Are you, as a therapist, family member or case worker, feeling stuck in your relationships with people who have extreme experiences of psychosis? Maybe it feels hard to envision a world of recovery activities and you are wondering if distant, passive, and impoverished relationships are as good as it gets. Maybe it seems like the only help you can provide is to ask them if they took their medication today or to do things for them so they will keep you around.
Or maybe you struggled with these challenges yourself and would like to help other people join you in better healing from these challenges. Maybe you don’t feel safe talking about what happened and mask your personality because you don’t want to go back to problems that can be monumental and scary.
If you are in either of these two categories, I have created a twenty-hour training workshop that aims to help achieve better outreach to people in extreme experiences of psychosis. This community-oriented workshop is built to help you feel comfortable exploring the contents of what has been experienced in a psychosis with a road map of healing suggestions so you can join people on their journey and help them be more flexible in how they make meaning of their experiences and work towards recovery.
What people go through in psychosis can be scary and overwhelming or joyous yet destructive; regardless, a lot can be learned from studying these experiences and there still is the chance for relationships to flourish when sharing happens. To demonstrate the value of this, I share several of my stories and there is opportunity for others to share as well.
I am currently recruiting participants to attend ten two-hour training sessions in 2026 from 4-6pm the first Saturday of the month. In 2024 I completed said training and disbanded a troop of supporters who I will invite back. It was hard to give up that community. I have missed the camaraderie and connection I experienced over the ten-session year. I hope you will consider joining me for 2026.
Working with people who experience what I prefer to term as special message crisis can be challenging. Often people suffering may hold you at an arms distance and refuse to share the contents of what they are experiencing with you. I find that reviewing components of the training helps keep me hopeful and creative in my work. When I am not working on the contents of this training, it is easy to feel stuck and hopeless.
I am aware that I may be competing against CBT for Psychosis, a training that is accredited. To be honest, I have not taken that training to compare it to mine. That’s why I wanted to take a minute to explain that I have come to develop this training by reading accredited books or completing research. I have crafted this training being in community with message receivers where I work running clinical groups. This training comes from the perspective of someone with lived experience and who in addition has seventeen years of experience running these groups as a practitioner. It aims to better prepare you to come up with creative interventions
Yes, I have attended Hearing Voices Network Training and I have both participated in and facilitated these groups as well. I found these trainings were exceptional, but I also think my work gives guidance toward being able to bring the wisdom of a community experience to an individual relationship with techniques and activities that bear the potential of helping prepare you to change lives. Perhaps you may find as I do that working in community helps inspire you in the moments you have with a message receiver to provide something they may need.
There is a suggested price of $200 to attend the training. I see this more as a suggested donation as I plan to admit people who can’t afford the fee. Once you have paid the fee, or joined me for a while, you can continue to participate in future trainings until you are satisfied and have mastery over the material. As I stated before, this is a community-oriented workshop full of didactics, stories, videos, exercises, and discussions which means that participation also helps me learn grow and improve the training.
