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Join Our Friends at EHNW in Portland for a Fall Student Salon!

November 6, 2021; 10am-12pm Pacific Time

Student Salon: I don't know is the only thing I can know: Tolerating ambiguity and holding our theories lightly in therapy.

How do you know what you know? How certain are you of your knowledge, your approach, your treatment plan? If these questions unsettle, hooray! Therapy unsettles us. Experienced and wise therapists are fallibilists, recognizing that our understanding of anything or anyone is only a perspective within a horizon limited by our own experience. HOLD YOUR THEORY LIGHTLY.

This perspective keeps us flexible and open to multiple, emerging and expanding horizons of meaning. This also means we live and work with uncertainty and NOT KNOWING in our clinical work. This salon will focus on how our clinical skepticism can increase our humanism in our work.
Facilitators: Carol Swanson will be co-facilitating the conversation with Bob Edelstein.

Date: Saturday, November 6, 2021

Time: 10am-12pm, Pacific; Online by Zoom

Registration Fees: Free for EHNW Affiliate) $20-Professional & $15-Student

Presentation Host: Existential Humanistic NorthWest (EHNW)

Register With EHNW Here>>

Please Note: this event is not being hosted by EHI. Please contact EHNW about their events here: EHNW Contact Form.

Humanistic Psychotherapy and the Art of Living

Join Our Friends at EHNW in Portland for a Lunch and Learn!

December 10, 2021 1pm-2:30pm Pacific Time

Facilitator: Carol Swanson, LCSW

Date: Friday, December 10, 2021

Time: 1pm-2:30pm, Pacific; Online by Zoom

Registration Fees: Free for EHNW Affiliate $10-Non-Affiliate

Presentation Host: Existential Humanistic NorthWest (EHNW in Portland)

 

We live in a world of fragile things: fragile selves, fragile psyches, fragile bodies. Yet even with this uncertainty and fragility, we are asked to approach our lives with tenacity, grace and wisdom. As existential humanistic therapists we encounter the uncertainty and complexity in our clinical work everyday. We are asked to suffer alongside our clients, and to help them increase their capacities for living, and hopefully for a more creative life. An important capacity we need as therapists and we can lend to our clients is knowing that life’s unpredictability exceeds our capacity to control it, that a degree of insecurity is an existential predicament and not a neurotic issue. In this presentation, and conversation I want to put forward how we may never be successful in cultivating a unitary and internally consistent self. I pose the question: How do we develop the acceptance and tolerance for a degree of instability in our lives? Bio: Carol Swanson has been in private practice in Portland, OR for forty years. She co-founded the Portland Gestalt Therapy Training Institute and has trained therapists in the US, Europe and Australia. Her current interest is studying philosophical resources for clinical work. She has authored several articles published for Gestalt journals. When not in the Zoom room you can find her in the garden, cycling, hiking, paddling her kayak or paddle board or camping.Existential-Humanistic Institute Northwest (EHNW).

Register With EHNW Here>>

Please Note: this event is not being hosted by EHI. Please contact EHNW about their events here: EHNW Contact Form.

Browse Additional Hosted Events From the EHNW Team Here>>

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2nd International Existential Scholars Presentation Announced

Both Lu Xun and Rollo May are existential thinkers as well as existential literacy figures. They both use metaphors to reflect on human existence. With Lu Xun’s reflection on the Chinese psyche or even the Chinese nation as a whole, he advocates for the destruction of the Iron House to set people free to live as individual humans with respect and dignity. Rollo May, in addressing the perspective of an individual being persecuted by an alienating power, touches on a related fundamental theme of humanity. 

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