narrativetherapy-blog

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Advanced Intensive in Tuscany, Italy

with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs Dates: September 28-October 3, 2019 (opening dinner, Sept. 27, leaving Oct. 4) Limited to 15 participants

Tuition: Early bird rate, $800 (ends August 1, 2019); regular rate, $900.

In Fall 2019 we will offer our ninth annual advanced intensive in an especially beautiful spot in the Tuscan countryside. Our friends, the Rossi family, will once again welcome us to their highly rated bed and breakfast, Podere Ponte a Nappo.

Location: Ponte A Nappo Bed & Breakfast, San Gimignano, Italy

We plan to join with up to 15 other experienced practitioners of narrative therapy just outside the ancient walls of San Gimignano, Italy for 6 days, which will include five intensive workshop days. In the month before we meet we will correspond with participants to find out about the contexts they work in, the practices they are excited to learn more about, and the challenges they are facing in their practice. We will use this input to plan a set of experiences that meet as many specific requests, contexts, and challenges as we can in our time together. We will also share some of our newest work and provide structure for exercises and reflection.

We will meet for two 3-hour blocks each day, often in the gorgeously maintained gardens of the bed and breakfast. This will leave time for extended walks in the town or the countryside, visits to other hill towns, drives through the Chianti country, or just relaxing in the lush natural surroundings. In addition to five days of training, we will have a full day of recreation on the third or fourth day of our time together. Partners, family members, or traveling companions will be welcome to join us for meals and excursions.

Registration: We plan the course with the assumption that attendees have considerable familiarity and experience with narrative ideas and practices. If you are interested, contact us at 847-866-7879 or narrativetherapy@sbcglobal.net (or click here to access our website). We will correspond with you to get details about your background and experience to be sure that there is a good fit between our intentions and your desires. Once we have mutually agreed that the fit is right, we will send you a payment link and an invoice.

In order for us to qualify for group rates, all participants must stay at B&B Ponte a Nappo throughout the training. Once you have been accepted into the training, you can click here to register for your room.

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@BernieSanders

is crushing Trump in the most recent Pennsylvania poll (link: https://emersonpolling.reportablenews.com/pr/pennsylvania-2020-biden-leads-democratic-field-in-pennsylvania-biden-and-sanders-lead-trump-by-10-points-in-general-election) emersonpolling.reportablenews.com/pr/pennsylvani…

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My two cents

I was thinking about the story in the Bible of ”The Widow’s Mite“ in a sentimental vein recently. I’ve often heard people say they don’t have much truck with Christianity, but they sure do love Jesus. People read me as “Christian” and I guess that’s right, but Jesus has never been easy for me. I mean the whole topic about God in general is hard, but stories about Jesus more often than not astonish or annoy me. I had the story about the pious widow offering her last two cents at the Temple in Jerusalem as a meditation on the importance of an open and giving heart to a community. But looking into it I had it all wrong.

Addison Wright notes the the story leads off with “Beware of the scribes…They devour widow’s houses.” So the story is a critique of a social system that makes widows poor and  everyone being so conditioned to it that a widow donates the last little money she’s got to it. What follows is the real kicker:

One of the disciples remarks of the Temple: “Look teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him: “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:1-2; and  substantially the same is in  Luke 21:5-6).

Jesus! It’s two thousand years hence and his words are still shocking. How so they must have seemed back then.

On March 15th students across the globe walked out of classes to draw attention to the climate change crisis and to demand action. Among the news photos of the event was one by AP photographer Jacquelyn Martin of Havana Chapman Edwards. Havana is seated on the grass with a chalk board  with the number 19 written on it, that’s the age she’ll be in 2030. The photo is affecting and I was filled with avuncular feelings of concern. Scrolling through Havana Chapman Edwards’s tweets it’s clear that she sees darkness and crisis at such a tender age of 8. Scandal, murder, despair, suicide, injustice, disasters: It’s all enough to undo me. But Havana seems so joyful. Part of the reason why must be  her activism. 

I also listened to the 16 year old Greta Thunberg make the case to act right now on climate. Thunberg’s protest on the Swedish Parliament’s steps a year ago  was inspiration for the worldwide protests this year.

Jesus! Thunberg’s talk runs right over my sentimentally.  

Greta Thunberg ends her talk with this:

So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

Today, we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.

Everything needs to change – and it has to start today.

I’m hardly an expert on young people, but I’m old I know a little about that. I can relate to the disciple of Jesus pointing to how solid the stones and how wonderful the buildings in response to Jesus’s critique. I know how hard it is to think in any way except how I’m used to thinking. In the viral video of some kids with the Sunrise Movement and Senator Feinstein,there was this exchange:

“Some scientists have said we have 12 years to turn this around,” a little girl told the senator. “Well, it’s not going to get turned around in 10 years,” Feinstein responded.

I’m old, so I’m sure Feinstein is right. Alas, in despair, I know the kids are right too.

The exchange prompted a lot of opinion pieces. One frame was to view the kids as pawns. My sense of the matter is that kids all over the world understand the gravity of the climate crisis. In listening or reading a transcript of Greta Thunberg’s talk, it’s difficult to imagine her as a pawn. Havana Chapman Edwards is so photogenic it’s easier to imagine her as a "poster child.” But it’s hard to look at her Twitter feed or listen to what she has to say and then to think she’s not paying attention. She says, “We may be little, but we are fierce’ and I believe her. She calls the Flint water activist Mari Copeny "big sister."  Copeny has a wry sense of humor that’s hard to imagine is not her own. Young people are paying attention and they’re creating solidarity across differences.

The best bet is to join with them.

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It’s about time.

