GROUP
INFORMATION: Groups will be
held at Harbord Center for Critical Therapy Education at 181 Harbord
St.Toronto Ont. Groups are offered at various times during the week.
The cost is twenty dollars per 2 hour session. Contact Richard Todhunter,
bio-energetic psychotherapist and massage therapist at 416-535-9305
to register. Groups are on-going and can be joined at anytime but one
must commit to ten sessions completed over a three month period.
Group Education/Therapy
Agenda
Session 1 - An exploration of troublesome issues and
means for dealing with them
Session 2 - Dealing with issues from the standpoint
of bring to bear four ways of making sense of and acting in the world
Session 3 - Dealing with issues from the standpoint
of belonging to communities of practice
Session 4 - Dealing with issues from the standpoint
of participating in the practices of communities
Session 5 - Dealing with issues from the standpoint
of engaging in survival and advancement activities
Session 6 - Setting the stage for self-directed Education/Therapy
Sessions 7-10 - On going therapy with conflicts identified
earlier in process with emphasis on actions and four modes of intelligence
in one's lifeworld involvements.
Short Term, Solution-Focussed
Education/Therapy
Aim:
This education/therapy aims to contribute to the development of competence
by people who are encountering difficulty in various family, workplace,
and other social situations in their lives. The expectation is that
the education\therapy will enable participants to, in a relatively short
span of time, understand and mediate conflicts or issues they encounter
in familial, health, educational, recreational, work and other situations
in their lives and in so doing enhance their well-being.
Focus:
In education\therapy people focus on their ways of making sense
of the world, identifying with, participating in, and engaging
in survival and advancement activities of various communities
of practice that constitute a major portion of their lives. Particular
attention is paid to conflicts encountered as they make sense of the
world, belong to, participate in, and engage in survival and advancement
activities in various communities of practice. The intent is to help
people develop their ways of knowing, recognize conflicts that trouble
them and mediate these conflicts so they operate more effectively in
communities of practice, thereby nurturing the development of both the
communities of practice and those who belong to and participate in them.
Method:
With the help of the educator\therapist--over a period not exceeding
ten face-to-face sessions-- participants learn to contextualize the
major conflicts that underlie their difficulties by locating them within
communities of practice and discourses. Then they deal with conflicts
through a process of mediation and survival and advancement activities
through which they develop and bring to bear somatic, narrative,
scientific, and linguistic ways of making sense of the
world that help to reconstruct their view toward life in general and
the specific social situations in which their difficulties arise.
Explorations are undertaken of a person’s somatic, narrative,
scientific, and linguistic ways of making sense of and acting in the
world; the manner in which they play social roles as members of communities
of practice; the identity formation process people undergo as they participate
as full members, new members, and partial members
of communities of practice; a person’s abilities to take on the
common language, values, and the direction of often conflicting communities
of practice along with the accepted attitude, gestures, glances, body
position and dress required to enact various conflicting paractices;
and engagement in advancement activities such as processing data, developing
distinctions and norms, scaling knowledge, ensuring knowledge connections,
self-referencing and languaging that make possible the co-construction
of knowledge. This approach will enable people to search for habituated
patterns that have become second-nature and problematic for them as
individuals and as members of communities of practice.
Short Term, Solution-Focused Education/Therapy is undertaken to help
people understand and make more explicit their ways of making sense
of and acting in the world, how they go about identifying with and participating
in communities of practice, and enacting the social roles that underpin
them. A key thrust is to help people better understand the process of
actualizing forms of human intelligence, becoming able to participate
in the practice of particular communities, and engaging in advancement
activities with the overall aim of developing a more fulfilling life.
In an initial session, participants portray an implicit understanding
of how their lives play out in problematic situations and how their
desires and intentions influence these situations. The educator\therapist
then describes the Short-Term Solution-Focussed Education\Therapy
approach to making intentions and actions more explicit and mediating
conflicts and issues so as to make one’s life more meaningful
and overviews the tools-for-reflection to be employed by a participant
to achieve this outcome.
Between sessions, and with the understanding and tools-for-reflection
that are acquired systematically in each session, the person is able
to make more explicit her or his implicit intentions and the action
connected to them through a journalling process and a critique
by the educator\ therapist as an integral part of each session. Instructional
modules for each of the tools-for-reflection are provided. The content
for each session is the person's recent problematic actions that occurred
between sessions as represented both in journalled and verbal accounts
of them. In the critique stage of each session, the conflicts made explicit
during previous sessions and the attempts to mediate them are examined
by the participant and the educator/therapist with an eye toward developing
deeper insights and more robust action in the problematic situation
under exploration.
