Therapists Only Catholic Story Groups

 NOTE: Must be a therapist, therapist-in-training, or in a graduate program educating you to be a therapist to participate in this group.  

Within a Catholic Story Group, we explore our early stories of harm, seeing how God, our co-Author, is calling us to greater healing, integration, and holiness. This also helps us to see how our story impacts how we engage our clients for better or worse. Here’s what participating in a Catholic Story Group entails:

• Curiosity: With the Holy Spirit, story work begins with a deep exploration of the stories we hold from childhood. We are particularly interested in those stories we don’t yet fully know, but may be impacting us in the present. This doesn’t have to be an overtly traumatic story. Often, the more subtle a story (we’ve dismissed it in the past as not being a “big deal”), the greater the impact once the story is engaged.
• Crafting: Next, we write the story from our child self’s perspective. Without much thought to spelling or grammar, we simply put words and texture to our past. We describe in great detail what happened. Sometimes writing with our non-dominant hand can give us more access to the emotional power of the story. 
• Telling: With the courage of the Holy Spirit, we read our story aloud to our story group. Through the active engagement of the group members, our story is witnessed and further illuminated by the ways that we have been wounded and how God wants to redeem our stories to bring about greater goodness, wholeness, and holiness.  
• Blessing: At the end of our 10-Week Catholic Story Group experience, blessings spring from our story and our engagement with others. We will have grown in our capacity to tenderly attune well to others, including God, our family members, and our clients. We may experience more joy in our relationships rather than tension, conflict, and strife. Our ability to more clearly see reality and love others as they are will expand.

Notice: Participating in a Catholic Story Group is not therapy or counseling. Each session is designed to help attendees own and process their story more fully so they may more deeply understand the story that God is writing in their lives. During the 10-week time period, each participant is asked to write a story from their early childhood or adolescent experience and share it with the group. The writing and sharing of our story can involve emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort. This is normal. It is one of the purposes of the group: to provide a supportive context that invites each attendee to identify and begin to explore difficult issues that may have inhibited their ability to connect with God, others, and ourselves. The purpose of the facilitator is to create an environment of psychological safety, authenticity, and strict confidentiality guidelines (nothing is shared or published outside the group). The facilitator will also model how to attune and respond to one another’s stories and provide guidance for how to relational repair when and if misattunement occurs within the group.