Advanced Training
Applied and advanced training for professionals interested in key practice areas,
integrative practice, live supervision and systemic masterclasses.
Workshops:
Picture This: Harnessing the Therapeutic Power of Genograms (1 day)
Systems and Stories: A Narrative Therapy Approach to Meaning Making and Change (2 days)
Systemic Integrative Practice Masterclass (1 day)
Systemic Thinking Masterclass: Getting Unstuck and Maximizing Maneuverability (1 day)
Live Supervision: Enhancing Systemic Family Therapy Practice (2 days)​​
Picture This: Harnessing the Therapeutic Power of Genograms
This workshop will open up the enormous possibilities and potential of the genogram as a process for both assessment, and intervention. Widely used by family therapists and all health care professionals, the genogram is a graphic way of organising the mass of information gathered during a family assessment and finding patterns in the family system for more targeted treatment.
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Yet many practitioners commonly complete a very basic genogram and file it away, never to be looked at again by them (or their client). This is a major loss especially with complex cases. Done correctly a genogram interview is a powerful assessment tool giving you more detailed understanding of case presentations and how to plan targeted interventions.
To understand what it is that brings a person to seek help, it's essential to consider how each person is inextricably interwoven within broader interactional and contextual systems, the most fundamental of which is family. Family is a principle influence in shaping who a person is, how they relate to others, and how they react or respond to life's predictable stages and changes (e.g., marriage, starting a family, teenage years, aging parents), as well as unplanned challenges (e.g., divorce, remarriage, infertility, untimely death, trauma). This is an important consideration regardless of the family structure people come from, but especially so if clients have an experience of removal from their biological family to foster, kinship or residential care.
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Family diagrams (or genograms) provide a picture of who a person is, where they come from, who matters in their life, and how they belong in the world; as well as providing a framework for understanding present stressors, past struggles and strengths and resources. It goes beyond a traditional family tree allowing practitioners to visualise patterns and psychological factors that affect relationships. This "picture" representation of a client's family context enables practitioners to organise and hold in mind the complexity of a client's context (family history, patterns, events) and their strengths in order to collaboratively identify pathways to healing and promote recovery. Genograms provide a rich and powerful tool for engagement, enhancing the therapeutic alliance, assessment, treatment planning, and can be used as a therapeutic intervention in itself.
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By completion of this workshop participants will have highly effective tools that can be used with all clients and their families/carers/other professionals involved.
The Workshop will include the following areas:
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The place of genogram work within Systemic Family Therapy
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Core systemic concepts related to genogram work
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How to create a genogram and graphically organise information gathered in an assessment session
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How to conduct a genogram interview and how to share the genogram with your client
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Tracking family patterns through time and space
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Interpreting and working with family structure
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Assessing family patterns and functioning, including relational patterns and triangles
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Consideration of the Family Life Cycle
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Mental Health implications
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A Strengths based approach to genograms
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Using genograms as assessment, to plan intervention and as an intervention
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Creative approaches to creating and working with genograms
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Genograms for Young People in Out of Home Care
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To arrange this workshop for your organisation, please contact Dr Leonie White at drleoniewhite@gmail.com or 0401002544
To attend a public event, please search the Compass Seminars Australia website at ​
https://www.compassaustralia.com.au/genogram-training-and-family-genogram-symbols-training
Systems and Stories: A Narrative Therapy Approach to Meaning Making and Change
This two-day workshop will provide participants with key skills in Narrative Practice including practical clinical skills that can be used immediately with individuals and families (children, adolescents, adults and older persons). Participants will consider the relevance of Narrative Practice in their work setting, and applications relating to the context of trauma, relationships, and grief and loss. Participants will gain an understanding of the role of neuroscience in enhancing narrative practice and consider how to “tread lightly” but effectively with Narrative Practice.
In this course participants will develop an understanding of:
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What Narrative Therapy is
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The Systemic Family Therapy context of Narrative Therapy
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Assumptions and systemic concepts underpinning Narrative Practice
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The importance of stories in our own lives and the lives of those we work with
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Therapist positioning in Narrative Therapy
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How applications of neuroscience can boost narrative practices and thicken preferred identities
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Participants will develop skills in:
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Deconstruction
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Externalising Conversations
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Reauthoring conversations, including
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Absent but Implicit Conversations
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Unique Outcomes Conversations
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Thickening alternative storylines to amplify change, including
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Remembering conversations
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Outsider witnessing
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Therapeutic documents
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Working with the Landscape of Action and Landscape of Identity.
