Scot Cooper, RP -Project Lead (he/him)

Hi Folks, the image above was my family home. With settler heritage from Scotland and England, I grew up connected to the farmland of southern Ontario, Canada. We experience the four seasons- explosive springs with the smell of lilacs and tulips, hot humid summers, and the vibrance of fall that welcomes preparation for some very cold days and winter snow. Now situated in Caledonia Ontario along the Grand River, I acknowledge that we work and live on the unceded territory of the Anishnawbe (Ah-nish-nah-bay), Haudenosaunee (Ho-deh-no-show-nee) and Attawandaron (At-ta-won-da-ron) Nations. It’s here that I learned not only about how we came to be on this land as uninvited guests but also about the Two Row Wampum Belt treaty. This is our agreement with First People’s about how to be together as respectful neighbours. I begin our story in this way as a means to foreground connection, relationship, and context; our connection to each other, to the land, our culture and the ecology. Although we teach ‘brief therapy’, it is not void of the contexts of people’s lives and the politics of culture that contributes to distress.

Since 1998 I have been teaching single session therapy and brief narrative practice for people, organizations, and communities. This has taken me throughout Canada and across the world. Most recently I have crafted the book Brief Narrative Practice in Single-Session Therapy as a means to archive what I’ve learned that I believe reflects a practice that is caring, collaborative, foregrounds people’s know-how and personal agency, and resists accommodating people to the injustices of the world. I wish to thank the many colleagues, families, and teachers that have shaped my practice and a service landscape where people can access services in their time of need, experience dignity and preferred stories.

Background:

My journey in the field started in the late nineties which was an exciting time in the field. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Narrative Therapy as well as collaborative therapies out of the U.S. where gathering momentum. These people-centred, non-pathologizing, collaborative therapies opened new possibilities for therapeutic conversation as well as foregrounded relational ethics.

From 1998 to 2012 I found a home at Brief Therapy Training Centres International (now Sickkids Learning Institute) as external training and research faculty. The centre was overseen by Jim Duvall who shaped the ‘brief therapy’ landscape throughout Ontario and the rest of the country. Jim would host trainers such as Insoo Kim Berg (co-developer of SFBT) and Michael White (co-developer of Narrative Therapy) who would do live demonstrations as part of their training intensives. We may not have known it at the time but they were teaching us how to do singles session therapy.

Through the past few decades, Ontario has been innovating, growing access to services through implementation of single session therapy (SST) quick access (walk-in therapy) clinics. We opened our clinic in 2006 and have seen SST spread rapidly across Ontario providing a viable service pathway for those in need. These offerings, an ethical part of a diverse service menu, have reshaped the service landscape, clearing away some old traditions to get services to people when they need them.

In Ontario a unique genre of SST has emerged concerned with efficient and effective conversations but also with a strong focus on:

1) Relational ethics (attention to how we do what we do and the possible effects on shaping people’s lives),

2) Questioning grand narratives and how they shape meaning and identity, and

3) Attention to social, historical, cultural, and political contexts of suffering.

What has emerged is a brief therapy that resists having people accommodate to injustice and oppression.

In the midst of this growth, I started Brief Narrative Practices (BNP) in 2012 as a means to collect up and archive in one place the many projects and trainings I was involved with. This ranged from providing workshops, assisting clinics to modify their pathways, co-organizing conferences, to involvement in community initiatives informed by narrative practice. I’m excited to now welcome Stephanie Alderson to this project. I met Steph as her field placement supervisor and we have worked alongside each other for many years. Steph brings with her special interest in supervision practice and a holistic understanding of what gets narrowly referred to as mental health. Her view looks to the influence of nutrition or lack of access to nutrition and broader social circumstances that shape well-being.

Lastly, throughout this journey Monica and I have watched our twins grow and navigate a very challenging yet interesting time. Ben has graduated as a biologist tending to the oceans and coral restoration. Grace will graduate as an environmentalist tending to the flora and fauna of the forests.