Thursday, November 8, 2007

Hope and Resiliency: Strength-Based Strategies

"Hope begins in the dark; the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work and you don’t give up." Anne Lamott

How do we help our clients maintain hope in the face of adversity and suffering? How do we help others sustain their hope when our own experience of hope may be waning? For those of us working in human service agencies, schools, home-based, and health care settings, experiencing hope is an essential aspect of our work. This workshop will use a narrative approach to explore the relational nature of hope as a means to enhance growth and change.

How we make meaning of our life experiences is related to the development of a resilient world-view. Facilitating the discovery of meaning is one of the essential narrative practices used to support clients’ natural strengths and resiliencies. In this workshop, we will look at the role of hope, imagination, and spirituality in the healing process. We will discuss a creative repertoire of strategies to enhance communication with our clients, to explore their views of hope, including hope stories, images, symbols, rituals, metaphors, humor, and artwork to foster resiliency and the possibility of change. Workshop participants will:

• Recognize the importance of harnessing hope as a therapeutic strategy
• Explore the imaginative and creative components of the hoping process
• Obtain narrative strategies to elicit hope stories and rituals from clients and their families
• Develop a set of creative strategies to sustain hope
• Reconnect with their own sense of meaning, hope, and possibility

Workshop format includes lecture, discussion, case examples including artwork and narratives, and brief experiential exercises.

Instructor

Laura Basili, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist whose therapeutic work focuses on how children, families, and helping professionals make meaning of adversity, illness, and loss. She has a private practice and teaches at Middlebury and Saint Michael's Colleges in Vermont. For ten years Laura worked as a psychologist at Boston Children's Hospital and as an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Laura is an inspirational and dynamic speaker whose nationally known workshops are infused with her joie de vivre and heartfelt storytelling.