We recently caught up with Kim Dent-Brown to hear more about his forthcoming CPD event on the 6-Part Story Method on 27th March. NB To make it more broadly accessible, Kim’s workshop will now take place online. Running it this way will give participants an added opportunity to try it out ‘as if ‘ in remote therapy. Read on to learn more about Kim’s journey with the approach over the years.
Kim, tell us about how you initially found the 6-Part Story Method (6PSM)
Back in the late 1980s I was training as an Occupational Therapist and one of the key elements of that profession is the therapeutic use of ordinary, familiar human activity. I had a background in the theatre so I was interested in all the creative approaches to therapy. This might involve using art, music, drama, movement, working with everything from clay to stories. That was the first time I came across the method. It seemed to me that it was a very attractive and simple way of helping a client create a workable, rich metaphor for their everyday life.
After my OT training I trained as a Dramatherapist and that enabled me to work in more depth with the method. Clients and I could turn the story into an improvised drama that we could then enact, witness, comment on and re-write at will. I was working as a Dramatherapist in an NHS specialist team for personality disorder and we all used the 6PSM at times. Mary Dunn, our team leader, shared it with Glenys Parry when she (Mary) was training in CAT with Glenys. That’s how the 6PSM filtered into the CAT world.
How has the CAT world received the 6PSM?
The CAT North practitioner training invited me to run a day for trainees but I can’t exactly remember when! Probably the early 1990s. It must have gone well because I was asked back the next year. Since then it has been a consistent element of the training, given at the very end of the first year. Every CAT North/Catalyse cohort since then has received it, except for two years when I did my own practitioner training and moved from trainer to trainee! I’m proud to say that feedback about the day (shared with Sarah Littlejohn) suggests that trainees find it an enjoyable, interesting, creative and powerful experience.
Generations of CAT practitioners have now learned the method. The one-day training gives enough of a basis for anyone to start to incorporate it into practice. I know practitioners who bring client stories to supervision, and supervisors who use it too. My own supervisor in my training encouraged me to use the 6PSM in place of administering the Psychotherapy File in the first few sessions. I never looked back.
The 6PSM doesn’t fit only with one modality. I’ve taught it to counsellors, arts therapists, social workers and other groups. But for CAT I think it opens opportunities to look at reciprocal roles, traps and snags, procedures and exits.
How can it help the therapeutic process?
I haven’t delivered CAT as a practitioner for a long time now so I can only answer generally. But I think introducing it early on sets a playful, inquisitive tone for a therapy. The practitioner relies on the client to interpret the story, not the other way round. This sets the client up as an expert in their own field, to be collaborated with and not ‘done to’. The process itself is almost always surprisingly enjoyable, which of course is reassuring. It may be surprising for a client who expects therapy to be like a visit to the dentist.
If done before the reformulation letter (my preferred time to do it) then it can be a very useful source of material to help the practitioner look for process rather than content. It provides a treasure store of metaphor and simile that the therapist can use in the letter itself. Later in the therapy it can be a useful intervention to use if things have become stuck or circular. Then at the end it can be a handy way of reviewing the therapy itself prior to the goodbye letter.
Do you ever use this technique in other areas of your life/work?
My daughters are now in their thirties but when they were toddlers I used this to tell them bedtime stories. That’s to say I would ask then to identify the six elements of the story. Then I’d simply assemble them in order and elaborate a story for them. After a year or two they got wise to me but it was delightful to play storymaking with them this way. And in idle moments when I consider my retirement career as the author of a novel, I imagine using the 6PSM as a way of structuring scenes, chapters and the book itself. Then good sense takes hold and I cut the grass or plant some seedlings!
What will people take away from your day?
If you come on the course you can expect to learn how to facilitate somebody creating, telling and exploring their own new, fictional story. You’ll also take the opposite role, creating a story which might shine some creative light on an aspect of yourself or your life at the moment. Out of this practice, you’ll have the basic knowledge and skills to incorporate the 6PSM into your own work – perhaps after some further rehearsals and trials. If you are supervisor, the day will help you know the background to 6-part stories that your supervisees might bring.
Above all, I expect everyone will find this very experiential day an enjoyable and creative one. I think you may be surprised by how a method that is uncomplicated and light hearted can nevertheless be powerful and revealing.
To see more details or book a place on Kim’s day, go to The 6-Part Story Method page.
