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Live - Online Training
How to create healing stories for distressed children
A masterclass in devising therapeutic metaphors
This inspiring online training day gives you powerful, non-intrusive ways to help distressed young people – and others – overcome difficulties in their lives – the skills you will learn can also be used with adults
Course Factfile
How to create healing stories for distressed children online course
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Date: Tues 13th May 2025
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Accredited CPD: 6 hours
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Length: 1 day (9.15am - 4.00pm BST)
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Tutor: Pamela Woodford
- Price: £145 per person
Price includes course notes and a recording of the tutor sessions
£145.00
Book your place
Select a date
LIVE ONLINE – Join Pamela Woodford live online on Tuesday 13th May 2025 for this enjoyable, experiential CPD accredited training day – you will have plenty of opportunities to ask questions, take part in exercises to practice the steps involved, come up with pertinent metaphors and create your own story. Limited numbers.
BONUS RECORDING – you will also get a recording of the tutor sessions for a limited time afterwards to maximise your learning.
Register your interest for future dates >
Fantastic online training, engaging and thought-provoking throughout. The confidence Pamela has given me will impact positively on my everyday practice, I am truly inspired...
Psychotherapist
Why take this course
Children’s natural affinity with stories gives us an incredibly powerful, non-directive way to help emotionally distressed and abused young people, who can sometimes be hard to reach in any other way. On this practical live training event you will learn how to tap into your own metaphorical brain to create therapeutic stories and metaphors ‘in the moment’ that are appropriate to each individual’s circumstances and experiences.
Throughout the day Pamela – a master storyteller and highly experienced psychotherapist – draws on her own case histories, metaphor and story examples as she guides you through the steps involved in ‘thinking on your feet’ and creating a story yourself in the moment. By the end of the day you will have lots of new, innovative ways to engage with and help distressed children deal with the experiences they have had – whilst also offering them hope, understanding, and new ways of thinking and feeling about life and themselves.
Indeed, you may well be surprised at how quickly positive psychological changes occur as a result of the stories you will create and tell ‘in the moment’.
Stories also play a crucial role in child development – through the ways the different characters think, act and overcome difficulties, children gain important templates for understanding the world and dealing with the challenges and situations they will meet in life – both now and in the future. They are a wonderful way to help build resilience.
Storytelling and the careful use of therapeutic metaphor are crucial elements of successful counselling and psychotherapy – they help bypass assumptions and rigid thinking to offer a new, broader way of looking at things, awaken innate resources and offer crucial hope – just what struggling children need…
Wonderful, interactive online course. Pamela is a joy to listen to – I learnt so much
Counsellor
What will you learn
- A clear understanding of how to address emotional issues in children
- Simple ways to calm and relax children – “it’s the way you tell ‘em”
- Tips for igniting your own imagination and creativity
- How to ‘think metaphor’ to find the right one for each situation
- A step-by-step guide to creating your own stories – the 6 steps for creating short stories with metaphors specifically tailored to quickly bring about positive psychological changes in children and young people
- Breathing life into inanimate objects and taking inspiration from nature – how to tune into your metaphorical mind
- Valuable experience in creating your own therapeutic story from scratch
- How to use your stories and metaphors
- The importance of paying attention to the words children use when telling you something
- Case histories which illustrate the effectiveness and flexibility of stories – and show why they are such powerful therapeutic tools, even with difficult cases
- How to find your own metaphors and connect them emotionally to distressing situations
- Using embedded suggestions in stories – exercise
- Different ways to use therapeutic stories, such as those in Pamela’s acclaimed Brighter Little Minds series, to develop emotional literacy
- The importance of incorporating all of our senses
- How to adapt stories to use with adolescents and adults
- Tips for thinking creatively ‘on your feet’ to come up with suitable metaphors and ideas there and then in the moment
- Flexible skills that can easily be adapted to working with adults
- Why subtly entwining a child’s interests into a story makes its impact stronger
- How to introduce a story or therapeutic metaphor naturally into your conversation
- Feedback on the story you create and time to ask questions of the tutor – a highly experienced and creative psychotherapist who has spent decades working therapeutically with distressed children and young people
- A greater appreciation of the subtle power of metaphor, imagination and embedded suggestions and how to use them to help the young people you care for
- Increased confidence in creating and telling therapeutic stories yourself
- A variety of story examples and ‘scripts’
- Lots of new ideas from Pamela Woodford’s ‘treasure chest of healing spells’ to spark your own creativity
- Tips for improving your own storytelling abilities
- and more…
Such a helpful live online training day – the use of metaphor via story form is a powerful tool
Head of Behaviour Support Service – Education
Course Programme
The ‘How to create healing stories for distressed children’ live online workshop starts at 9.15am and runs until 4.00pm. (GMT).
