Once Upon A Time
A New Year, a time for new magic, new unfoldings of our stories, new beginnings.
I’ve loved stories all my life. As a child I escaped into them away from a reality that was lonely, upsetting, confusing and seemed to demand constant hard work and struggle. Flying away on the Wishing Chair, camping and sailing with the Swallows and Amazons, living with the wild horses of Australia with the Silver Brumby, and of course joining Lucy and the others in Narnia; my mind would be full of adventure, friendship, and connection, while my emotions got involved in lives that were not my own, but were somehow telling my story, or the story I longed to live. I devoured the Fairy Story section of the local library shelves – those beautiful colour coded collections of magical tales from around the world, the Lilac Book of Fairy Tales, the Blue, the Crimson and so on. They provided nourishment that was important not only for my 7 year old self but for deeper and more permanent parts of my being. Words, and specifically metaphors, became food for my soul, allowing experiences and feelings that made no sense to my young mind, to find their place in my own narrative.
For many years now I have been a psychotherapist – the ideal profession for someone who loves stories. As a therapist I have listened, witnessed and facilitated as my clients gradually unfold their life story with me, searching for the golden threads of meaning that will give their pain purpose and allow it to ease. Sometimes we have invited in the heroes of my clients’ favourite tales, reclaiming the qualities that the hero has held for the client so that these can be used with conscious awareness as part of the client’s resources. Sometimes we have deliberately worked with one story – the one that the client has always felt connected to since they were a child – and discovered how that story lives in the client’s life, and can ultimately hold the answers and the healing that we are seeking.
As a client myself, I have sought and found understanding, resourcing and healing through working with fairy stories, metaphors and magical figures, at times unpacking in great detail the connections between an ancient tale and my own. I have walked my own path through the woods to meet the witch and discover that she has lessons to teach me. I have unlocked doors in dark dungeons and faced the blood and bones that have been hidden within. I have become wiser, more intuitive and more discerning, as I have got to know how the great mythical archetypes live in my life.
And these days, I can also call myself a writer. I have spent the last eight years or so finding ways to share my own story in written form. I have learned how to find the arc of my life story, to recognise my heroes and demons, to describe character and setting through deliberate choice of language, so that the plot can unfold not only as it has done in reality, but also in a way that takes a reader on the journey. Learning to “show not tell” has not been easy for the teacher in me, but I have discovered that it has a deeply transformative potential. The telling of my story in my own therapy has been a vital part of my growth, but showing it in its raw form in my writing has taken me deeper into changing the narrative and how it is held in my body, mind and spirit. Relationships have shifted and changed in both my inner and outer worlds.
So this year I have decided to offer some trainings in this kind of work for others who work with clients, and with themselves, to bring about healing and growth. As with pretty much all the workshops I run, these will be experiential and involve working deeply with your self in order to learn how to share these processes with your clients. There are a few different “flavours” available – exploring archetypes, using fairytales, and developing the skills of therapeutic memoir writing – so I invite you to explore the descriptions you will find below and go where your heart/soul/intuition leads! I hope to “see” many of you online soon, and wish you all a story filled 2022.
Meeting the Mother – Working with the Mother Archetype in Therapy
The Ugly Duckling and Other Stories – Medicine for the wounds of Difference
A Beginner’s Guide to Therapeutic Life Story Writing (Saturday)
A Beginner’s Guide to Therapeutic Life Story Writing (weekday)