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A Classic Working Treatment Model for At-Risk and High-Risk Youth

The Hero's Journey Workshop works best in an 18-24 hour format over 3-4 days.  Participants experience all the exercises and tools for later using with adolescents.  Having experienced the depth and diversity of the Hero's Journey components helps participants use this material on their own with their particular clientele.

Among his many contributions to the understanding of mythologies and stories, Joseph Campbell brought to light the recurring theme of how the Hero’s Journey creates a framework for developmental shifts.  Adolescents in particular have followed and been drawn to the universal elements of the Hero’s Journey   Each culture, throughout history, found this universal tool, and used it as a basis for creating and following one’s personal journey. The Hero’s Journey represents the fundamental stages found in rites of passage, and is probably most famous for providing a path through and beyond adolescence.

    Steeped in history and mythology, the Hero’s Journey reflects a universal and time honored approach to dealing with the crisis of adolescence.  The Hero’s Journey creates an emotional map for adolescent “travelers” and their adult “guides.”  The Hero’s Journey, along with an understanding of hero archetypes, helps create a mythologically flavored, visually graphic way to help youth see where they’ve been, where they’re at, and where they need to go, aiding staff or parents in creating specific goals and tasks.  This model is ideal for those working directly with youth, as well as those involved in staff development and training. 

Stages of the Journey

   Conventional Slumber:  To recognize and go beyond the conventional.  To 
wake up from traditional, or conventional slumber to more currently needed thinking.              
Call to Adventure:  An existential confrontation, to either choose to go 
toward change, uncertainty and fear, or retreat to the familiar.  To accept the challenge of everyday life.  There may be Thresholds of Difficulty to face or be tested by.
The Hero's Journey Model
 Discipline and Training:  Accepting teachers of various kinds.  The training is emotional, physical, spiritual, mental, and social.
   Culmination of the Quest:  Not necessarily a completion, but it represents a breakthrough, and includes insight & understanding.
   Return and Contribution:  The seeker becomes the knower; the student becomes the teacher.  A return to community, the “I” becomes the “we.”  The return shifts the individual from taking to contributing, and there is a loss of egocentricity.  It is the completion of the cycle, where the next cycle takes off from.  The Threshold of Difficulty may be faced again, testing faith in new beliefs or skills.

 

Hero's Journey Workshop Components

Discussion Pieces

Experiential Pieces

• The History of Adolescence
• Cross Cultural Approaches to  Adolescence
• Loss of Initiation and Rites of Passage
• The Hero’s Journey Model
          -Tracking individuals
          -Program dynamics
• Ceremony and Ritual
• Contemporary Rites of Passage
• Transpersonal Approaches to working  with At-Risk & High-Risk Youth

• The Journey® five-part guided imagery
with artwork process
• Cultural Riddles
• Mythological stories
• Experiential Exercises:
          -Images of Death
          -Magic Box
          -Essences, and more...
• Potlatch Giveaway Ceremony
• Emotional Graffiti
• Guided Visualizations for teens

Additional components that may be substituted or incorporated into the workshop:
• Drum playing and/or drum making
• Mask making and process exercises

     

    This will be an interactive and experiential workshop.  Participants will engage in a number of exercises designed to help them experience and notice how the Hero’s Journey model can be overlaid onto an individual youth, or a youth program.  Woven into the fabric of this weekend will be The Journey, created by David Oldfield.    The Journey is a five-part, mythologically flavored guided imagery for adolescents that promotes internal problem solving and developmental shifts.  In essence, it helps to create an inner rite of passage.  The Journey will be supported by creative expression and artwork, cultural riddles and stories, and other exercises participants can experience in person as well as take home with them.

The Hero’s Journey is a valuable tool for biological or foster parents, kinship providers, residential staff, and       anyone else working or living with at-risk or high-risk youth.  An individual child may be “tracked” via his or her progress along the model.  This helps clarify where particular youth are stuck in their attempts to change and grow. Similarly, the Hero’s Journey model may be overlaid on an existing program, showing strengths and weaknesses within the program that can be focused on.  This model helps create a strong foundation for adding elements of ceremony and ritual into a program.  Finally, the Hero’s Journey stands on its own as a working treatment model, and a rich, elaborate treatment program can evolve from it.

For a deeper look at the Hero's Journey stages and model, please Click Here.

 

For more information, contact Bret.

All material Copyright by Bret Stephenson 2002
unless noted otherwise.

Last Updated November 24, 2002