Resources for Coaches and Therapists

I will add more to this page, but for right now, here are two resources for you:

The Art of Therapeutic Storytelling – This recording is from 1994, when I was speaking in the mind-body medicine field. It’s from a presentation I did for the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine conference in Hilton Head.

Hermie…the Little Hermit Crab in the Big Shell – This is an adaption of one the therapeutic metaphors I created back in the late 80s. I had studied with Steve and Carol Lankton, who were Dr. Milton Erickson’s best known students in the area of therapeutic storytelling, and found their approach to designing metaphors that “spoke to the unconscious mind” to be incredibly powerful. This version of the story doesn’t have all the hypnotic language patterns that the original one did, but the structural shift from small, self-focused, run by negative internal dialogue to outward focused, feeling alive, and discovering what’s possible is all still there. If you want to use this with clients, you can help them get into a light trance and then play this for them. The drawings you’ll see were from a class of fourth graders.

I’m working on re-doing a couple of my other favorite therapeutic metaphors and will eventually be sharing those. All the ones I created, except the Hermie story, were created in the oral tradition model. I never wrote down these stories and am now recreating them in written form.

I’ve been thinking about returning to doing training on therapeutic and transformational storytelling. If that’s something of interest to you, please let me know.