The Tale of all Tales: My Life as a “Hero’s Journey” - Group Schema Therapy Meets Expressive Arts Therapy

This one-day workshop offers a practical introduction to an integrative approach that combines Group Schema Therapy with Expressive Arts Therapy—including movement- and body-oriented techniques—within the mythological and archetypal framework of the “Free Child” and “Hero’s Journey”. Drawing on Jungian perspectives, the workshop invites participants to experientially explore selected stages of the Hero’s Journey as a structured pathway for therapeutic transformation.

The Hero's Journey motif, as outlined by Joseph Campbell (1949), is a fundamental narrative structure that underlies a vast array of myths, stories, and even modern films and scripts: From Gilgamesh through the Arab oral myth of Abu Zayed al-Hilali from the 11.th century until Harry Potter and recent Hollywood films, the hero myth encompasses the legacy of human storytelling traditions.

The collective unconscious allows each of us to meet in films, novels, myths, and stories, the experience of being addressed and even called by our own name, by our own reality (tua res agitur!) - sometimes in joy or in fear, in chill or in awe.

Through guided exercises, we will encounter key motifs such as the call to awakening, the resistance to this call, and the crossing of thresholds into the unknown in everydays’ life as well as in therapeutic contexts. We will work experientially to uncover the Vulnerable Child mode concealed beneath coping-driven “shadow” modes, and support its transformation through activation of the Happy/Vital Child mode and empowerment of the Healthy Adult mode. Within an imaginal confrontation with mortality, fear, and the “inner enemy”—the Inner Critic and its allies—participants will experience how autonomy, vitality, and group connectedness can be mobilized toward inner liberation and integration.

Core steps of the Hero’s Journey will be enacted, reflected upon, and linked to schema-therapeutic mechanisms of change. Participants will gain direct embodied experience as well as a conceptual understanding of how this narrative framework can be flexibly integrated into both individual and group Schema Therapy. The approach offers a culturally versatile, humanistic matrix to which therapists can return repeatedly in their clinical work.

This workshop emerged from a collaborative project between Christoph Fuhrhans and the Egyptian Expressive Arts Therapist Mera Abdelmalek. It was originally designed as a one-time self-experiential workshop for a group of Sudanese student refugees in Tanta, in the Nile Delta.

Since then, we have developed the workshop in various formats: as a multi-day retreat in Aswan incorporating elements of ancient Egyptian mythology (the Book of the Dead), as well as shorter half-day workshops presented at different locations across Egypt, at the ISST Conference in Thessaloniki, and in online settings.

Its unique quality lies in the almost seamless integration of Group Schema Therapy with a humanistic, archetypally grounded process of self-exploration, enriched and brought to life by the methods of Expressive Arts Therapy.

Therapists and Co-Therapists and interested laypersons with basic knowledge of Schema Therapy

320 Euro

8

Literature:

Campbell, Joseph: The Hero With A Thousand Faces, New York 1949

Gilligan, Stephen and Robert Dilts, The Hero's Journey – a Voyage of Self Discovery, Williston 2009

Farrell, Joan and Ida Shaw: Group Schema Therapy, Wiley & Sons, 2012

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Psychology of The Child Archetype, (in: C. G. Jung and K. Kerenyi, Science of Mythology, 1941/49)

Rebilliot, Paul and Melissa Kay: The Call to Adventure. Bringing the Hero's Journey to Daily Life, San Francisco 1993