This issue is a compelling offering of peer-reviewed articles, audio recordings, videos, reviews and multimedia. There is a diversity of themes that sparkle with everyday acts of resistance, a call for epistemic justice and communities as sites of healing.For…
Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear Reader This issue is a compelling offering of peer-reviewed articles, audio recordings, videos, reviews and multimedia from narrative practitioners in Nepal, Armenia, Hong Kong, China, Chile, Australia, the UK and…
To emigrate is a tough decision. Many people who move to a new country face what can feel like overwhelming challenges. We can find it hard to recognise the skills and knowledge we hold.
In this audio recording of a favourite paper from the journal’s archives, a team from Dulwich Centre, coordinated by Leonie Simmons, offers answers to frequently asked questions about poststructuralism and therapy. Narrative therapy is influenced by poststructuralist ideas and yet, for many of us, it can be quite a challenge to understand what poststructuralism is and what it might mean for our practice as therapists. This brief piece sets out structuralist and poststructuralist ways of seeing the world and how they have shaped therapeutic approaches.
The Story Kitchen in Nepal is applying the tools of collective narrative practice to ensure that women who have been subjected to sexual violence during armed conflict are not left with a single story.
Having faced wars, genocide, dispossession and natural disaster, the Armenian people have a long history of finding ways to survive, drawing on history and spiritual values.
Metaphors invite imagination and suggest possibilities for developing multiple stories in narrative practice. Using familiar elements of the local culture as metaphors can contribute to resonant conversations. In this video, Wenjia describes how she has explored the use of traditional Chinese mythical animals as metaphors in narrative practice within the context of Chinese culture. Dominant discourses in psychology often emphasise the individual and their boundaries, which may bring about a sense of alienation for people in distress.
Trans bodies, trans selves: A resource by and for transgender communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (2nd edition), Reviewed by Tiffany Sostar
Manja Visschedijk reviews Catrina Brown’s (2024) edited collection Reframing trauma through social justice: Resisting the politics of mainstream trauma discourse.
Tiffany Sostar is a narrative therapist and community worker living on Treaty 7 land (in Calgary, Alberta, Canada), and is part of the BPD Superpowers group. Here, Tiffany offers a response to Alicia Bruzek’s paper “Re-authoring identity conclusions in borderline personality disorder”, which is published in this issue of the journal.
This paper describes the use of narrative therapy with people who had been given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. In a context of significant stigma against persons with this diagnosis, perpetuated both within and beyond mental health systems, this paper shows how concepts of identity developed in narrative therapy were used to resist totalising identity conclusions and uncover possibilities for hope.
Jacob Tumanako works with young people, families and communities intersecting with the criminal justice system. He is also a Māori man with tattoos or tā moko. Here, Jacob offers a response to Paul Graham’s paper “Body as A Picture Book: A tool for narrative conversations inspired by tattoos”, which is published in this issue of the journal.
This article introduces a tool for narrative therapy conversations with young people using tattoos as a point of entry. It is inspired by trauma-informed tattooing and discusses how elements of narrative practice can be adjusted to use in conversations about tattoos, whether real or imagined. Narrative practices of externalising, re-authoring, re-membering, the absent but implicit and outsider witnessing are demonstrated. By using a template that invites the person to imagine tattoos or body paint, conversations about tattoos are made available to people who have not been tattooed themselves, including young people.
This paper tells the history of The Read Everything Michael White Published Project, in which I read all the works available to me that were published by Michael White, the co-originator of narrative therapy. I describe the reading project’s conception, its effects on my work, some practices that Michael White believed were useful for therapists, tips for others considering a reading project of their own, and new initiatives this project was generative of in my work.
Community responses to those experiencing mental health crisis and distress are important. However, in Australia and many other colonised countries, responses to distress have become highly medicalised, punitive, individual and privatised. Exploring friendship responses to mental health crisis may increase the possibilities for building on community connectedness and local support networks. The work described in this paper aimed to make visible the acts of care, solidarity, friendship and mutuality that friends and members of the community have taken up in response to someone close to them experiencing distress. The work was guided by intentional peer support and narrative practices including re-authoring, collective documentation and outsider witnessing.
