Love 

Between Dishes, Betrayals, and Threats:

Description:

It has been our privilege to discover, together with our clients, extraordinary stories of love in the midst of ordinary yelling matches about chores, betrayals, sex, indifference and abuse that couples experience. In the midst of these dramatic exchanges in our therapy rooms, we were pressed to find Narrative means for couples to tell their stories in a way that does not shy away from the veritable catastrophes of love and yet, invites them to risk stepping passionately into each other’s worlds.

In this 2-day workshop, which will take place over two Saturdays (October 3rd & 10th), we will talk you through the theoretical, philosophical and ethical underpinnings that have informed our practice. In particular, we will highlight the feminist and Narrative ideas that we have vitally relied on to fashion conversations with couples that seek to undermine deadly assumptions about love, gender, power, and distress that have dispossessed couples from their unique moral commitments and artistries in the realms of love.

We will show you, story-by-story, step-by-step, a way of inviting couples to be intimate witnesses of each other and the entirely surprising effects of such invitations on our conversations and subsequently our couple’s lives and loves. We will do so by inviting you to take a close look at our session transcripts, therapy videos, and therapeutic documents.

…So I started crying:

OF COURSE I care.

Hey beautiful, 

Let’s go share some fries

And talk about exactly 

What we mean 

When we talk about

Love…

(Excerpt from a therapeutic couple’s poem)

“-Love is work.

No no. Love is not that, not that.

-Love is dead.

No. Incorrect. Love is not dead, not

Yet.”

(Lord Birthday)

Rate: $300 (Professionals) $150 (Student)

About the Presenters:

Sanni Paljakka is a narrative therapist and Director at the Calgary Narrative Collective. Tom Stone Carlson is the co-editor of the Journal of Narrative Family Therapy and draws on narrative ideas in his teaching, supervision, and therapy practice. After a chance meeting at a narrative therapy conference, they discovered a shared interest in narrative ideas that can transform a conversation, undermine taken for granted power hierarchies, demoralize problem stories, and restore people’s acts and arts of living to their unique beauty and trustworthiness. Sanni and Tom have published many articles on their narrative work and have been invited to present their work nationally and throughout the world including in Argentina, Canada, France, New Zealand, Norway, and South Africa.