Course Topics & Expertise
Evidence-based continuing education in expressive writing and narrative medicine for the clinical professionals, spiritual care providers, and interdisciplinary teams doing the hardest work in healthcare.
All courses are available for licensing, platform development, or organizational delivery. Descriptions below represent areas of deep subject-matter expertise; length, format, and clinical focus can be adapted for your platform and audience.
For Mental Health Practitioners
Using Expressive Writing as a Clinical Intervention: The Pennebaker Protocol for Therapists, Social Workers, and Grief Counselors
3 - 6 CE HOURS
Most clinicians have heard of expressive writing. Far fewer know how to actually assign it, structure it, and process what clients bring back. This course closes that gap. Participants learn the neurological mechanism behind the Pennebaker protocol — why putting emotional experience into language quiets amygdala threat-response and activates prefrontal regulation — and then work through a practical clinical framework for introducing, facilitating, and following up on writing assignments across a range of presenting issues. Includes sample prompts, contraindication guidance, and a session-by-session structure practitioners can use immediately.
Includes sample prompts, contraindication guidance, population-specific adaptations for grief, midlife transition, and identity change, and a session-by-session structure practitioners can use immediately. Appropriate for therapists, licensed clinical social workers, grief counselors, and other licensed mental health practitioners.
Writing Through Compassion Fatigue: Expressive Writing Protocols for Mental Health Practitioners
2 CE HOURS
This course is for the practitioner, not their clients. Compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and burnout among mental health professionals are not character flaws or signs of insufficient resilience — they are predictable outcomes of sustained empathic engagement without adequate processing tools. Drawing on the same evidence base used in clinical intervention, this course teaches practitioners a structured four-week expressive writing practice designed specifically for the emotional residue of clinical work. Participants leave with a protocol they can begin using the following week, not a framework they have to translate.
Writing Through Life Transitions: Expressive Writing Interventions for Clients in Grief, Midlife, and Identity Change
3 CE HOURS
Grief is not only about death. The losses that accompany midlife identity shift, relationship dissolution, career change, spiritual deconstruction, and the slow erosion of a version of yourself you no longer recognize are real, clinically significant, and chronically underserved by existing intervention frameworks. This course adapts the expressive writing protocol specifically for non-death losses and life transitions, with attention to the particular presentations of midlife women, caregivers, and anyone navigating a becoming they did not choose. Includes adapted prompts, population-specific considerations, and guidance for integrating writing assignments into an existing therapeutic relationship.
Narrative Medicine in Clinical Practice: Using Story and Writing to Support Trauma Recovery
6 CE HOURS
Rita Charon’s narrative medicine framework — grounded in close reading, reflective writing, and the practice of witness — offers clinicians something the trauma literature often lacks: a relational philosophy for sitting with what cannot be fixed. This extended course introduces the three movements of narrative medicine (attention, representation, affiliation) and integrates them with expressive writing protocols and current trauma neuroscience to build a comprehensive framework for trauma-informed clinical practice. Participants work through case examples, practice facilitation techniques, and leave with a portable set of tools applicable across trauma presentations and clinical settings. Appropriate for therapists, social workers, counselors, and other licensed mental health practitioners.
For Residents, Physicians & Oncology Teams
Narrative Medicine in Clinical Practice: What the Evidence Shows and How to Use It
2- 3 CE HOURS
Narrative medicine is moving from the fringes of medical education into oncology units, tumor boards, residency programs, and palliative care rounds — not because it is fashionable but because the evidence is accumulating. This course provides physicians, residents, and oncology clinicians with a clear, research-grounded introduction to narrative medicine practice: what it is, what the systematic review evidence shows about its effects on burnout, empathy, diagnostic accuracy, and patient outcomes, and how to integrate brief narrative practices — including the Parallel Chart — into existing clinical workflows without adding significant time burden.
Drawing on the 2024 Paul et al. systematic review and a 2025 primary care study documenting enhanced diagnostic accuracy, a 25% increase in treatment compliance, and a reduction in misdiagnosis rates of approximately 10%, this course is designed to be immediately applicable and institutionally scalable. No prior experience with narrative medicine required.
The Evidence for Narrative Medicine: What Oncology Clinicians Need to Know
2 CE HOURS
Narrative medicine is moving from the fringes of medical education into oncology units, tumor boards, and palliative care rounds — not because it is fashionable but because the evidence for it is accumulating. This course provides oncology clinicians with a clear, research-grounded introduction to narrative medicine practice: what it is, what the systematic review evidence shows about its effects on burnout, empathy, and secondary trauma, and how to integrate brief narrative practices into existing clinical workflows without adding significant time burden. Drawing on the 2024 Paul et al. systematic review of narrative medicine interventions for oncology clinicians, this course is designed to be immediately applicable and institutionally scalable.
Writing Through Grief: Tools for Bereavement Coordinators and Hospice Social Workers
3 CE HOURS
Bereavement coordinators and hospice social workers are among the most undertrained and under-resourced clinicians in the grief support ecosystem. They are expected to hold space for families in acute loss with limited time, limited supervision, and tools that often amount to a pamphlet and a phone number. This course gives them something better: a structured, evidence-based expressive writing curriculum they can facilitate with bereaved families, grief groups, and individual clients, along with the neuroscience and clinical rationale to explain why it works. Includes facilitated group writing models, prompt libraries organized by loss type and stage, and guidance for introducing writing to clients who have never considered themselves writers.
