The Success of Failure and
the "Not Good Enough" Virus
With Sarah Beth Hughes, BSW, MSc
How failure stories shape our lives, our clinical work,
and how we can respond differently.
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Nearly everyone we work with, and many of us as therapists, has a relationship with a powerful story of “not being good enough.” These stories don’t just affect confidence or self-esteem; they shape how people see themselves, what they attempt, and how they interpret their struggles. They can also slip into how we understand ourselves as helpers.
This course invites a careful, compassionate, and practice-based exploration of these stories and offers concrete ways of responding to them in therapeutic work.
Course description and details
This course, developed by Sarah Beth Hughes from a workshop Stephen Gaddis delivered in 2021, is designed to help us examine and deconstruct relationships with stories that successfully get us to relate to ourselves as failures. The course exposes the tactics that failure stories use to sustain their power. Participants have a chance to connect with stories they prefer to have relationships with instead. Our hope is that through understanding how we can change our own relationships with failure stories, we all will develop new ideas for how we might help our clients with those stories as well.
While the course offers meaningful personal reflection, its focus is distinctly therapeutic. By understanding how failure stories operate — how they recruit evidence, shape identity conclusions, and maintain influence — participants develop new clinical ideas for supporting preferred stories, both for themselves and for the people they work with.
The inspiration for this course and Stephen Gaddis’s 2021 workshop, is Michael White’s article published in 2002, “Addressing Personal Failure.” Sarah Beth Hughes gently walks along with you through the self-paced course, offering video clips, written exercises, readings, and reflective opportunities designed to help grow the skills to support the development of preferred relationships with failure stories for ourselves and our clients.
With this course, you will be helped to:
• Deconstruct your relationship with Failure and document Unique Outcomes.
• Identify what is not okay with you about your relationship with Failure, and why.
• Develop a preferred story that you want to nourish and keep closer to you than Failure.
This program is grounded in a Narrative Worldview. Participants can expect the program to be informed by narrative practices, ideas, and ethics. It will be helpful to have had some introduction to narrative ways of thinking before taking this course, but not required.
Cost of the program: $125 for Regular Registration/$75 for Student/Senior. CE Certificates are $25. Certificates of Completion (no CEs) are free. Please see below for more information.
Time to complete the program: You can expect, depending on your own personal pacing, breaks, and time preferences, for the course to take approximately 6 hours to complete.
CE Information: If you will need a CE certificate, please order one in the registration form. CE Certificates are $25. Upon completion of all the modules, you will be directed to a link to complete the post-test. You will have 3 opportunities to answer 80% of the questions correctly. We very much want you to pass the post-test and hope this is reflected in the questions! Once 80% of the questions have been answered correctly, you will be directed to a link to the program evaluation. Upon completion of the evaluation, you will receive, via email, your CE Certificate or Certificate of Completion. 6 CEs for LMFTs, LMHCs, and LCSW/LICSW have been approved by NEAFAST, MAMHCA, NASW-MA respectively. Please note it is the participant's responsibility to check with your respective licensing board to determine if these approvals meet the requirements for licensure renewal.
We welcome you being in touch with Sarah Beth Hughes or Darcey Surette at narrativetherapyinitiative@gmail.com with any questions, comments, or problems that may occur.
Curriculum
Sarah Beth Hughes, BSW, MSc
Sarah Beth Hughes is a Couple and Family Therapist, supervisor, and educator based in British Columbia, Canada. Her work is grounded in narrative therapy and informed by over twenty years of clinical practice.
Her early work as the North American distributor for Dulwich Publications in the 1990s allowed her to train extensively with Michael White and laid the foundation for a career devoted to narrative practice. Sarah Beth now teaches, supervises, and designs learning experiences that combine clinical rigor with warmth, creativity, and relational depth.
She is currently writing a book on tender and creative approaches to narrative therapy, and her teaching is known for translating theory into practices therapists can meaningfully bring into their work.
Steve Gaddis, PhD, LMFT
Steve Gaddis was the founder and director of the Narrative Therapy Initiative (NTI). Steve studied, practiced, and taught narrative therapy from 1994 until his death from cancer in 2022. He earned his International Postgraduate Diploma in narrative therapy at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, Australia, where he studied with Michael White. Steve also spent a year teaching narrative therapy in the graduate school of counseling at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He published and presented on narrative therapy nationally and internationally. Steve had a full-time narrative therapy and supervision practice in Salem, Mass., and he taught narrative therapy at Boston College School of Social Work, Salem State University, William James College, and other academic institutions, as well as independently through NTI. Steve earned his doctorate in marriage and family therapy from Syracuse University. Steve always said that after his love for his wife and two children, his greatest love affair was with the Narrative Worldview.
About NTI
The Narrative Therapy Initiative (NTI) is a community-centered organization dedicated to advancing narrative therapeutic practice, education, and social change. NTI fosters inclusive spaces for clinicians, educators, and community members to explore narrative approaches that honor stories of resilience, challenge dominant cultural narratives, and promote well-being. Through workshops, training, research, and collective dialogue, NTI cultivates creative, culturally responsive practices that support individuals and communities in reclaiming agency and meaning in their lives. We invite you to visit our website to find out more about NTI and our offerings for training.