Who is this course suitable for?
Anyone working with emotionally distressed children or young people, including:
- Psychotherapists, therapists and counsellors
- Teachers and educational professionals
- Childcare and healthcare professionals (and students)
- Foster carers
- Adoptive parents – and perspective adoptive parents
- Social workers
- Parents and carers
- Interested friends or family who wish to help a young person they know
- And anyone who would like to attend for personal reasons
This course has been independently accredited by the internationally recognised CPD Standards Office for 6 hours of CPD training.
On completion of this training you’ll receive CPD certificates from the College and the CPD Standards Office.
Register your interest – next date
If you can’t make this course, please complete the form below and we’ll email you when another date becomes available.
Tell others about this course
It was excellent! Learnt how to recognise metaphor and embedded suggestions – great tips on identifying what you’ve got to build the story on, the words to use, as well as the voice and delivery.
OT & HG Therapist
A lovely amalgam of theory and practice, stimulus and response. I learned of the centrality of metaphor, how to use embedded suggestions and the importance of using all these in telling stories.
Teacher
Very useful to learn how effective stories can be at achieving better emotional states.
Writer/Poet
Reviews for this course
4.9/5 (84 Reviews)
Write a review
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How to create healing stories for distressed children
Tues 13th May 2025 £145.00
Tues 13th May 2025 £145.00
I thoroughly enjoyed this course. It got my creative juices flowing and I can see so many ways to incorporate healing stories into my family hypnotherapy practice. Pamela’s insight into how to create stories was wonderful and I was really proud of the metaphorical story we came up with as a group with other therapists and counsellors. Thank you for an inspiring day’s workshop.
I absolutely loved this course. Pamela beautifully teased out of all participants our amazing imaginations. She made it very accessible and structured. I had no idea how tiny little ‘noticings’ in our world could be used to make huge differences. Thank you.
This course was amazing. I found Pamela’s words of wisdom encouraging and actually made me want to learn more about the subject. The information I learned will aid me in my counselling sessions.
Very pleased with the day’s workshop. I really liked working together in a group and creating our own story step by step, rather than just being talked at. It was good to have the experience of doing it ourselves. Lots of very good information to use.
Really valuable and meaningful. Pamela opens us the door to creativity in an easy and enjoyable way. You learn to create stories, that through characters and an entertaining plot, sprinkled with metaphors, convey a positive message to the listener. It is a very useful resource both with children and teenagers. I liked and enjoyed the course.
I really enjoyed the course. Pamela’s depth of knowledge and experience made it an invaluable day packed with resources. The course works to ‘scaffold’ story-making to make it accessible for everyone and the group work time means you get to use the skills as you learn them. Pamela’s warmth, enthusiasm and humour make it all really enjoyable. I would highly recommend it.
A very stimulating course with plenty of experiential work. A compassionate approach shone through.
Wonderful, engaging, enjoyable course
It was a pleasure to learn from Pamela herself and to watch her in action as she created stories on the spot. She was such an inspiration, it was also amazing to work with other professionals to create our own stories.
Well delivered and thought-provoking.
It was great to be creative and learn from Pamela Woodford. Her stories were great, especially the ones she did spontaneously. I enjoyed working as a group in breakout rooms to write our own healing story.
The course with Pamela was fantastic, very creative and fascinating. I found the lively way the content was delivered captivating, practical, inspiring, and thought provoking 🙂 I highly recommend this course.
