Speaker(s):

Regi Carpenter

Presentation: This workshop is designed to help therapists, social workers, clergy and bereavement counselors utilize storytelling as a therapeutic tool for the bereaved. Stories allows children, adults and families to share their experience of death in a risk-free environment as well as realizing the potentially life affirming dimensions of death. Using storytelling and other narrative techniques this workshop will provide guidance and resources on the inclusion of storytelling in grief work. Culturally diverse materials will be available to use in both private and group settings.

Objectives:

• Practice storytelling as a therapeutic tool in bereavement
• Underscore the affirmation of life for the grieving
• Use stories to lessen anxiety, heighten self-esteem and gain insight
• Utilize simple narratives to focus and clarify therapeutic sessions

Slides and Handouts:

Carpenter_Storytelling in Therapeutic Settings Handout- R Carpenter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaker(s):

Regi Carpenter

Presentation: Regi Carpenter was sixteen years old when she first experienced severe mental illness and was committed to a state mental institution in Ogdensburg, NY. After being released she never spoke of it for over thirty years. As a professional storyteller, author and workshop leader, Regi knows the importance of telling one’s story to overcome trauma, ease anxiety, depression and shame. It wasn’t until she told her story of teenage trauma that Regi knew the healing power of stories to restore and heal the battered psyche. In this keynote you’ll hear stories of Regi’s experience as well as how stories can be used as a therapeutic tool to help clients become more resilient and resourceful.

Objectives:

• Build awareness about the misconceptions of people with mental illness
• Promote the use of listening as a therapeutic tool
• Obtain greater understanding of the personal experience of the mentally ill
• Ensure others that recovery is possible

Speaker(s):

Liz Hunter

Presentation:

All I wanted as a child was to feel like a “real” girl. Instead, I grew up in a society that inadvertently separated me with statements of “realness.” My foster parents were often asked, “Is she your real child?” I was frequently questioned, “Where are your real parents? Why doesn’t your real mom love you?” From the abusive and neglectful place I first landed to the rejecting world of foster care, I was unable to connect with the ideas of real love and family. Everything about my internal and external reality felt lacking and, therefore, inferior. I came to understand myself as an “other”—something not “real” or less than human.

As professionals, we intimately understand how attachment problems are created at home. Yet, we may not realize that victims of abuse/neglect are receiving disconnecting messages both within and outside the walls that house them. Sometimes, this disconnect is even perpetuated by the very profession that seeks to remedy it. Human helpers need to better understand how a sense of “disconnection” interplays with many of the behavioral and emotional problems we see in children from traumatic circumstances.

Children come to care about the impact of their actions on others through having a strong and healthy connection to people. But what happens when a child feels alienated from humankind? With my story, as well as my parents’ stories, I will seek to answer that question. I will explore both the interfamilial and societal dynamics that led to generation of dysfunction within my own family—dysfunction characterized by abuse, neglect, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, and marked parental failure. I will show how this cycle was finally broken by others simply inviting me back into humanity and showing me that I was and always had been a “real” girl.

Objectives:

• Describe the mental processes and environmental messages that lead a child to become/feel “disconnected”
• Explore how “disconnection” leads to negative interpretations of self
• Explore how disconnecting from ourselves leads us to disconnect from others.
• Show how our growth, connection, and learning needs can sometimes be met in the darkest of spaces by the most unexpected people
• Show how children born into the same home circumstances can have different outcomes because of connections they forge
• Show that the only cure for human connection problems is human connection.
• Show that our hope for reaching people is through our shared humanness
• Show that the people who changed my life the most were the people who simply identified a need within me, connected with the need, and met it