Workshop Description:
Implicit bias is complex, wrapped in the wounds of trauma and grief.
Fear, distorted perceptions, and a desperate need to explain suffering become locked in the body and in the imagination. Buried away from awareness, existential threats become layered with shame, negating the self, heightening vulnerability, and limit trust of others. Held within, suffering activates implicit bias.
Engagement with symbols can help clients safely represent trauma and grief, transforming damaging bias. Combining therapeutic metaphor with symbols clients unpack damaging perceptions of self and others. Imagined dialogues and active imagination acknowledge vulnerability, honor grief and loss, and help bring truth to implicit bias.
This is an experiential session. Participants are invited to engage with symbols and examine possible implicit bias in invented scenarios. Taking a narrative approach, we will explore essential validation, freedom from the danger of implicit bias, and I-Thou dialogues to reclaim existential truth.
Learning Objectives:
1. Define Implicit bias, the externalization process and cultural relevance.
2. Explain the connection between implicit bias, trauma and grief.
3. Describe physical and psychological dynamics regarding bias, projection, fear, perception, and imagination.
4. Describe how existential crisis activates implicit bias.
5. Describe three ways to engage with symbols to help clients represent trauma and grief, and transform damaging bias.
6. Present three ways to combine therapeutic metaphor with symbols.
7. State three therapy skills to facilitate externalizing implicit bias and empower clients.
8. State the power of integrating narrative, gestalt and existential therapies, while engaging Shadow to reauthor implicit bias.
9. Practice engagement with images and symbols to heighten therapist presence and invite exploration of implicit bias.
10. Practice therapeutic silence and mindful reflection to reduce judgment and shame that sabotage flow and authenticity in therapy.