Presenter: Scott Kellogg
Description:
Stories and storytelling have been central to my life and my journey as a therapist. I fell in love with the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls through the stories that he and others shared about his work in the 1960s; I just thought that they were amazingly beautiful.
On a more clinical level, I feel that Erving Polster, in his book Every Person’s Life Deserves a Novel, presented a series of compelling examples of the power of therapeutic storytelling as a method for working through profound and life-resonating traumas. For Polster, the telling, the hearing, and the editing of narratives are central tools that can be used to help patients heal and reclaim their lives.
For myself, Third-Person Storytelling, or the repetitive telling of one’s story as if it were being witnessed from the outside, is a therapeutic method that allows individuals to deeply engage with and express the complexities of their personal experiences while simultaneously being able to have greater emotional distance from them. This form of narrative healing is used in the treatment of histories of trauma and interpersonal abuse because it can effectively decrease the experience of fear, shame, and guilt while enabling the integration of difficult and painful narratives and memories. In addition to trauma work, it can serve as a vehicle for 1) reclaiming disowned stories of success and achievement; 2) creating a path to successful goal completion; and 3) creating a more self-directed life through the practice of self-eulogy.
In this workshop, I will give a brief presentation on the Three Dialogue method. This will be followed by a demonstration with a volunteer. The participants will then be invited to break into small groups so that they may have an opportunity to practice and experience the healing power of repetitive Third-Person Storytelling with one another.
Biography:
Dr. Scott Kellogg is an ISST-certified Advanced Schema Therapist who has also trained in Gestalt therapy and Voice Dialogue. He created the Transformational Chairwork approach in 2008 and he currently teaches this method of psychotherapeutic dialogue to clinicians in both the United States and abroad.
Scott is in private practice in New York City and has served on the faculties of New York University, The Rockefeller University, and the Yale University School of Medicine.
In addition, he is the author of Transformational Chairwork: Using Psychotherapeutic Dialogues in Clinical Practice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
His Chairwork website is: https://transformationalchairwork.com/