For Hospice, Palliative Care & Spiritual Care Providers
Narrative Witnessing: Story, Writing, and the Practice of Spiritual Care
3 CE HOURS
Chaplaincy is, at its core, a practice of witness — of receiving another person’s story with full attention and without the impulse to fix, reframe, or resolve it. This course draws on Rita Charon’s narrative medicine framework and the expressive writing research base to offer chaplains and spiritual care providers a set of practical tools for deepening that witness: close reading exercises, structured writing prompts for use with patients and families, and reflective writing practices for the chaplain’s own processing. The Association of Professional Chaplains requires 50 CE hours annually with broad latitude for content — this course is designed to meet that requirement while offering tools with immediate clinical application.
Expressive Writing and Narrative Medicine for End-of-Life Teams
2 - 3 CE HOURS
Hospice teams — nurses, social workers, chaplains, aides, bereavement coordinators, and spiritual care providers — carry a particular kind of emotional weight: proximity to death, repeated loss, the sustained labor of bearing witness to suffering without the ability to cure it. This course draws on the evidence base for expressive writing in palliative care settings, including the 2021 Cosentino et al. study demonstrating significant improvements in compassion satisfaction and decreases in burnout among palliative care professionals who completed a structured writing protocol.
Participants learn how to use expressive writing for their own processing, how to introduce legacy writing and narrative tools with patients and families, and how to hold writing that emerges from spiritual crisis or grief — including the clinical and ethical distinction between therapeutic writing and spiritual accompaniment. Includes facilitated group writing models, prompt libraries organized by loss type and stage, and guidance for introducing writing to patients and families who have never considered themselves writers.
For Caregivers & Patients Facing Illness or Loss
Writing Through It: Expressive Writing for People Living with Illness, Loss, and the Work of Caregiving
3 CE HOURS
This course is for the people on the other side of the clinical encounter — and for those who love them. Caregiving is its own sustained labor, and illness rewrites the story of a life in ways that leave both patients and those who love them without adequate language or tools for what they’re carrying.
Drawing on Pennebaker’s expressive writing protocol and narrative medicine’s practice of witness, this course offers a structured framework for writing through the particular losses of illness: the loss of a former self, the grief of anticipatory loss, the isolation of carrying something others cannot see. Participants leave with a four-week writing practice they can begin immediately, adapted prompts for a range of illness experiences and caregiving contexts, and guidance for facilitating writing in group settings such as caregiver support groups, cancer centers, and bereavement programs.
Appropriate for patient advocates, caregiver support group facilitators, oncology social workers, and CE platforms serving patients and families directly. Can be adapted for non-CE delivery in retreat, community, or healthcare settings.
Sustaining the Witness: Resilience and Narrative Practice for Those Working at the Edge of Environmental Loss
2 CE HOURS
This course is for the environmental professional who is not in crisis but is carrying more than they have language for — the field biologist documenting species decline, the conservation director watching funding dry up alongside the aquifer, the climate scientist whose data tells a story she cannot stop thinking about. Drawing on narrative medicine’s practice of attention and witness alongside expressive writing’s evidence base for chronic stress and burnout, this course offers a sustainable daily practice and a theoretical framework for understanding what it means to be a witness to loss over the long arc of a career.
Interested in Licensing or Platform Development?
I develop full courses — script, slides, quiz questions, reference list — for CE platforms seeking evidence-based content on therapeutic writing and narrative medicine. My academic appointment as Full Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at Appalachian State University, combined with an active IRB research program and clinical training partnership with MAHEC, positions me to offer something the CE market currently lacks: a course creator who bridges writing studies scholarship, clinical neuroscience, and practitioner-facing pedagogy.
Content development from $150/hr · Flat-fee packages available · Royalty and licensing arrangements negotiable
For Retreat, Contemplative & Spiritual Education Settings
Writing as Spiritual Practice: Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing for Contemplative Communities
3 HOURS
Writing has always lived at the heart of contemplative practice — as confession, as examen, as the slow work of making meaning from what the silence reveals. This workshop-format course brings the research on expressive writing and narrative medicine into conversation with that tradition, offering participants both a theoretical grounding in why writing heals and a set of practical tools for integrating writing into contemplative community life. Designed for retreat centers, spiritual direction programs, and adult education settings at the intersection of faith, healing, and the interior life. No writing experience required — or, for that matter, any particular spiritual tradition.
The Page as Witness: Story, Silence, and the Interior Life
HALF OR FULL DAY
A full or half-day experiential workshop designed for retreat settings. Participants move through a structured sequence of close reading, reflective writing, and witnessed sharing — the three movements of narrative medicine practice — with attention to the particular gifts and resistances that arise when people who are not used to writing about themselves are invited to try. This workshop is suited for groups navigating grief, transition, spiritual questioning, or simply the accumulated weight of lives lived at high speed without adequate space for reflection. It requires no writing ability, no literary ambition, and no prior experience with therapeutic writing of any kind.
