Counselling ESL (Everybody's Starting Language) recognizes that all people have a story inside them that is waiting to be told. However, too often as they age, the way they want to express their story is at odds with the way their families or their societies allow them to express it. Be part of our group discussions to uncover the ways your life stories shape your identity and experiences.
Module 1: Style and Setting
In any language foundation training, including the language of self, we begin with the present tense- rooted in where we are. In English, there are nine uses of the present tense, although the ninth use (storytelling) is only taught in foreign language instruction once a learner shows an advanced mastery of the grammatical pieces needed to design a narrative. Storytelling is not as simple as it may seem to native speakers, and it is often something that is taken for granted by those who absorbed the language as infants. The first module will be adapted to the linguistic capabilities of the students and parent groups that it is working with, and will be adapted to meet their language, emotional, and intellectual skills.
Module 2: Emotions and Crafting
Primarily dealing with descriptive language, such as nouns and adjectives, module two deals with emotions. Emotions are energy in motion (Goleman, 2005), cultural constructs that are created by the individual and emerge as a combination of the physical properties of the body, a flexible brain that has wired itself to the environment of development, and the culture and upbringing which provide the environment (Feldman Barrett, 2017). This is why one child may find joy in collecting bugs, while another may be disgusted by the same concept, but it is when a child is not allowed to explore the emotion, that the body represses it, and mental stability is threatened; there is no homeostasis in the body and this causes disconnection to the mind. However, how people talk about their emotions relates to how their emotions have been stored in their body in the past, as to how they are able to respond to emotional stimulation in the present with direct impact on how the lingering effects of 'sticking points' causes them to react to themselves and to others.
Module 3: Memory and Character
A major concern in the narrative understanding is the role of memory in how people create their identities through the construction of their stories – it is selective. In working primarily with past tense verbs and storytelling, participants build on the first two modules to determine how past experiences with people interrupt their ability to get to know others in the present who may remind them of past abusers. More practically though, it can put context into words for people in our lives that we all know but don’t always think about, and provide more up-to-date language on people groups and gender terminology so that people don’t make insensitive comments or gestures without meaning to.
Module 4: Language and Plot
In module four, participants begin to explore the concept of ‘nodus tollens’ or the realization that at some point in their life, the plotline they had envisioned for themselves stopped making sense. Whether this was through systemic interruption, such as the upheaval of their family, the long-term effects of the residential schools, or childhood maltreatment, people start to lose the understanding that their life is an adventure entirely within their choosing. When this happens, what do they do with the thread? Where do they begin to understand how to find themselves again? Grammatically, this deals with reworking the language so that you can explain it to others without having to re-live the trauma all over again and works with modals, or helping verbs, to support the actions in making sense.
Module 5: Transitions and Perspectives
Transitional language is very complicated between linguistic backgrounds, because they are small words that make a difference, but very challenging to remember. These are prefixes, prepositions, articles, conjunctions; words you are loathe to pay attention to in high school English that set the foundation for how we gain perspective of the details in our own stories and of the details in the stories of those around us.
Module 6: The Ending
Module six deals with putting it all together. Giving participants a chance to take their story and practice re-storying it through different mediums for communication. It deals with the understanding of how participants have seen their identity, perhaps as survivors of trauma or victims, to that of embodied beings who are capable of creating and designing the life they want to lead, despite the pitfalls. Language deals with the future. How does an end lead to a new beginning?
If you’re interested and want to learn more, please reach out to our team at info.horizonhealing@gmail.com directly. We’d love to hear from you.