MORNING WORKSHOPS

(9:00am-12:00pm)

FSW, 7th Floor MacKimmie Tower at the University of Calgary

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WORKSHOP 1: IPscope Review and Update

Karl Tomm and Tamara Wilson

This introductory workshop is intended for Conference participants who are not yet familiar with the IPscope or who would like to refresh their memories about this relational assessment tool. The Interpersonal Pattern scope (IPscope) focuses on identifying and clarifying patterns of interaction between clients and significant others. Several years ago, Karl and his colleagues developed this model of systemic assessment that distinguishes between Pathologizing Interaction Patterns (PIPs), Healing Interaction Patterns (HIPs), Wellness Interaction Patterns (WIPs), Transforming Interpersonal Patterns (TIPs), and Deteriorating Interpersonal Patterns (DIPs). Recently he and his colleagues have extended this framework to include Socio-Cultural Interpersonal Patterns (SCIPs) and Social Network Interpersonal Patterns (SNIPs) as well. A book on the IPscope was published in May of 2014.

Compared to a traditional psychiatric assessment, this systemic approach to assessment is much less pathologizing. Since a PIP exists in the interpersonal space between persons,

labeling or “diagnosing” the PIP has fewer stigmatizing effects on the people involved than diagnosing an individual with a mental disorder. Systemic assessment also provides

guidance for therapeutic interventions. That is, once a particular PIP has been identified as part of a relationship system, a specific HIP can usually be conceptualized as an

antidote to that PIP. Formulating the main PIPs and HIPs in a clinical situation provides an overall map, which helps clinicians initiate TIPs, bring forth HIPs and WIPs, and

avoid DIPs. As a result, therapeutic initiatives for constructive change can become more focused and rigorous.

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WORKSHOP 2: 'TIPs' to Move from Disquieting Disruption to Generative Participation 

Joaquin Gaete & Ines Sametband

Caregivers often experience their children’s behavior as highly disruptive, or somewhat wrong. More recently, children often become disruptive not just in terms of what they do, but of what they are – by, say, coming out as gender fluid, or defying parents’ religion, body shapes/weight, food-consumption, and other identity-making preferences.  Parents coming from too different intersecting cultural backgrounds/discourses may experience high discrepancy in how they understand their children’s behaviour and identities.  Responding to disruption has become even more complicated in our current postdisciplinary societies, where various potentially legitimate identities/discourses coexist, and mushroom to the point that even language seems to fall short to ‘pin them down’. As a result, more traditional “disciplinarian” styles of managing (potentially conflictive) difference are becoming problematic and even offensive, leaving many caregivers, educators (and therapists!) at a loss on how to proceed. Drawing from the notion of Transforming Interpersonal Patters (TIPs; Tomm et al., 2014; Gaete et al., 2014; 2020), in this workshop we outline resources to assist therapists in managing “disquieting differences” generatively. First, we will review the potential benefits of deferring immediate evaluation constitutive of experienced disruption (“this is right/wrong”). This will include introducing a series of conversational resources: from Karl Tomm’s classic Internalized Other Interviewing and Reciprocal Reflective Listening to our more recently developed TIPs (e.g., “Co-creating Learnings as Freedoms”, “Legitimizing Constructive Difference”.) Second, we will provide a series of examples showing how therapists may approach these disquieting moments by helping family members distinguish and articulate their positions in ways that are respectful of other members’ views/responses.

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WORKSHOP 3: Children's Stories, Children's Solutions: Constructing Therapeutic Realities with Children and Families

Jeff Chang 

In this workshop, Jeff will illustrate a practical, collaborative, and playful approach to engaging children and their families in therapy. Jeff will discuss some of the cultural ideas and discourses that support children's problems, and how interpersonal patterns can maintain children's difficulties. Influenced by solution-focused and narrative ideas, and enlivened by expressive arts, he will describe and demonstrate an approach to socially constructing therapeutic realities with children and families, encompassing five key tasks:

• developing and maintaining a cooperative relationship

• understanding the clients’ world view and strengths

• negotiating a solvable problem

• noticing and eliciting embodied experiences of difference

• anchoring, amplifying, and circulating these experiences of difference

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WORKSHOP 4: Resistance, Reflexivity, and Revelations: What "Disquieting" Moments in Therapy Tell Us About Our Values 

Monica Sesma-Vazquez and Carla Guanaes-Lorenzi

In this pre-conference workshop, participants will engage in a dialogic journey examining and evoking those emotional and uncomfortable moments with family therapy clients. There are instances during therapeutic conversations when we notice something is off, awkward, or problematic. Our bodies now and then react to certain interactions with clients, their behaviours, narratives, or content. We might perceive that what we say, ask, or do provoke “disquiet” in some members of the family. In addition, we could notice interactions among family members in which they verbally or non-verbally communicate emotional “disquiet” among themselves, and sometimes we would react to them. These disquieting moments, that are precious for the therapeutic process, could help us understand what we (or others) are resisting and reacting to, and could be very generative and illuminating. This pre-conference workshop is an invitation to take part in a collective reflectivity exercise in which we will co-create questions and processes to better examine disquieting moments with families with the intention to bring forth those revelations that spark transformational experiences in the therapeutic room. We will be exploring and sharing our personal disquieting moments, join in conversation about how those disquieting moments inform what we value, and how we could welcome the therapeutic system to explore

these values together.

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WORKSHOP 5: Practical Strategies for Understanding Social and Institutional Barriers Faced in Family Therapy

Emily Doyle

As systemic therapists we already recognize impacts of socio-cultural patterns of interaction, oppression, and injustice in our clinical work. Despite this recognition, I’m sure that each of us could describe instances where we have felt helpless in our attempts to effectively advocate for meaningful change in the face of these experiences. I have learned that without practical strategies from which to address the resulting disquiet, I struggle in my work as both a family therapist and a counsellor educator. 

From the everyday aspects of our therapy work it can be difficult to identify the layers of organization we are standing under, as they are not readily visible. How we meet, where and when we meet, what we are able do, what we are unable to do, as well as discourses we orient to, beliefs we hold, and stories we tell about each other all are organized and maintained in tangible ways that are beyond our frontline experiences. As a result, disjuncture emerges between lived experiences (both our own and the families that we work with) and the care we can offer. This challenges our ability to engage in preferred patterns of interaction and/or target our advocacy efforts.

When we are able to identify factors creating and maintaining disjunctures, we can come to see, name, and respond to the aspects of our practices that are actively oppressing both families and practitioners. In this workshop we will work with practical mapping strategies designed to make visible – and accessible – the social and institutional organization that perpetuates our lived experiences.