Working with Creative Cards | Dr. Shulamit Niv & Dr. Yehuda Shacham, Israel

Cards belong to an extended and respectful family of accessories for creative therapy. We all have our inner museum in which we store memories, visions, imagination and experiences .We visit this museum according to our needs and will, yet some time we neglect to visit unpleasant and unprocessed experiences that are too difficult to deal with.

The cards’ images encourage association and projections; assist us in expressing, articulating, and make events concrete again, as well as bypass censorship and rational thinking.

The cards function as a therapeutic tool that helps to express thoughts, feelings and ideas which are hard to talk about or which are unconscious, in a creative way.

In the process of working with the cards we encourage a continuing dialog between the person, the external and the internal images. Each re-examination of the cards can evoke a new meaning. The transfer from the concrete to the metaphorical and back helps to externalize the internal dialogues and enables their examination from a more objective and multi- perspective angle.

Therapeutic cards are tools that may be used individually or in groups, thus suitable for school psychologists’ diverse working environments with students, faculties and parents.

Working with therapeutic cards creates a positive and vivid atmosphere and can help school psychologists in many of their professional encounters.

In our Seminar we will work with cards on the following issues:

  • Processing past life events.
  • Re-narrating - creating a different positive approach to interpersonal "dead end" experiences.
  • Conflict resolution.
  • Problem solving – a systemic approach to individual's problems in school.
  • Dealing with developmental challenges in the school system: beginning and endings of school phases and relationships.
  • Dealing with loss and bereavement.
  • Professional supervision for individual therapeutic encounters
  • Methodological and ethical issues that might evolve using therapeutic cards.
  • We'll use a variety of cards packs and techniques.

Training methods

In our workshop we will use mainly experiential training methods. Thus, every participant will have the opportunity to personally examine each technique both, from the clients' and the helper's points of view. Though, the participants will be encouraged to dare and apply the new techniques to process their own personal and professional experiences, the trainer will make sure to create a safe and supportive coaching group environment.

Participants

Maximum 24 participants (school psychologists, psachologists, counselors)

Language

The workshop will be conducted in English.