Join Our Waitlist for Upcoming Sessions

• Each session takes place via Zoom on Thursday evenings for four consecutive weeks. Each session runs from 2-2.5 hours.
• Screening will take place in the month prior to the start of the sessions in which a participant will enroll.

We are aiming to expand our programs to accommodate more participants, and we are grateful for your interest and patience. If you have any questions, or would like to join our waitlist, please email us at [email protected].

Workshop Curriculum

Session One: The Power and Science of Storytelling

• Participants will learn that storytelling is a skill that can be developed and used as a tool for a powerful effect and will receive an overview about purposeful story development and how it can contribute to inclusion and connection, self-confidence, healing, and bring about social and political change.
• Participants will acquire skills in the techniques of storytelling and how to apply it for different modes of communication and will take a deep dive into interactive writing exercises.
• Participants will be given an extended overview of the experience of trauma and learn the guiding principles of trauma recovery, which will include the restoration of safety and opportunities to reclaim power and share their story.

Session Two: Understanding the Stages of Writing, Healing, and Compassionate Reframing

• Participants will be taught skills to reprocess their experience from a safe place, enabling them to experience a type of mastery and control over the trauma, and begin to overcome any feelings of helplessness and powerlessness.
• Participants will become expert in Marinella’s five stages of writing and healing and apply the stages to their story. These stages can lead to story transformation.
• With guidance from facilitators, participants will be able to confront their trauma at a suitable, self-directed speed, letting personal meanings and solutions develop and flourish in their writing of their own story on their own terms.

Session Three:  Using the Power of Your Resilient Voice to Bring Your Own Words to Life

• Participants will give their own perspective to their experience and its relation to the rest of their life by opening up about the elements of the trauma most important to them, and constructing their own narrative of what occurred in a way that allows them to cognitively confront, process, and heal from the pain.
• Participants will discover new ways to sustain resilience, viewing it as a muscle they can build, and that both sharing their own narrative of what happened and listening to those of others are at the heart of working out the resiliency muscle.

Session Four: Storytelling Ceremony & Celebration

• Each participant will be given an opportunity to tell their story to the group.  When we tell our stories to others who are actively engaged and listening, our neurons in our brains fire up together and forge deep bonds. This sense that we matter, are connected to others and moving through tough times in our lives as part of a narrative larger than our own is linked to resilience.
• In closing, the group will celebrate their work and their journey in a ceremony including interactive activities and reflection.