March 5, 2025: Narrative Practice Conversations about ‘BPD’
March 5, 2025: Narrative Practice Conversations about ‘BPD’
Event Date:
March 5, 2025
Event Time:
3:00 pm
Event Location:
This is an ONLINE EVENT
Narrative Practice Conversations about 'Borderline Personality Disorder'
3:00 to 5:00 PM Eastern Time | Convert to your time zone here
Facilitated by Tiffany Sostar
Early rate $45 until February 10, 2025
Regular rate $60 thereafter
About The Workshop
For narrative practitioners who resist cooperating with pathologizing discourses and ideas, conversations about borderline experience, especially when someone identifies with the ‘borderline personality disorder’ (BPD) label, can sometimes be challenging.
How do we honour people’s right to make meaning of their own experience, and their naming rights for their own experiences, while having a conversation about something like BPD? How do we keep our ethics and politics of resisting pathologizing discourses close, without imposing our own views on the people speaking with us?
One possible answer is to be guided by community knowledge. What do people who have experiences that might be called ‘borderline’ say about what is useful, helpful, generative? For narrative practitioners who want to learn from community directly, there is a lot of exciting work happening right now. The emerging neurodiversity paradigm, which seeks to honour differences in neurotype without continuing to pathologize these differences, has been taken up by borderline scholars who are bringing ideas of neurodiversity and neuroqueering to how they make meaning of these experiences.
Borderline scholar Franscesa Lewis writes, “Neuroqueer theory has the potential to radically shake up established norms, restrictive binaries, and structures of oppression. It can bring new insights to established disciplines.”
There is significant potential resonance between narrative therapy and these ideas of depathologized understandings of borderline experience.
In this workshop we will explore the tensions and possibilities that exist in narrative conversations about borderline experiences, and offer invitations and practice opportunities for narrative work on this topic. We will draw on learnings from the BPD Superpowers: What the Borderline Makes Possible collective narrative document, as well as new and emerging work from scholars and community members who identify with ‘borderline experiences’ while critiquing the pathologizing discourse of ‘borderline personality disorder’.
Cited:
Francesca Lewis for The Polyphony (18 July 2023), “The kaleidoscopic value of neuroqueer knowledges.” https://thepolyphony.org/2023/07/18/neuroqueer-knowledges/
About Tiffany Sostar (they/them)
Tiffany Sostar is a narrative therapist and community worker living as an uninvited guest on Treaty 7 land (in Calgary, Alberta, Canada). They love collective narrative practice and documentation, and are interested in the ways collective narrative practice overlaps and intersects with legacies of queer and feminist zine culture. They graduated from the Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work program in 2018 and enjoy being an ongoing part of the program as a faculty member and subject designer in Canvas. Tiffany is queer, non-binary, non-monogamous, and disabled, living in lots of liminal spaces, and interested in working in these spaces.
Recently, as hostility towards the trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming communities continued to escalate, Tiffany’s community lost two cherished trans community members, Bekett and Theda. For the next long while, they are undertaking a series of community work projects responding to these losses and hoping to create a body of narrative responses in support of trans lives.
If you are new to the ideas and practices of Narrative Therapy we suggest first readingWhat is Narrative Therapy? (2000) by Alice Morgan.
You also can sign-up for the upcoming 1.5 hour webinar on January 24, 2025 titled ‘Re-Authoring Stories of Depression’ which will share introductory ideas that shape narrative therapy. Note: if you are unable to join on Jan 24, it is possible to watch the video on-demand afterwards.
Certificates of Training can be requested at the end of the online workshop and will state 2 hours of narrative therapy training. Certificates can be used to qualify for eligibility for continuing education credits from professional colleges and licensing boards. Please contact your own college or association to confirm requirements.
STUDENTS – At checkout in ‘discount code’ enter STUDENT10. Also in the ‘additional info’ box please include your student info – i.e.: Name of institution and program of study
For groups of 3 or more, please register together in one transaction and at checkout in ‘discount code’ enter GROUP10. One main person can be registrant, and please type info (name, email, address) for other group members in the ‘additional info’ box
Cancellations will be accepted if requested at least 14 days prior to the event via email to contact@narrativetherapycentre.com. A 10% admin fee will be deducted from the amount to be refunded.
We regret that a refund cannot be offered after the cancellation date, but a colleague may be substituted for attendance.