An overview
The Chaptering course is a single, continuous formation in the practice. It is undertaken one-to-one, over roughly three months, across twelve sessions that form three complete chapters. You are moved through the work as a participant — your own inner child leads three chapters of her own — and the theory and interpretation are taught alongside, so that you come to understand the practice from the inside as you experience it. The course concludes with a certification of demonstrated practice.
This dual character is deliberate. Chaptering is learned most truly by being lived. A practitioner who has been accompanied through their own chapters carries first-hand knowledge of what receptive, non-directive witnessing actually is and what it makes possible. That experiential knowledge is the foundation everything else rests on.
The shape of the three months
The first three chapters of a person's Chaptering work are each offered across four sessions, giving the inner child the additional space she often draws on as the practice finds its footing. Three chapters across four sessions each is the twelve sessions of the course.
Each chapter follows its own arc. The first session establishes the landscape and the chapter's orientation — the inner child opens her world and shows the direction she will take. The middle sessions move into the central territory, where the encounters concentrate and the chapter's essential meaning begins to show itself. The closing session brings the chapter to its natural completion, the inner child returning, in her own way, to where she began with a quality of having arrived somewhere.
The space between sessions is as much a part of the work as the sessions themselves. Integration happens there — quietly, in dreams, in shifts of perception, in the renewed quality of the relationship with the inner child — while she prepares what comes next.
What is taught
The theory and interpretation are introduced as the work calls for them: the inner child and the imaginal; why story is the form the psyche reaches for; the chapter as a unit, and the logic of its three-session arc; the consciousness structures that underlie the developmental map; the recurring symbolic elements and how to read them; and, above all, the discipline of the practitioner — the witness, silence as the primary instrument, and the trust in the inner child's intelligence that makes the deep work possible.
The aim throughout is inner literacy: the developing ability to read your own inner life, to recognise the symbolic logic of the sessions, and to hold the work independently. This reflects the Inner Council's wider philosophy of open source therapy, in which the practitioner's role is to transfer capacity and, from the outset, to make themselves unnecessary.
What is included
Twelve one-to-one sessions
Three complete chapters across approximately three months, each chapter unfolding across four sessions at the pace the inner child sets.
Theory and interpretation
The practice taught alongside the work as it unfolds — so that understanding develops through experience rather than in advance of it.
The book
A hard copy of Chaptering: Healing the Past Through Imaginal Storywork, included with the course.
Certification
A certification of demonstrated practice within the Inner Council framework on completion of the course.
Readiness
Chaptering is a continuation of an established relationship with the inner child, and its depth depends on the ground that has been prepared. The work asks for the capacity to enter and remain in an imaginal state while staying connected to the present moment. Where that ground is still forming, there are gentler preparations that come first, and a conversation is the place to find out what serves you best. Readiness is assessed phenomenologically, observed in the work itself as it unfolds.
Certification
The course concludes with a certification of demonstrated practice within the Inner Council framework. It attests that you have undertaken the work in full and demonstrated the capacity to hold it for another. It marks a beginning: practitioners continue to develop through supervision, peer reflection, and their own ongoing inner child work, and the framework itself stays alive through the honest contribution of those who carry it forward.
How to begin
The course begins with a conversation — to ask your questions, to sense whether the time is right, and to look together at where you stand in relation to the work.