At the conclusion of the face-to-face education\therapy sessions, participants
will have acquired a set of tools-for-reflection and the skills to use
them to mediate future contradictions and the associated actions that
occur and drive a person’s development throughout life. On-line
journalling and on-line short courses on ways of making sense of and
acting in the world, development of competence in communities of practice,
and the co-construction of knowledge through advancement activities
can be arranged for participants who wish to continue with education\therapy
on an on-line basis.
Glossary of terms:
• Advancement activities, developing distinctions and
norms, processing data, ensuring knowledge connectivity, scaling knowledge,
self-referencing, and languaging, are ways that people enhance their
own as well as a community’s knowledge base through a process
of co-construction.
• Communities of Practice are groups of people who come
together and form an identity over time in a mutual endeavour that represents
a societally significant practice. Departments within companies and
government agencies, families, sports teams, work crews, neighbourhood
organizations, church congregations, crews of ships, agricultural cooperatives,
and members of an academic department exemplify communities of practice.
• Co-construction of knowledge is the notion that the
discourse and practice of communities of practice as well as the members
constantly undergo change as members continually reproduce them as well
as their selfs through participation in advancement and survival activities.
• Conflicts are the emotion-filled differences between
the way things should or ought to be and the way they are. Said another
way, conflicts are the issues that arise when expectations do not materialize.
• Critique is a process through which people step back
from their day-to-day activities and analyze them using conceptual tools
that provide insights that can not be developed when they are actively
engaged in the operational undertakings of communities of practice.
• Discourses are ways of being, how we speak, the language
we use, the values we espouse, the views we hold, the norms we abide
by, the way in which we dress, and the manner is which we hold our bodies
that signify our competence to engage in the social activities within
given social institutions such as occupations, sports, religion, gender,
ethnic groups, regional groups and nations.
• Full Members of a Community of Practice are competent
old-timers who are responsible for conducting its practice and socializing
newcomers into the community in terms of the newcomers identifying with
the community and developing the competence required for full membership.
• Identity is the many parts of our self that we appropriate
through participation as members of communities of practice.
• Journalling is a process whereby people make written
notes about their emotional responses to situations to record their
emotions as markers for further reflection on the events.
• Linguistic Intelligence, the ability to make sense
our lives by reconciling the conflict between our biological and cultural
heritages, is grounded in nonformal logic aimed at mediating the conflict
between somatic intelligence rooted in biology and narrative and scientific
intelligence rooted in culture.
• Narrative Intelligence, our ability to tell stories
that make sense of our lives and resonate with others in their attempts
to understand events in their lives, is grounded in our cultural experiences
and informal logic.
• New Members of a Community of Practice are accepted
and valued members whose essential role is to develop the competence
to enact the community’s practice as a full member.
• Mediation is a mental process whereby a person is able
to divide the one-sidedness or black-and-whiteness of an issue so as
to be able to cut through emotions and see hidden positive aspects of
a situation.
• Partial or Temporary Members of a Community of Practice
rather than being newcomers or old-timers in a community of practice
are participant\observers who are interested in a community’s
practice and have something to offer in return for limited participation
in it.
• Scientific Intelligence, the ability to make sense
of particular events in such a way as to predict and control them, is
grounded in a form of analytic logic aimed at explaining a set of events.
• Short-Term
Solution-Focussed Education\Therapy is a view of development within
which a person is seen to develop over a lifetime as a result of membership
in various communities of practice, each of which has its own unique
practice and knowledge base that resides in the group rather than in
any one member’s head. Through gaining membership in various communities
of practice people acquire knowledge, understanding and skills that
nurture their identity and competence to function in communities of
practice in general.
• Somatic Intelligence, often referred to as emotional
intelligence, is our natural inclination to act that is grounded in
our primate, biologically grounded sensibilities.< Survival Activities,
competing, planning and deciding, organizing, resource development and
allocation, routinization and controlling are ways that people preserve
their own as well as a community’s practice that enable them to
perform the functions necessary for their day-to-day survival.
• Tools for Reflection are ideas, notions, and concepts
that make possible precise reflection on events for purposes of better
understanding and mediating conflicts and issues that arise from them.
? Ways of Making Sense of the World are somatic, narrative, scientific,
linguistic intelligence that have evolved over the course of the biological
and cultural development of human being.