How the course is structured
The Chaptering course is delivered one-to-one in twelve sessions of ninety minutes each, grouped into three chapters of four sessions. The structure holds two strands together throughout. In each chapter, your own inner child leads a chapter of her own work, so that you come to know the practice from the inside. Alongside it, you study the part of the book that gives that experience its language, so that theory and lived work illuminate each other as you go. The reading follows the book in sequence, and each chapter of the course takes up the next part of the text.
Chapter One · Sessions 1–4
The first chapter establishes the ground the whole practice rests on. As your own first chapter opens, you study Part I of the book — the foundations:
- What Is the Inner Child?
- What Is the Imaginal?
- The Landscape of Inner Child Work
- The Phenomenological Stance
Chapter Two · Sessions 5–8
The second chapter moves into the theory, and the frameworks that make the inner child's material legible. As your second chapter develops, you study Part II — the theory of Chaptering:
- Introduction: The Framework That Holds the Practice
- Gebserian Consciousness Structures and Their Relevance
- Cosmological and Mythic Parallels
- Archetypal Logic
- The Chapter as Unit
- The Role of the Practitioner
Chapter Three · Sessions 9–12
The third chapter turns to the practice itself, in full operational detail. As your third chapter completes the arc, you study Part III — the practice of Chaptering:
- Introduction: From Theory to Practice
- Conditions and Readiness
- Assessing Readiness Through Meditation
- Session Pacing and Facilitation Guidance
- Awareness-Enhancing Interventions
- Working with What Arises
- Reading the First Chapter
After the twelve sessions
With the sessions complete and the practice held from the inside, attention turns to Part IV — the casebook, where the theory becomes visible in lived work. You study the cases, read whole and in sequence, guided by the casebook's own introduction on how to read them.
The casebook carries a practical exercise that develops the interpretive eye directly. You are given a set of chapters to study and to summarise, drawing each chapter's movement together in your own words. Often these are another practitioner's chapter records, which you read and cross-check, learning to recognise the patterns of the work in chapters drawn from another's practice. Reading and summarising the chapters of others is the most direct way to develop fluency in the inner child's symbolic language.
Concluding review and assessment
A follow-up session draws the whole practice together and reviews your understanding of it. A short examination accompanies it, supporting your readiness to offer Chaptering to your own participants. The assessment is held in the phenomenological spirit of the work: it confirms a grounded, demonstrated grasp of the practice and the discernment to carry it responsibly.
Resources that accompany the course
Reference material supports the work throughout and remains a resource in your practice afterward:
- Glossary of the practice's specific terms
- Extended Initiatory Sequences: A Note for the Advanced Practitioner
- References and Further Reading
- Additional handouts and glossaries provided alongside the sessions
The appendix, A First Chapter in Full, offers a complete worked example to study against your own developing reading.
What you receive on completion
Certification
Of demonstrated practice within the Inner Council framework.
The Chaptering workbook
Chaptering: Healing the Past Through Imaginal Storywork is provided in parts across the course, each part read alongside the chapter it accompanies. A hard copy of the complete book is included on completion.
Begin
If you would like to talk through the curriculum, or where you stand in relation to the work, the next step is a conversation.