National Drugs Conference Ireland (NDCI) – Scott Kellogg Workshop

Wednesday 3rd November

Scott Kellogg Transformational Chairwork

Dr. Scott Kellogg is a clinical psychologist  and psychotherapist from New York. This introduction doesn’t quite do him justice though, you can see more about him here. This workshop introduced Transformational Chairwork as a technique for working around addictions and loss with clients (or ‘patients’ as he prefers). It can be used in different ways.  Scott’s website explains the ways much better than I can: –

There are five core ways to use chairwork: (1) External dialogues; (2) Internal dialogues; (3) Dreamwork; (4) Corrective dialogues; and (5) Role-playing.

The empty chair can be used in order for the client to communicate with a person they may need a dialogue with. It can also be used to communicate with different ‘parts’ of the client. For example it  gives them an opportunity to recognise their different identities such as user, non user, mother/father, partner etc. Work around identity can be useful for the client to think about the following:-

Who are you now? Who will you be in the future? Who do you want to be in the future?

A  question I thought was great to ask was..

‘If your drug was a person what would they be like?’

In a recent EFT session with a young woman around cravings for Heroin, I asked her to imagine Heroin as a person in the room and to say what she thought of them, of course it proved very emotive and telling.  (Incidentally she went on after the session to abstain for her longest time yet!).

I'm the one with the spooky orb at the back hiding!

The workshop was particularly interesting for me as an EFT Practitioner as that too recognises self identity and parts work as important when alleviating emotional intensity of an issue and helping people to move forward postively. A lot of my learning from this workshop made me think about how I can incorprate it in my work and integrate it with EFT.  Working with self identity will also be beneficial in terms of the UK’s new ‘Recovery’ agenda.

Scott also presented the next day at the conference about Gradualism which I found really interesting and in line with my thinking around the whole harm recuction/recovery/abstinence debate. You can read about that here.

You can see more about Scott’s work on his website.

http://transformationalchairwork.com/

Stacey