatment. In fact, treatment can only be as effective as the thoroughness of the assessment process. The screening and assessment processes can and should result in clients’ reduced denial or “resistance” and easily transition into therapy.

In this training program you will be able to:

  • Understand screening and assessment.
  • Be able to describe a comprehensive concept of addiction’s progressive nature with problems, tolerance and loss of control.
  • Be able to determine the kinds of questions to ask a client that are most relevant during an initial interview.
  • Be able to formulate specific relevant questions to ask during the interview process.
  • How to use Motivational Interviewing to engage clients and develop a rapport with them.
  • How to obtain collateral information about the client.
  • How to use the DSM-5’s criteria for SUD to diagnose clients and decrease clients’ resistance to treatment.
  • Gaining clients’ trust, reduce denial and resistance to treatment.
  • Gain clients’ agreement that they are addicted to some substance or behavior at a particular stage of the addiction process.
  • How to determine the specific level of care advocated by ASAM.
  • How to transition from screening to the assessment to the therapy stages of treatment.

Visit www.sassi.com/other-training-online/ for registration information, provides 4 CEUs.