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“On this International Day of Remembrance, we pay homage to the millions of African men, women and children who were denied their humanity and forced to endure such abominable cruelty. We honour them by standing up against ongoing forms of slavery, by raising awareness of the dangers of racism in our time, and by ensuring justice and equal opportunities for all people of African descent today.”

— António Guterres at Remember Slavery. Message of the United Nations Secretary-General for 2019

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“Cash is a form of payment long associated with those on the lower rungs of post-colonial informal economies — the fish market in Maputo, the back-street hairdresser in Mumbai, or the Andean craft merchant — issued by states but easily taken out of their view and direct control. Digital payment, however, is the domain of large-scale globalized financial corporations, and cannot be separated from them or taken out of their view. To use — or to be forced to use — digital payments is to enter their sphere of influence and power.”

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I’m reading this book and finding it to be really, really good. A clear and relatively easy overview of the history of how neoliberalism has replaced New Deal democratic socialism, and some interesting, practical ideas for a new narrative, centered on community, that might energize and help consolidate activism toward a better world.

“Without a new story, a story that is positive and propositional rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story, everything changes.‘

“Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.“

“This approach is neither quick nor easy (though it is a good deal quicker than wandering around in helpless circles, which appears to comprise the current strategy of most moderate political parties). But it has four obvious virtues. The first is that no part of the process is wasted. Kindling participatory culture is beneficial whether or not it leads to political transformation. You could reach the end of a political life of this kind and tell yourself: ‘We didn’t take power. So all I’ve achieved is to bring people together, reduce loneliness, suspicion and fear, create jobs, entertainment and pleasant places to live, and increase the sum of human happiness. What a waste.’“

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A key shift over the past half-century has been the disintegration of those wider social movements and radical struggles. Labour movement organizations have weakened, the new social movements have disintegrated, as indeed has the left. As the old social movements and radical struggles lost influence, so the recognition of identity became not a means to an end, but an end in itself. As the political philosopher Wendy Brown has put it, ‘What we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism.’ Through these changes the meaning of belongingness and of solidarity transformed. Politically, the sense of belonging to a group or collective has historically been expressed in two broad forms: through the politics of identity and through the politics of solidarity. The former stresses attachment to common identities based on such categories as race, nation, gender or culture. The difference between leftwing and rightwing forms of identity politics derives, in part, from the categories of identity that are deemed particularly important. The politics of solidarity draws people into a collective not because of a given identity but to further a political or social goal. Where the politics of identity divides, the politics of solidarity finds collective purpose across the fissures of race or gender, sexuality or religion, culture or nation. But it is the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past two decades as radical movements have declined. For many today, the only form of collective politics that seem possible is that rooted in identity.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium. The history and politics of white identity (via protoslacker)

“The politics of solidarity draws people into a collective not because of a given identity but to further a political or social goal. Where the politics of identity divides, the politics of solidarity finds collective purpose across the fissures of race or gender, sexuality or religion, culture or nation. But it is the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past two decades as radical movements have declined. For many today, the only form of collective politics that seem possible is that rooted in identity.“

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Poetry from a sociologist.

“The idea that the uniqueness and unrepeatability of events is a distinguishing characteristic of human history, the object of historical research, frequently goes hand in hand with the notion that this ‘uniqueness’ is rooted in the nature of the object, regardless of all the value-judgements of the researchers. But this is by no means the case. The fact that what is currently studied as history is generally regarded as a collection of individual data, has its origin in the belief that events, which are unique and unrepeatable, constitute the essential reality of the process being studied. It originates, in other words, in a specific valuation which can easily seem self-evident. But it is perhaps better to examine this belief, to see how far it is justified. For unrepeatable and unique phenomena are by no means confined to the sequences of events that historians take as the object of their studies. Such phenomena exist everywhere. Not only is each human being, each human feeling, each action and each experience of a person unique, but each bat and bacillus. Every extinct animal species is unique. The Saurians will not return. In the same sense Homo sapiens, the human species as a whole, is unique. And the same can be said of each speck of dust, of our sun, the Milky Way and of every other formation: they come, they go, and when they have gone they do not return. The problem of uniqueness and unrepeatability is therefore more complex than it appears in discussions of the theory of science. There are different degrees of uniqueness and unrepeatability, and what is unique and unrepeatable on one level can be seen on another as repetition, a return of the never-changing. Our unique sun, the unrepeatable, slowly changing Earth on which we live, appear to the fleeting generations as eternally recurring forms. As for the unique human species, individual human beings are themselves repetitions of an unchanging form, and what differs between people now appears as a variation of the ever-recurring basic pattern.”

— Norbert Elias - The Court Society

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“While the social infrastructure’s been destroyed during your and my whole career – all of my life of service has been spent watching the destruction of the social net – and so my work has been a response to that. Individual therapy … For me, it’s a limited response to that kind of context of social injustice. A lot of my work is trying to bridge the work of social justice activism and psychology, social work, community work, mental health work. I’m trying to create a bridge between those things, because I think there’s things we know, as social justice activists, about how to stay alive in the work, in contexts that lack social injustice that are really missing in “professional” contexts.”

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Vikki Reynolds in interview in Faculty of Social Work at University of Calgary. “Zone of Fabulousness” Q & A with Vikki Reynolds

Vikki Reynolds, PhD, is known as a direct action activist and an incendiary speaker. In this ‘forthright’ discussion Reynolds speaks on a wide-range of topics from self care to a “trickle-up” approach to social justice.

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“If Chelsea Manning changed her name to ‘Pussy Riot’ and her location to ‘Russia,’ we might hear some outrage from official Washington and the Beltway press corps that claims to care so much about press freedom,” said journalist Max Blumenthal today.