Metaphor, Story, and Meaning-Making in Clinical Practice Using MI Spirit to Explore How Clients Make Meaning
Friday, December 4, 2026
9:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. MT | 8:00–11:15 a.m. PT | 10:00 a.m.–1:15 p.m. CT | 11:00 a.m.–2:15 p.m. ET
3 Cultural CE Hours
Approved through the New Mexico Counseling & Therapy Practice Board and New Mexico Social Work Board.
Clients, especially those entering the work of change, often speak in images, stories, comparisons, family sayings, dichos, cultural references, symbols, and metaphors. They may describe feeling caught between two worlds, carrying the family on their shoulders, or losing a part of themselves through migration, language loss, or changing family roles. These expressions can offer a window into how culture, relationships, identity, migration, and lived experience shape what a person fears, values, and understands change to mean.
This interactive training explores how helping professionals can use the spirit and skills of Motivational Interviewing to listen for and work with the metaphors, stories, and meanings clients naturally bring into conversations about change.
Using MI Spirit — partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment — as a guiding stance, participants will explore metaphor stewardship: noticing, honoring, and deepening client-generated metaphors while preserving client autonomy and authorship. Through reflective listening and evocative questions, participants will practice following the meaning already present in a client’s language rather than assuming or imposing interpretation.
Particular attention will be given to how culture, language, family, community, identity, spirituality, and lived experience shape metaphor, story, values, and meaning-making. Participants will explore culturally and intergenerationally influenced narratives about responsibility, belonging, gender, sacrifice, identity, safety, and possibility, while considering how clinicians’ own cultural assumptions can shape what they hear and interpret.
The training will also use the archetypal Hero’s Journey as a framework for exploring meaning, identity, struggle, transition, and transformation, while examining the cultural assumptions that may be embedded within familiar narrative frameworks.
Through real-life clinical vignettes, storytelling, experiential exercises, guided reflection, and practice, participants will develop practical ways to use MI-consistent reflections and evocative questions to explore metaphor, culture, values, ambivalence, and meaning while protecting the client’s authorship of their own story.
Sliding-scale registration is available if cost is a barrier.
