The idea for the “Connections” group was sparked when a physician colleague approached Michelle about running a group for young women living with “emotional regulation” difficulties in their lives. This interest grew from the challenges of working with young women who were dealing with serious problems like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, cutting, and suicide. Our experience at CFT of working with young people who are struggling with eating disorders has taught us that the body and the mind can be so desperately at odds so as to create intense suffering for people.  So Michelle approached her colleague Sue Steindorf, a true believer in the power of yoga practice, to see what they could fashion together that might address the complexity of the problems these young women were having. 

The “Connections” group was structured to highlight both bodily awareness, through yoga, as well as the connections between experiences of the body and participants’ own developing identities as young women.  We didn’t want this experience to feel like therapy in a traditional sense, although we wanted the effects to be therapeutic and life changing. The yoga concepts we have focused on include breath, strength, ?exibility, balance, heart opening, and stillness to help create meaningful connections personally and interpersonally.  Focused conversations about what discoveries these bodily experiences connect to in regards to feelings and relationships take place at the beginning and ending of each meeting together.

We have held three “Connections” groups over the past year with women of all ages.  Michele Rizza, nurse and gifted yoga instructor, and I have teamed up with Sue Steindorf, pediatric physical therapist, and committed yoga instructor, to facilitate these groups.  Our collaboration has itself been another kind of rich connection as our different professional orientations have created a truly unique context in which wellness and healing occur. As a personal trainer and family therapist, this group births a dream I have held about creating ways to integrate mind, body, and spirit in the healing process. Here are just a few of the comments that group participants have made along the way:

I am able to be me now. I cry with happiness - everyone has noticed. This has helped me connect my body and my mind.

I’m so much happier now, before I was crying all the time because of how sad I was, now I’m able to let feelings go.

I am a more open person, which is not easy to do. I am more confident and aware of myself. I know myself better and I have opened up to people more. I know that it is okay if people don’t understand me.

Yoga has helped me respond to stress better and I can focus on my feelings. I am connecting my mind and body, and finding time with myself to do the poses at home. I let the emotions go and focus on breath, and then the emotions. This allows me to take a break. I do the poses before bed and sometimes during the day.

I envision my hands holding my heart, and see me for me. I don’t worry as much and I am happy with myself.

Our experience of these groups has been that by blending the arts of yoga and psychotherapy together, openings are created for change that are not possible in either discipline alone. Plans for the future are to offer “Connections” groups for couples and for men.

Kim Delaney

Licensed Family Therapist

The following is a paper written by a fellow colleague, Tony Stanton. He is a psychiatrist who has published extensively in his field, and holds years of experience working with troubled youth. This piece shares a summary of the values that Narrative Therapy embodies, and that we as practitioners working with this perspective commit to uphold in our work with clients and each other.

A Little Working Paper on Values in the Practice of Narrative Therapy

Underlying our mandate to help our clients is an affirmation of their inalienable right to experience safety, respect, and meaning in their lives. To uphold this mandate the following values are put forth as possible useful points of discussion.

1. We ask permission before we offer help and we keep a strict eye on confidentiality. The exception is when we feel that someone is not safe.

2. We value curiosity and inquiry towards all the factors that either impede or promote the heart of creativity in our clients. This means that we value questions more than quick answers and that we help our clients to be explorers in their own lives. It also means that we value descriptions of real life more than diagnostic categories.

3. We help our clients search towards the preferred stories of their lives so that these stories are revealed and honored over any limiting stories that may be restraining their lives in the present. This means that we help our clients become detectives towards their successful experiences and those people from their past who have supported them.

4. We take a stand against those stories that may be dominant in our culture which prevent our clients from knowing themselves and from experiencing themselves as capable of exercising choice towards their preferred values. Such stories may include subjects of race, physical appearance, or limiting ideas of what constitutes being a person.

5. We affirm that our own work will be based on a community of support for each other - and that this support will exemplify the same values that we promote for our clients i.e. respect and support for each other’s creativity. To this end we need to meet with each other regularly as well as make ourselves available to each other on a more casual basis.

6. Whenever it is useful we will help our clients to experience us as a larger community which is committed to the rights stated above. While we are not a 12 step program we should exemplify the same principles of support and sharing that are manifest in such a program. Clients may need to know that we are not isolated individual therapists - that we help each other and that we engage the larger world outside of our own practices.

7. We believe that the body and mind constitute an exquisite instrument for the discrimination of value and that this instrument can make precise decisions through what is known as “common sense” or intuition if we free it from the burden of external restraints. It is part of our job to return this “instrument of the discrimination” back to its proper functioning.

8. We promote the knowledge each of our clients can obtain of those gifts they hold towards their families and the larger community - gifts which ultimately enhance the lives of those they are in contact with. This might be called helping people to know their place in “the larger scheme of things” and experiencing themselves as “having meaning” in the lives of others.

T. Stanton

I invite readers to share a blog by two of my most trusted colleagues, Kurt Johns and Michelle Naden. They are both Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists at Collaborative Family Therapy on Bainbridge Island. You can find their blog at www.practicalnarrativetherapy.com