A really informative course, full of tips and anecdotes and, most importantly, stories that will help me in my work with children and young people. Pamela’s experience and expertise is invaluable and she is extremely engaging. I really enjoyed creating stories and hearing others’ stories that can be used with many different clients, young and old. It was a also a good refresher of how to use embedded suggestions and metaphor in therapeutic ways. Thank you for a helpful, enjoyable and informative day
I thought this course was amazing and very transferable for the work that I do with adults too. It made me fall in love with writing again and reminded me how it can help adults and children relate and communicate their emotions. The course was engaging and Pamela is wonderful.
I was interested in this course to learn how to use metaphors and stories for adults. I couldn’t attend the course, but was able to watch the recording. Pamela’s style of teaching is fun, honest and encouraging with many useful learning points. I have already found myself using more metaphors with my adult clients. Now to get my creative mind to think about stories.
Pamela was just magical! She had me hooked from the beginning.
Very informative I enjoyed the experience. I would recommend
It. It’s not just for those working with children.
Such a thought provoking and inspiring course, really looking forward to implementing the learning into my work.
I really enjoyed the day. Pamela was so positive and encouraging, and I was amazed at the stories we could create, even in such a short time. Lots of ideas for taking forward. Thank you Pamela!
Pamela is very passionate about metaphors and stories. She has shown us how powerful the tools are in the therapeutic context, particularly when we are creating them ‘in the moment’. Really enjoyable and eye-opening.
This course briefly covered the essentials of what metaphor is, how metaphorical stories might be created, how and why the stories work with human minds, examples of working with metaphor and particular clients, and a trove of related insights. There was a large amount of information covered in one day, including ample time for gradual, progressive practice work. By the end of the day I was seeing metaphors in so many things that it was almost hard to choose which would be best to use! But seriously, the workshop taught the understanding of and, best of all, the ease of access to metaphorical stories. Encouraged to use certain, appropriate client details, the building blocks for metaphor through story telling became many. The workshop resulted in a beginner’s knowledge of a frequently successful therapeutic tool for use with distressed children and anyone else.
I found the course very helpful, with Pamela’s explanations giving me even more insight as to how beneficial this tool is. I also appreciated the ‘break-out’ sessions, where we could discuss and work with others on the course. The exercises we did were so much more productive with the input of others in our small groups – and the small group option was just right for bringing out our individual ideas, as well as gaining insights from others’ input. This was far more enriching than working individually would have been. Pamela’s encouraging manner throughout was a great help; as she kept reminding us that everyone’s ideas are valid, there is no one ‘right’ idea – provided the guidelines are followed. This too was helpful, the framework she gave for constructing the stories, and the essential elements. Since doing the course I have found myself ‘seeing’ story possibilities in lots of ordinary day-to-day situations. It definitely does take a certain mindset, a bit quirky or playful, and being able to re-visit our own childhood fantasy minds – something I had unfortunately ‘grown out of’, but am now enjoying reconnecting with. I have not consciously used it with any clients yet (most of my clients are adults; and my work has been rather quiet over the Christmas/new Year period) but I am getting ideas now, knowing how valuable this took can be with adults, and look forward to putting it into action in the coming weeks.
What an incredible day. I learnt so much and can apply it immediately. So, so valuable – can’t recommend it highly enough!
I found this course very useful in being able to navigate a child through their distressing experiences. It is very clever how storytelling and the use of imagination, can help achieve this. I will be using tools provided in this course in my sessions with young people, adapting relative stories to include particular resources that I think would help them also (eg mindfulness).
Pamela is an excellent lecturer and presenter. She has a magical way of engaging listeners and students that makes learning from her a genuine pleasure. I found Pamela’s handouts clear and well-structured, and her way of intertwining the human givens principles in her stories beautiful.
How our brain understands the world through metaphor and the power of stories to ‘reach those parts of us that other beers cannot reach’ has always been very clear to me. What I have learned from life – but quite directly from the people involved in the Human Givens – has helped me to understand this better. As for Pamela Woodford’s course, I can say this: If I hadn’t been brought up so much in a left-brained, logic-orientated environment, I might have learned to recite a story from my own culture. What Pamela brought today has helped me to understand – through her own stories and practically through the exercises on the course – is what it means when we’re told that we all have stories in us. That, if we just take a little time to think about it, we can find useful metaphors to communicate and to connect – with each other, and importantly, with the innate resources within us all – resources that can really help us when we’re ‘stuck’.
