This is an exciting experiential workshop that explores an expressive arts approach to family therapy. This is a cultural adaptive approach that includes storytelling, mindfulness and embodied joining to help families increase secure attachment and re-write problem-statured stories that the family is carrying. Join us as we play with poetry, spoken word practices and performance techniques while traversing familial stories of trauma and oppression. Jenna will share how to weave together elements of expressive arts therapy, poetry therapy and narrative therapy to meet families where they are at. At the end of this training, participants will feel more confident to incorporate writing or oral storytelling, somatic awareness and embodied joining practices into their family therapy practice to build connection and heal attachment wounds.

Jenna Robinson (she/her), MA, LMFT, is a QWOC expressive arts therapist and performance poet located in the Bay Area. She has been performing and facilitating spoken word workshops to youth, adults and families since 2011 in Hawaii and California. She is a two-time grand slam champion of Hawaii Slam, a National Poetry Slam finalist, and has competed on 7 national slam poetry teams. While in the Expressive Arts Therapy M.A. program at CIIS in San Francisco, she worked to develop her own approach melding Narrative therapy, Expressive Arts and spoken word poetry. In 2017 she founded Revisions, an intergenerational therapeutic writing program for families and community groups with Bay Area Creative. Since then, Jenna has piloted and facilitated trauma-informed writing workshops with individuals, youth, and families throughout the Bay Area, specializing in families who have experienced intimate partner violence and system engaged youth. She is an adjunct professor in the Expressive Arts Therapy department at CIIS and at the Wright Institute. She is currently in training as a Poetry Therapist under the supervision of Dr. Sherry Reiter.