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ICPP Study Group 2010-2011
The therapist as writer


Co-Chairs: Anne Gray, MSW, LCSW and Georgia DeGangi, Ph.D.
Location: Bethesda, MD.
Dates and Time: Third Tuesday of the month, 11:20-12:50 Sept.2010 thru May, 2010


CEUs: For attendance at 9 sessions, registered participants will receive 13.5 units (1.5 per session) from ICP&P. Participants must be members of ICP&P.

Description: This study group is for psychotherapists who have been writing and want the push of a group to stretch harder, grow taller, write more deeply, and bring a story to life. As psychotherapists we listen to others' stories, awed by the power unleashed in the telling. Our own stories too often are held silent, waiting hopefully.... will we remember that image or those feelings? Or will our writing become another item on a "to do" list that is rarely completed?

There are times in our lives when we no longer want those stories to slip away. And so we begin this group for psychotherapists who determine to create room for the richness of their own stories, professional and personal, to rise to the surface, to be noted, to be offered a form of transmission. The group is primarily evocative and supportive in nature, with a focus on stimulating participants to create and complete an article, story, essay, or memoir. Through the sharing of our writing with one another, we hope to clarify our thinking and writing styles. The group will be small and each person will submit three pages for all of us to read for comments in the following group.

Participants will be able to:

  1. Shift the focus from constructing meanings within a reading to analyzing and evaluating how the meanings are presented.
  2. Formulate written compositions that may depict a more complex understanding of emotional and/or relational states.
  3. Develop a more thorough awareness of and ability to express through written language many concepts confronted in daily practice of psychotherapy.
  4. Discuss how to bring to life non-verbal gestural cues, emotional affect and visual images expressed by characters (including clients) through written narrative.
  5. Recognize assumptions in an observational essay, and analyze how to write, and read, this type of essay.
  6. Discuss how the therapist's difficulty in capturing a client's therapy may parallel the client's difficulty in self-disclosure.
  7. Discuss and analyze writing samples from group members, integrating and applying knowledge of writing technique, and of therapeutic skills in making the unthought known.
  8. Write helpful reflective comments on the writings of group members.
  9. Demonstrate bringing to life your experience of a client by writing a short descriptive paragraph of the client.
  10. Assist fellow group members in finding suitable forums to publish their work.

Contact persons: Anne Gray and Georgia DeGangi are both published writers and psychotherapists. For more information about the group, please contact Anne Gray at anniemgray@aol.com or (301) 897-9591 or Georgia DeGangi at gdegangi@aol.com or (301) 962-0800 ext. 2.