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Introduction:

People come to the counseling room with their autobiographical stories.  All stories are shaped by emotional themes and the process of telling stories help one make sense of one’s emotions.  The interplay between emotion and narrative is a dynamic process.  An understanding of narrative process can enhance emotion-focused interventions efficiently and effectively.  Working on emotional experience using experiencing-based tasks can help re-construct the meaning of narrative.  Hence, understanding the narrative expression is the basis for facilitating emotional change and co-constructing a coherent sense of self.  This workshop aims at addressing this parallel interacting process between emotional experience and narrative construction, while working towards corrective emotional experience, a reflective narrative meaning, new story outcomes and eventually a new emergence of self.

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Aims:​

• equipping the skills of active listening and tracking the narrative-emotion process of clients 

• learning how to select differentiated interventions of empathic responses

• learning how to identify markers for different therapeutic tasks

• learning how to facilitate experiencing-based therapeutic tasks

• learning how to enhance emotional expression

• learning how to reprocess emotional experience

• learning how to evoke and contain the re-telling of difficult emotional experience

• learning how to co-construct reflection and meaning making work with clients

 

Course Outline:

Learning the following emotion-focused interventions step-by-step:

1. Empathic attunement – understanding narrative and differentiated use of empathic responses

2. Empathic affirmation – working on vulnerable emotions

3. Accessing emotional experience – experiential focusing

4. Allowing emotional expression – clearing a space

5. Reprocessing emotional experience – systematic evocative unfolding

6. Retelling of difficult emotional experience

7. Making meaning of emotional experience

 

Training Format:

1. Didactic presentations

2. Experiential exercises

3. Case presentation and discussion

4. Simulated practice of counseling sessions
    

Medium of Instruction:   Cantonese supplemented with English

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Training Materials:   Mainly in English

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Attendance:   Participants with 80% or above attendance would be granted certificates

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About the trainer

Mrs. Catherine Poon

B.A., M.S.W., M.BuddhStud.
Emotion-Focused Therapist (Individual/Couple Therapy)
Registered Social Worker
Certified Counselor (HKPCA)
Associate Fellow (HKPCA) 
Approved Supervisor (HKPCA) 
Certified EFT Trainer (Individual Therapy) recognized by the International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (isEFT)

 

Mrs. Catherine Poon has worked with the Hong Kong Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (HKCMAC) for over 20 years as a marriage counselor.  She specializes her clinical work with clients of emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, and childhood attachment trauma, and couples with chronic physical/mental illnesses, addictive behavioral problems and extra-marital relationship.  Apart from clinical practice of individual and couple counselling, she has supervised social work students at different universities and family mediator trainees from different social service agencies.  She maintains a humanistic person-centered approach in her clinical practice and supervision.

 

Mrs. Catherine Poon has been trained in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) with Professor Leslie Greenberg since 2004. She has given presentations, provided skills coaching in the Module Workshops, and conducted monthly supervision groups in the yearly Training Programs in EFT (Individual & Couples) jointly organized by the EFT Clinic of York University and HKCMAC from 2007 to 2017.  Over the years, she has led hundreds of supervision group sessions.  She is recognized as a certified EFT individual therapy trainer since 2016.
 
She is currently in private practice.  She continues to provide individual and couples therapy, training workshops on EFT (Individual and Couples), Advanced Empathy and Mindfulness-informed clinical work, and EFT supervision for local practitioners.  She is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong from 2015 to 2020, teaching Emotion-Focused Interventions and Marital Counseling for Master degree students of counseling and social work.