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To arrange this workshop for your organisation, please contact Dr Leonie White at drleoniewhite@gmail.com or 0401002544
To attend a public event, please search the Compass Seminars Australia website at
https://www.compassaustralia.com.au/narrative-therapy-training-and-course
Systemic Integrative Practice Masterclass
This one-day workshop is aimed at practitioners who work with children, young people, adults, couples, families, stakeholder groups, and/or organisations who provide counselling, family therapy or systemic support to in counselling, mental health, or community services who are interesting in a framework for thoughtfully and intentionally combining therapeutic knowledges and approaches in the service of the client.
This is an advanced and applied training workshop for participants who have systemic family therapy training and experience. In this workshop participants will review family therapy as a framework for practice, and revisit systemic thinking core concepts and change processes. Building on this shared understanding of systemic family therapy, the workshop will then teach the Systemic Meta-Framework for Integrative practice, a process map to support clinicians in intentional practice, and the provision of individualised interventions tailored to the client’s unique circumstances and needs.
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This workshop links theory and practice with applied clinical discussions as participants put systemic thinking and the model of integrative practice into action in structured consultation sessions.
This workshop is interactive, dynamic, experiential, and self-reflective.
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To arrange this workshop for your organisation, please contact Dr Leonie White at drleoniewhite@gmail.com or 0401002544
Systemic Thinking Masterclass: Getting Unstuck and Maximizing Maneuverability
This one-day workshop is aimed at practitioners who work with children, young people, adults, couples, families and/or organisations who provide counselling, family therapy or systemic support to in counselling, mental health, or community services who are interesting in developing their systemic thinking and practice, especially when feeling "stuck".
This one-day workshop is aimed at practitioners who work with children, young people, adults, couples, families, stakeholder groups and/or organisations who provide counselling, family therapy or systemic support to in counselling, mental health, or community services who are interesting in developing their systemic thinking and practice, especially when feeling "stuck".
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This is an advanced and applied training workshop for participants who have systemic family therapy training and experience.
In this workshop participants will review family therapy as a framework for practice and systemic thinking with a focus on the “helicopter view” to expand thinking and maximize manoeuvrability. This workshop will use an integrative practice framework to privilege multiple lenses for ways of thinking and working.
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Building on this shared understanding of systemic family therapy, helicopter view and integrative practice, the workshop will then focus on manoeuvrability to support clinicians in intentional practice, and the provision of individualised interventions tailored to the client’s unique circumstances and needs. Being maneuverable keeps the therapist’s options open so that necessary shifts in treatment can be made in a purposeful, rather than reactive, fashion. In this way the therapist maximizes the ability to create a context for change to occur.
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This workshop will support participants to develop their ability to take purposeful action despite fluctuating obstacles or restrictions, keep their options open as therapy progresses, and shift as needed during the course of the intervention.
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This workshop links theory and practice with applied clinical discussions as participants put systemic thinking and manoeuvrability into action in structured consultation sessions.
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This workshop is interactive, dynamic, experiential, and self-reflective.
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To arrange this workshop for your organisation, please contact Dr Leonie White at drleoniewhite@gmail.com or 0401002544
Live Supervision: Enhancing Systemic Family Therapy Practice (2 days)
This two-day workshop is for participants who have completed family therapy training (minimum of foundational training e.g., Key Skills in Family Therapy) who would like to hone their family therapy knowledge and skills through the experience of live supervision of clinical practice. The workshop will involve a review and refresh of systemic family therapy, an orientation to live supervision using the one-way mirror and team based interventions, and the experience of live supervision.
This workshop will cover:
Day 1: Education and Team Set Up
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Systemic family therapy review and refresh
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Systemic thinking
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Family Therapy approaches
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Integrative practice
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Introduction to systemic consultation model
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Case consultation linking reviewed theory to practice
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Orientation to Live Supervision
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Nature and purpose of the one-way mirror
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Evolution over time of the use of the mirror
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Two interventions from across family therapy generations and indicators for use: Reflective Teams & Messages
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Develop familiarity and comfort with the mirror and team-based work
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Day 2: Live Supervision
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Questions, curiosities and reflections from Day 1
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Two live supervision sessions of clinical practice. Each live supervision consists of three stages to enhance learning for all participants
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Pre-planning ​
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Client Session
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De-brief
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Application of learning activity
The workshop is interactive, dynamic, experiential, and self-reflective to enhance participant's experience and learning oucomes.
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To arrange this workshop for your organisation, please contact Dr Leonie White at drleoniewhite@gmail.com or 0401002544