Task-Oriented Group Training

For Clinicians and Creative Group Leaders

Developed over 20 years ago by Gail Noppe-Brandon, licensed social worker and playwright, the FYV group method has been written up in two books: Find Your Voice, and One Vision, Many Voices, and documented in the film, Listening With Their Eyes, as well as on PBS.

Based, on the premise that our identities (and obstacles to living) can be found in the way we tell our stories, the FYV workshop process begins with an evocative photograph, to get people ‘telling’. In response to this stimulus, much like a Rorschach ink-blot, participants are asked to do a free-write. The free-write is then read aloud, and responses to a series of questions about the writing become the basis for a play comprised of two-characters and one conflict.

Because we all write through our own experience, and because it is required that participants include a potential conflict in their story idea, it’s inevitable that the participant’s plays will reflect some difficulty that’s pressing on their minds…though these are never addressed as autobiographical. This stance gives participants the freedom, safety and distance to re-examine a piece of their own narrative in front of others. They each complete many re-writes of their plays in response to feedback, the intent of which is to help them re-vise the event as one in which both characters have valid wants, and the ability to achieve some kind of resolution, though not necessarily a happy one! This experience solidifies the learning that revision in life is possible when everyone is seen as having a valid want.

A final play is created over the sessions, and then shared as a presentation to invited outsider-witnesses, who inevitably mirror those things with which they felt an affinity in the story, and in so doing normalize and empathize with the recounted experience.

Because this is all done in a very supportive environment, these workshops offer participants the opportunity to express themselves, while also re-examining the lives they’re living. Although the method is always the same, thematically clustered workshops, such as bereavement groups, families, couples, adolescents in after school programs, empty-nesters, career changers, blocked writers, seniors …to name a few…invite participants of all ages, who are sharing similar life experiences and transitions, to re-discover themselves in small communities of like-minded others.

The FYV group approach is an experiential intervention that can get the entire family on the same ‘page’ at the same time, help couples to resolve conflicts, and allow individuals of all ages to find the agency and flexibility with which to re-write their lives.

This is a fifteen-hour training that can take place during a single week or over the course of two weekends.

The FYV workshop is fully experiential; trainees undergo the same process through which they will eventually be leading others:

Guided writing sessions in which participants develop, revise and complete finished plays, which inevitably tell the stories of what is on their minds, and in their hearts, begging ‘balanced characters’ and resolved conflicts.

Guided acting sessions which participants study and perform published monologues, and learn to become better listeners and more sensitive communicators.

Final presentation for invited guests, who witness the finished plays performed by workshop participants.

“I’ve been more productive since taking this workshop…the notion that things can be ‘re-written’ was very liberating.”
-David Smyth, LCSW

“The focus on ‘the other’ [in this method] gets you back to who you are talking to, or better still… listening to; rather than giving advice or interpreting.”
-Gail Kinn, LCSW

For schedule and fees, or to organize a training for your agency, call (212) 741-9868, or email: info@findyourvoice.us.