Diploma of Solution Oriented Family Therapy

Overview

This diploma will be of interest to anyone wanting to work with children and their families, or to family therapists looking for a forum to extend their work in a supported way. This programme provides an opportunity for hands on, experiential learning around family therapy, and even those working with families will benefit from these experiential workshops which provide an opportunity to practice. This programme creates a context for a family to emerge from a group of individuals while exploring the moves that make this possible. These moves are foundational to this work. Managing the mood, joining, and creating connections to unite a family group will be recurrently emphasized, and this in turn will create the possibility to practice with the family that emerges.

CET diplomas have been based in Melbourne and running nationally for 25 years, providing a solid foundation grown from this experience and the feedback of hundreds of students about what is useful in a learning environment. These diplomas provide a refreshing return to emphasising a client’s actual experience, and away from the heady intellectualisations that have been distilled as techniques. This work has evolved from its origins in Rob McNeilly’s time spent with Milton Erickson in the 70’s, through his working and teaching to the present day. In our teaching we emphasise demonstration and practice over lecture and information. Where Erickson was a consummate teacher, we are interested in the experience of learning. Rob has explored this face to face with teachers such as Rafael Eccheverria, Humberto Maturana, Julio Olalla and Fernando Flores to name a few, and has brought this learning to teaching ,creating a community of educators locally, nationally and internationally

Lecture and content in these programmes takes on a very different feel for the student as we ‘speak it’, rather than ‘speak about it’. A meticulous focus on language which is generative shows a consistency of approach in our working, teaching and supervision of students. The generative importance of emotions and the body is similarly coherently expressed.

We invite students to observe a demonstration session, a client, a lecture, a book or paper and even their own writing from within their own experience, and to explore their own individual response and learning. Students learn a way of individualising the therapy to the client, while being in the experience of having the teaching individualised to them in a way that allows a texture of experience that is rare in modern education practices.

In this approach diagnoses are acknowledged and then the individual is allowed to emerge in his/her entirety, uncovering concerns, strengths, resources and often banal human dilemmas. At face value this way of working reveals engaging, practical and deceptively simple sessions, which provide an experiential blueprint from which to practice, allowing exploration of the many layers and subtleties of the use of language, emotions and the body to generate learning which is sustainable and available for future experience as well as past reflection.

In my own learning, initially in these programmes beginning in 2000 and then as a kind of Sorcerers Apprentice to Rob, learning to teach and teaching to learn, I have developed a deep appreciation of the value of experiential learning, and a fascination in facilitating learning in others. My interest in Family therapy has grown from 11 years in a family based general practice, with the added joy for me in learning to be part of a solution oriented conversation that reconnects a family, articulates concerns and uncovers family strengths and resources that assists their being together in a more satisfying and sustaining way.

An Invitation

My purpose here is to invite anyone already working with individuals or couples to play with transferring their talents to working with families, and to provide a forum for exploration and practice for any family therapist to extend themselves in a safe and supported way.
What you will learn
   •   A map to simplify the complexity of a family’s presenting issues.
   •   Competence and confidence in managing the mood within a family and group.
   •   Leading with that mood and the possibilities for the actions that can emerge
   •   A way of observing that will allow increased sensitivities to maintaining this mood throughout a difficult conversation
   •   The use of language as a generative tool for creating solutions
   •   Ways of working with emotions and the body to add texture to the solution experience.
   •   A framework for running a family session   where each participant’s individual style of therapy can be incorporated and built on.
   •   Clinical applications dealing with commonly encountered family problems.

Dates

Fees

full payment by beginning of programme $3300
Or 4 payments every 2 months from beginning of programme $850