3.00 CE Credits Available
Reimagining Multiculturalism: A Contemporary Narrative Approach, Volume 3: Ian
by Travis Heath
How can you bring yourself to the room more fully as a person, offering more than just empathy? Discover how to become an active participant in the process of moving clients beyond the limits of their worlds as they know them. Using a Contemporary Narrative Therapy approach, you can help clients trace the profound impact of systemic racism, and redefine not just their own stories, but the limits they have set for themselves.
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People frequently come to therapy after suffering significant life-changing trauma or health conditions. While those may be the presenting problems, there is often more to the story about how or why clients are feeling stuck or seeking therapy for support. While traditional multicultural approaches rely heavily on listening and empathizing, Clinical educator and Contemporary Narrative Therapy expert, Travis Heath, suggests that to help clients heal, therapists must become active participants in the process of moving people beyond the limits of their worlds as they know them.

Heath believes that all too often clients have a sense that racism is present and impacting them in some way, but it's not something freely discussed in the therapy space. Mapping the pernicious effects of racism in clients’ lives can help your clients recognize their relationships with discriminatory systems and institutions, evaluate how those relationships do or do not serve them, and choose whether they want to relate to those systems in new ways. In this video, the last volume in a three-volume series, we'll see Heath trace the profound impact of systemic racism with Ian, a former rugby player-turned-sports psychologist whose career as a professional athlete was derailed by catastrophic injuries and health-related setbacks. Over the course of two sessions, you’ll see how Heath masterfully blends contemporary techniques like privileging client language and strengths of moral character inquiries, with traditional Narrative Therapy techniques to co-author moving counter narratives of strength and resilience. Through an unconventional use of session notes, creative plays on language, and unabashed engagement, Heath demonstrates how therapists can help clients redefine what's possible by pushing beyond the stories that the world tells about who they are and who they should be.

This video is an invaluable resource for mental healthcare providers who want to go beyond collaboration and stand in solidarity with your clients as they share their experiences. Discover how to take risks and reimagine the therapeutic conversation so you can attend to storylines that are absent but implicit and offer clients a map of where they can go, not just where they have been.

In this video, you'll learn to
  • Examine the stories clients tell about themselves and the world tells about them
  • Become an active participant in the therapeutic process
  • Engage with interest and creativity to identify factors that impact clients’ identity
  • Co-author counter stories with clients to move them closer to who they want to be  

What therapists are saying…

“Travis Heath reinvents ethnocentric, mainstream therapy. He rebels against manualized, interventionist, and normalizing therapies. Travis engages therapy from an spirited ethics that materializes through intentional storytellings. He facilitates a transformative conversational partnership with people as a context for weaving stories of healing, beginning with people's narratives about their moral character, and their responses to racisms and discriminations.”
—marcela polanco, PhD, Professor, San Diego State University
“It is inspiring to watch Travis leading inquiries in to what he refers to as 'the foundations and strength of their moral character'. He eloquently demonstrates how he comes to know people as distinct from the Problems that challenge them. I believe this to be unique to Contemporary Narrative Therapy practice.”
— David Epston, Co-Originator of Narrative Therapy with Michael White
“If you are tired of therapy as usual and its ever increasing scrutiny and adoration of all things self: self-love, self-compassion, self-worth, self-care, etc., look no further. In this video series, Dr. Travis Heath demonstrates how Contemporary Narrative Therapy can help people escape from the pathologizing ways of thinking and relating to themselves, their lives, and the lives of others. Additionally, Dr. Heath challenges common ideas and approaches to multiculturalism and expertly demonstrates the decolonizing aims of Narrative Therapy.”
—Thomas Carlson, PhD, Professor & Branch Director, Alliant International University-San Diego; Editor, Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy
“Travis Heath brings a unique multicultural perspective to his sessions. By doing so, he is able to work with clients to connect with their heritage – including outstanding discussions about racism and how it influences a person's behaviors – to ultimately tie in self-reflection with an emphasis on the importance of asking ourselves how our backgrounds, and the stories we tell, contribute to our mental health. This volume was thought-provoking, informative, and very special to me as a therapist and educator. It will benefit so many!”
—Yancy L. Cruz, Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois University
In Depth
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Join Travis Heath, PhD over two sessions with Ian, who is of Indian and Trinidadian descent, and who spent his formative years in Britain under the colonizing values of White society and overt messages and experiences of racism. As a result, he often felt like an outsider in both groups, marginalized — that is, until he found commradery, acceptance, and a sense of pride through rugby. On an early trajectory to becoming a professional athlete, he sustained a severe injury and subsequent illness which robbed him of his dreams. While he used rugby as a way of feeling connected to others and finally gaining a foothold in his struggle against systemic racism, he became depressed when his athletic career was derailed, began thinking of himself as a failure, and entertaining self-destructive thoughts.

Heath helps Ian trace his journey that begins with despair and dejection and leads to one of growth and success. Even though Ian was forced to leave behind his career and identity as an athlete, he wove the lessons of the game into a narrative of post-traumatic growth, that centered around his identity as husband, parent, teacher, and consultant. By focusing on the strength of Ian’s character, the courage he inherited from his mother, and creative questions, Heath helps Ian re-story his journey as one of perseverance, resilience, and service.

In this volume, Heath will show you how to:
  • Consider departing from traditional or scripted clinical questions in favor of trusting yourself to ask questions based on the unfolding conversation
  • Balance the use of directive and open-ended questions with clients to better understand their experiences through their eyes
  • Tap into the client’s history and ancestral lineage for wisdom and guidance in addressing and overcoming their challenges, and redefining what is possible for them
  • Appreciate autoethnography as a tool through which the therapist is invited to co-create a narrative that expands rather than constricts the way the client makes sense of their experiences and lives their life
  • Privilege the client’s own language and stories rather than impose a limiting clinical narrative on them
  • Provide clients with the opportunity to have a conversation with the younger version of themselves so they can witness what they’ve learned over the years about living fuller lives

In this deep dive into Travis Heath’s contemporary narrative methods, viewers will have the opportunity to explore innovative narrative therapy concepts and techniques that will enhance their clinical practice. 

Length of video: 02:55:54

English subtitles available

Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-725-7

Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-725-4

Travis Heath, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and has been in community practice for nearly two decades. His scholarship has included looking at shifting from a multicultural approach to counseling to one of cultural democracy that invites people to heal in mediums that are culturally near. Other writings have focused on the use of rap music in narrative therapy, working with persons entangled in the criminal injustice system in ways that maintain their dignity, narrative practice stories as pedagogy, and a co-created questioning practice called reunion questions. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson, of the first book on Contemporary Narrative Therapy released in June 2022 entitled, “Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography.” He has presented his work in 10 countries to date. 

Travis Heath was compensated for his/her/their contribution. None of his/her/their books or additional offerings are required for any of the Psychotherapy.net content. Should such materials be references, it is as an additional resource.

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Additionally, there is no commercial support for this activity. None of the planners or any employee at Psychotherapy.net who has worked on this educational activity has relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies.

CE credits: 3

Learning Objectives:

  • Explain why traditional multicultural practices can fall short in creating an inclusive space for diverse clients
  • Apply culturally democratic methods in clinical settings to allow clients to speak on behalf of their own healing
  • Utilize narrative questions that privilege client language and stories
  • Use elements of the clients narrative in your clinical work to deconstruct problem-saturated stories
  • Identify themes of resilience, hope and other client strengths and craft questions that consolidate these internal resources

Bibliography available upon request

This course is offered for ASWB ACE credit for social workers. See complete list of CE approvals here

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