Karen Young

Karen is a faculty member with Brief Therapy Training Centres International (a division of the Hincks-Dellcrest Institute), teaching in the Institute’s Narrative Therapy Training Program and in the year-long clinical extern program in Brief and Narrative Therapy. She is the Manager of Clinical Services at Reach Out Centre for Kids in Burlington where she provides narrative supervision to staff and single session therapy services at the walk-in therapy clinic. She is a therapist with 25 years of experience working with children and families and has situated her therapeutic conversations within narrative practices for 20 years. Karen has provided narrative training and consultation to many agencies across southern Ontario and assisted several to plan and initiate their own walk-in clinics. Karen has published articles titled “Co-composing an Evidence Base: The Narrative Therapy Re-visiting Project” in the Journal of Systemic Therapies, “When All the Time You Have Is Now” in the book Catching the Winds of Change: A Collection of brief and narrative papers and conference proceedings, and a paper called, “When all the time you have is now: narrative practice at walk-in clinic”, on the Brief Therapy Network website. Her most recent publications appear in the Journal of Systemic Therapies, as papers titled “From Waiting Lists to Walk-in: Stories from a Walk-in Therapy Clinic” and “Narrative Practice at a Walk-in Clinic: Developing Children’s Worry Wisdom”. Karen has a great deal of passion and excitement for narrative ideas and practices and is regarded as a trainer who conveys these ways of thinking and being in very clear and useable ways. She has developed her own versions of narrative therapy guidelines and diagrams of conversational practices that have the effect of crystallizing theories/ideas/practices in ways that create “aha” moments for participants in her workshops.