The course led us step by step both through the theory behind the use of storytelling, metaphor and how to structure them. Listening to both published stories but also watching in amazement as she constructed one on the spot! I loved working in the same group throughout the day – we each had our own skills which we had the change to offer. How does time pass so quickly? When you’re enthralled, engaged and excited.
A truly rich, eye opening and inspiring training day. I thoroughly enjoyed myself! I was feeling inadequate at the beginning when it comes to metaphors and my creative storytelling side, but Pamela’s tips, clear explanations, guidance and encouragement meant I could immerse myself into the day, subsequently making me realise I can do this! I understand now what is involved in creating metaphorical stories and that it is now about me practising and creating opportunities to embrace and ‘flex’ this part of my brain. I am sure soon it will all become second nature to me. Thank you Pamela!
The enthusiasm and humanity of Pamela Woodford struck a chord with me from her initial introduction. Pamela, describing real world therapeutic situations and the inspirational stories she had used as interventions to connect to troubled minds, was a masterclass in showing how accessing the human brain’s innate metaphorical pattern matching abilities to re-write or overlay unhelpful templates could induce a positive outcome for clients.
Such a stimulating day! Pamela presented a fascinating, challenging and entertaining workshop, drawing on lots of examples from her counselling work and her own writing. It’s definitely a ‘learn by doing’ course.
This course was pleasant and fun. It was good to stay in the same breakout room and groups. There is much material to digest and use to create my own stories.
The entire day with Pamela was a joy and an absolute pleasure! I spent most of the day in a beautiful learning trance, mesmerised by the skills being imparted. At the end of the day I was delighted to have been part of producing a wonderful story and used it with a client the next day! I will keep practicing this from now on to develop this fabulous and powerful skill. Thank you so much – I feel this course has significantly enhanced my skill set.
This course gives you the tools to help your creative storytelling to have some teeth and fine-tune so to get your message across, applying to the current challenge or situation. I found this course very helpful to communicate with young people (and adults) by using story telling.
This course was very hands on with step by step activities and explanations on how to create stories using metaphors. As an author I found it wonderfully beneficial and inspirational. I look forward to using what I have learnt in my future projects.
The way Pamela creates stories is second to none. She has a natural flair in teaching us how to communicate with even the toughest of clients in a effective way.
Great insight into how to write a story for children and have an impact. Really loved Pamela’s way of teaching.
This course gave me the recipe for creating meaningful metaphors and I came away with confidence, knowing that I can use this in my work. Pamela made it easy and I would highly recommend this course!
It was a very informative course and gave me great insight into treating children’s difficulties.
The real life examples really helped the course to come alive and help make links with day to day practice. This in turn helped me consider the impact of the work on my own role and how we can use this practice across our Family Support Services
Pamela is a kind and compassionate person with an amazing talent, which she shares generously on this course. The pace and structure of the course is good and despite our doubts, everyone participated in creating some really inspiring and healing stories. The formula of writing the stories is simple – the time it will take you to write a story using the formula will be much shorter than you think, however, the story you write will have powerful potential to heal even the most complex of cases and this healing has the potential to last life-time! All this potential, wrapped up in a one day course.
I thought the course was good overall, but I personally missed a bit of a more basic introduction to the application of metaphor. I only realised after it (so didn’t ask during the course) that I wasn’t really sure how ‘vague’ the metaphor should be. As in – should we be aiming at metaphors which are very much open to individual interpretation or more reflective of the problem we’re working on? Should the metaphor suggest a solution to this problem, or just the context and leave it up to the audience to work out the solution? I was a bit confused about this.
It was very helpful in reminding me that metaphor is everywhere. I didn’t find it helpful to have an explanation of HG yet again. It would be great if these courses could be split so that qualified therapists could join later perhaps, perhaps at the first break (which would work on Zoom and IRL). I felt having six in the breakout groups was too many for Zoom and am unsure why we didn’t stick with three as per the agenda. I found the story composition exercise interesting and will develop my story to include it in my practice going forward. My vote would be to have break-out groups of three or four, with individuals working on their own so they have IP rights (which could actually be mentioned so attendees don’t simply appropriate others’ stories) whilst having support if they became stuck. My parter couldn’t think of an ending, so we came up with a new beginning which meant she had a ready-made ending.
