The ChrisLin Method: 5 Steps for Working Creatively with Imagery & Metaphor

A step-by-step guide to facilitating lasting transformation, presented in a practical, clear and approachable way, The ChrisLin Method deserves a prominent place in any practitioner’s toolkit.

Since the beginning of time, people of the world have expressed themselves through art, music, dance, drama and storytelling. In their groundbreaking book, Christina Bachini and Lindsey Wheeler offer practitioners – counsellors, coaches, art therapists and anyone engaged in delivering therapy or facilitating personal development – a practical guide to integrating creativity into their practice.

Built on 50+ years of collective experience, The ChrisLin Method uses creativity to help clients look at the underlying, unconscious drivers that affect their unhelpful emotions. It is through creatively exploring these unhelpful emotions that clients can untangle their inner world.

With easy to follow Steps, Core Questions, Frameworks and Case Studies, this comprehensive method will enable you to:

• Understand how creativity works
• Know when to offer creativity to your clients
• Be confident in using The ChrisLin Method as an intervention
• Learn how to work with your client’s creation.

www.awakeningcreativity.co.uk

Growing up in Ireland, the daughter of a Psychoanalyst who was himself a member of the 'Monkstown Group' - the renowned psychanalytical community in Dublin led by 'Jonty' Jonathan Hanahan - it's perhaps unsurprising that Christina followed in her father's footsteps. With a liberal parenting approach and a home regularly filled with the leading psychoanalysts of the time who were actively engaged in pushing the barriers of psychoanalysis, Christina will have unknowingly absorbed the importance of working with the mind and helping people live more fulfilling lives.Although not consciously aware of this early influence, Christina's career path led her to attend teacher-training college, where she became a group worker for young people who were non-school attendees. This role proved a turning point as she realised how fulfilling it was to help youngsters who were, and felt, disadvantaged in life to learn to be filled with choices and possibilities.Creativity became her go-to approach for helping them express themselves. Many were non-readers and not very articulate, so she introduced creativity, initially in the form of colouring-in books. She discovered that as they became absorbed in colouring an image, they started to talk and would answer her questions, and she witnessed a physical and mental change taking place in them. She recognised that they were digging deep into their inner world and gaining an understanding of themselves. In the decades that followed, Christina qualified in Humanistic Psychology and later went on to teach the course at Surrey University as well as teach counselling skills at Reading University. She became, amongst other things, an NLP Master Trainer and facilitated courses based on John Heron's work, including the 6 Category Intervention Analysis. By the mid-80s, Christina was working with organisations where she offered creativity as a way of developing trust in teams, building strategies for open, honest conversations and constructively challenging one another. Amongst other things, she also ran her own 'Creating from the Soul' retreats for personal development using art therapy, became a coach supervisor and today she continues to work as a supervisor and run her own private practice. Christina's professional career has been threaded with creativity that has benefited many hundreds of clients. She firmly believes that helping clients to create something outside of themselves, from their inner mind, in the form of a metaphor or symbol, means that the unconscious is free to do its work so that real change can take place. It is her broad and deep knowledge, experience and insight, that she shares with you in this book, that has made The ChrisLin Method what it is today.

Creativity in its broadest sense has always been a thread in Lindsey's life, from her early years with art and dance to her corporate career, where she was lucky enough to see the power of metaphors when used in training to help derive meaning, generate mutual understanding and promote safe debate within teams. However, it was a fortunate turn in her career in the late 1990s and a move into Organisational Development and training that helped her realise her calling was to work more deeply with people. In particular she wanted a more specific involvement in their personal development, and this career change led to qualifying as an NLP Practitioner. Since then, she has become CIPD qualified and trained in many models, systems and techniques, including approaches such as Clean Language, Transactional Analysis, Person-Centred Therapy, CBT, Motivational Interviewing and models by Nancy Kline and Kristin Neff, to name a few. But still, something was missing. Meeting Christina allowed her to connect her former creative approaches, her knowledge of developing systemic processes and her coaching skills to co-develop The ChrisLin Method. Her curiosity has led to a greater understanding of the human condition, and she has been highly influenced by people such as Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine and Stephen Porges. She firmly believes that working creatively enables deep and lasting change to occur by providing a unique opportunity to uncover the hidden, unconscious thoughts that so heavily influence a person's behaviour. She is immensely proud of the work she and Christina have achieved in developing and documenting a repeatable Method that means other practitioners can easily adopt creativity, and in doing so, make an even greater impact on the lives of clients around the world.