Personal Development
The Space Between – Exploring Family Estrangement at the Contact Boundary
Family estrangement occurs when one or more family members deliberately stops contact with others, usually due to extensive conflict, a breakdown in communication, unresolved emotional issues, generational trauma, mental health and addiction, or incompatible lifestyles or values. This participatory workshop is open to anyone engaged in their own personal therapy (as well as clinicians and training clinicians) and will focus on unpacking the phenomenology of family estrangement as it impacts the lives of our clients, and how it has perhaps touched our own. Using a combination of deep dialogue, group process, somatic awareness, and Gestalt experiments, we will explore themes such as the archetypal paradox of being a stranger within/without a family, how the felt experience of social isolation changes both how we understand our identity and how we understand ourselves in relation to our familial ties, and how choice or unavoidable circumstance can provide different lenses through which to view estrangement. We will also explore gradations of reconciliation and closure, including the possible inevitability of failure.
Date: Friday February 21, 2025 Time: 10:00AM - 4:00PM
Fee: Early Bird Fee: $150.00 (before February 11, 2025) | Regular Fee: $175.00 (after February 11, 2025)