I have always told stories to my children, many I simply made up – lots of fun. As I work with the healing and wellbeing of families, especially women and children, I looked forward to this seminar with great anticipation. It was all and more than I had expected. I can tell you with confidence that Pamela Woodford is an incredible human being with an amazing gift. Her personal successes and how she achieves them were so touching as she cited some of her experiences with children and teenagers, without dragging us, the participants into the darkness of some of these clients’ situations. The subject of children’s therapy is a difficult one when you think of all the children suffering from abuse and dysfunctional family situations, but somehow Pamela Woodford puts a touch of magic, joy and hope on it. This was certainly contagious – so when we broke into groups to create stories, there was a superb energy and enjoyment. I learnt so much, as my mind opened up to all the possible ways to use metaphor with embedded suggestions, pattern matching and other elements to achieve breakthrough in a child (or indeed an adult) through story telling. This was a wonderful, invigorating experience and has provoked me to use storytelling and creative means to touch lives for healing in a more deliberate, intelligent and enlightened way, both in my professional and private capacity. I have already suggested this seminar to people who work with children, trusting that they too will find skills through Pamela Woodford’s great, compassionate, inspiring work using the Human Givens model.
It was an intense, fun, and practical learning experience. Pamela generously shared her stories and insights and guided us as we created our own stories through a series of simple steps. Her breadth of experience is really inspiring as she explained how she has creatively used her metaphors and stories to bring about dramatic change in children who really needed her help.
It was so refreshing to re-connect with the HG principles and listen to Pamela, so passionate about the use of metaphor in her stories.
The tools and confidence she has given me to expand on metaphorical story telling will be valuable always.
We met a lovely group of people who all brought different experiences to the table.
A very insightful immersion that gives very good tools to create our own stories with the right embedded language.
Pamela is such an inspiring teacher bringing her stories, her humour, her wisdom to the group in a very special and authentic way.
I am very happy that I participated in this course. It was very well organised, focused yet open.
I found it extremely useful because it offers a wonderful and empowering way of thinking which I will now find ways to incorporate in my own work.
Pamela is a wonderful teacher, very inspiring and supportive.
The course was so interesting and engaging, I would highly recommend it. I’m really looking forward to practicing the skills and tools we were introduced to. Pam was fantastic! I could have listened to her stories and experiences for a whole week, never mind a day. What a lovely and very talented lady. Thank you Pam x
The only reason I didn’t give it 5* was because I found doing the course via zoom quite difficult. Although I know that can’t be helped at the moment, it has made me aware of my own need for face to face contact with people I’m training/learning with. I think we would have benefitted from a little more guidance during the story writing phase of the day and possibly opportunity to refine and improve.
I found this training very insightful, creative and inspiring. I was able to apply my learning to my work. Pamela was really informative and a fascinating story teller and creator.
I also enjoyed the group exercises and how the day was experiential.
I’ve come away very inspired – loved experiencing the power of metaphor first hand
Fantastic training, engaging and thought-provoking throughout. The confidence Pamela has given me will impact positively on my everyday practice, I am truly inspired. Looking forward to joining more training with Human Givens in the future.
Educational, interesting, useful way to spend a lockdown day. I found it both entertaining and well worthwhile.
Very, very rich and helpful course. Excellent introduction to using stories to help children heal. Pamela was a marvel of managing all the parts to make a whole. Her stories of working with children and adults in this manner were inspirational.
Pamela is a passionate and warm practitioner. She led the workshop with such a gentle, safe but structured framework. It was extremely practical and reminded me of the powerful effective of metaphor work. Many thanks
Amazing delivery. Captured the imagination from the start, a wonderful journey through story telling.
Pamela is an inspiration with an amazing talent for creating useful and effective stories on the spot to address the presenting problem.
Pamela is an engaging tutor who puts her students at ease from the start. It was probably the most relaxed HG course I have attended – and in a good way, because coming up with (and performing) stories isn’t easy. Although I’m already an HG practitioner, creating my own stories is my weakest point, so I really appreciated a slightly different approach to give me more confidence in this area. It was helpful to build the story gradually, as a group, and to hear all the stories other groups created.
A totally immersive and deeply creative experience where I learned a lot about the power of story – something I’d forgotten – both through the talent and skill of the trainer and through the story exploration in group sessions with other participants. It has opened up so many new ways of seeing and working through story both personally and professionally.
The hands on approach to learning the material was wonderful. The theory was presented in an easily grasped manner. The material was well organized and presented in a compelling way. At times, gripping, because of the nature of the case studies presented. The exercises encourage participants to apply the concepts. The learning format embeds the information – we lived it in the way we learn to ride a bike. We got on the bike and were supported by one another. As a storyteller, the course offers me more insight into the power of story and how it can foster healing.
Wonderful, interactive course. Pamela is a joy to listen to and I learnt so much from it.
Pamela’s course is well thought out, and well-structured. The course is to the point, yet playful and thought-provoking at the same time. There are many tools that can be taken away and used immediately in both home and work life. Pamela’s enthusiasm and her playful personality are infectious, and lend to a terrific learning experience. Thinking in Metaphor is my new favourite thing to do!
This is an excellent course. Funny, engaging and thoroughly relevant to the requirements of a therapist these days.
This one day course covered all the bases. Pamela is experienced, inspiring and engaging. Any aspiring writers, therapists, parents, carers or experienced writers looking to learn to write for children and adults would enjoy an inspiring and educational day. I’m carrying my notebook everywhere with me from here on.
Pamela is wonderfully empathetic and inspirational. I loved her stories and already use her books a lot.
I was so looking forward to this course and it didnt disapoint. Thank you so very much.
This course was amazing!! The day was jam-packed with lots of information around story writing and use of metaphor. It was so exciting to be able to create a therapeutic story within the safety and support of a smaller group with guidance from an exceptionally talented facilitator and author. I would highly recommend this course.
The exercises Pamela devised where excellent, really helped me to give it a go, hearing amazing rich stories because of the use of all sensory descriptions with great metaphors, and embedded suggestions that can evoke so many different responses and can be created with the client in mind so will resonate particularly with them. The case studies that Pamela shared and her generosity, encouragement and humour all made it a great learning experience. Thank you.
Thoroughly enjoyed the workshop. Pamela is a very knowledgeable, passionate and encouraging tutor- it was an information packed day and I have come away feeling inspired and ready to use what I have learnt. Special thanks to Arlene also, who was very knowledgeable, patient and supportive with my technical woes!
A wonderful day demonstrating the power of stories to help troubled youngsters, often without them knowing. A good practical course to dust-off our own innate ability to communicate through story and metaphor.
I would definitely recommend this course to any therapist working with either adults or children. It was wonderful to hear about how the instructor used the stories in session and created a safe healing environment for the kids to dive into the healing stories she was weaving. Truly inspirational! I am very happy that I took this course!
Fun-filled, stretching day that gives you the framework to establish and maintain therapy interactions with children and young adults.
Excellent
An excellent day, especially learning the building blocks to creating beautiful therapeutic stories, using embedded suggestions and using the senses to address a variety of different problems.
Such a helpful day – the use of metaphor via story form is a powerful tool to support children in moving forward with their issues/problems. Thank you Pamela for a relaxed, entertaining delivery – good fun and informative.
It was excellent! Learnt how to recognise metaphor and embedded suggestions – great tips on identifying what you’ve got to build the story on, the words to use, as well as the voice and delivery.
Very good to learn how to structure a story to meet therapeutic needs for a child or young person.
Really useful to learn the use of embedded suggestions and how to put the stories together based on the particular client needs.
I’ve come away very inspired – loved experiencing the power of metaphor first hand.
Loved Pamela’s excellent teaching style and wealth of wisdom.
Everything led to a most fantastic finale! Thank you, it was beautifully structured, supported and inspiring.
A lovely amalgam of theory and practice, stimulus and response. I learned of the centrality of metaphor, how to use embedded suggestions and the importance of using all these in telling stories.
Everything was useful – can’t wait to put all I’ve learnt into practise. Thanks Pamela for freeing my imagination.
Very useful to learn how effective stories can be at achieving better emotional states.
Really enjoyed the day of creating stories, using metaphor, practising embedded suggestions and having fun doing it.