When Grief Arrives is a narrative therapy and oral history project aimed at re-storying narratives of grief and loss within queer, trans and Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities. The project documents multi-storied accounts of grief that resist the individualisation and isolation of grieving that is common under settler colonialism and capitalism. By honouring overlooked landscapes of experience, the project seeks to generate solidarity and interconnection through shared knowledges. This article discusses the project’s methodology, ethical considerations, and the transformative potential of collective storytelling in fostering solidarity and healing within marginalised communities.
The label of delusion can be so powerful that people so labelled are no longer believed or supported in preferred ways by those around them. This leads to a lack of meaningful and non-pathologising support for their significant, and at times unusual, beliefs. This phenomenon constitutes a form of epistemic injustice. To address this issue, this paper outlines specific approaches practitioners can adopt to better respond to such beliefs, illustrating these strategies with real-world examples from practice. By doing so, it aims to foster a form of epistemic justice that respects the knowledge and experience of people labelled as delusional and supports them to understand and lessen the impact of these often-distressing experiences. This paper is informed by research undertaken with people who had been labelled by psychiatry as “delusional”.
Este artículo ilustra un proceso de trabajo metafórico y participativo en el cual un grupo de activistas feministas, lesbo-feministas y disidentes nos reunimos para responder terapéuticamente a los efectos del lesbo-odio. El contexto terapéutico se creó progresivamente, junto al despliegue de un conjunto de metáforas relacionadas con el arte textil, inspiradas en las conversaciones de reautoría propuestas por Michael White.
This article describes a participatory process in which a group of feminist, lesbian feminist and dissident activists came together to respond therapeutically to the impacts of anti-lesbian hatred. The therapeutic context was created gradually, together with the deployment of a set of metaphors related to textile art, inspired by the re-authoring conversations proposed by Michael White.
We're excited to announce a new free online course which explores the work of the Just Therapy Team in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa, New Zealand This free online course conveys the stories, principles and practices of the Just Therapy Team…
This web resource features the sparkling work of African narrative practitioners whose work with children, adults, families and communities provides moving and skilful ways of assisting those who are suffering. There are so many African contributions to the field of narrative therapy and community work and many of these are conveyed here. Also included are videos from the 13th International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference that took place in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2022. For those of you who were unable to attend this event in person, there’s now the opportunity to get a sense of this vibrant event. You will find here significant stories of practice with children, young people, adults and communities from Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Zanzibar/Tanzania as well as from Africans in the diaspora.
In narrative approaches, celebrations and ceremonies are important! And we are coming to the end of this resource … so it seems appropriate for us to celebrate! This resource represents so much work by so many people over many…
This chapter includes three presentations in relation to spirituality and narrative practice. There are so many different spiritualities and religions across the African continent. We hope that in time that many further presentations can be included here from diverse…
This influential paper, De-colonizing our lives: Divining a post-colonial therapy, is by Makungu Akinyela. Within it he describes his hopes for an African centred therapy:It is my hope that African centred therapy could provide African individuals and families a space to…
This chapter focuses on creative work with young people from Zanzibar, Rwanda, USA and South Africa. Resisting social injustices We start in Zanzibar where Gharib Abdalla has used re-authoring practices, the Team of Life, documentation and outsider witnessing in…
This chapter includes uplifting stories of narrative community work projects from Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. It begins with the work of Caleb Wakhungu and the Mt Elgon Self-Help Community Project which has inspired practitioners in many different contexts…
One of the key principles of narrative practice is that ‘the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem, and the solution is not only personal’. In this chapter, practitioners from Rwanda, Ethiopia and South Africa share…
One of the first engagements with narrative therapy practices on the African continent was by the CARE Counsellors of Malawi and Yvonne Sliep who developed a form of narrative theatre to enable people to talk with the problem of…
The Ibuka Counsellors of Rwanda were a young team of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi who responded as counsellors and assistant lawyers to other survivors throughout the country. This story of their work in this interview…
We begin by sharing examples of work in response to children. Why? For two reasons. Firstly, Africa is the continent with the youngest population worldwide. ‘As of 2023, around 40 percent of the population was aged 15 years and…
This web resource features the sparkling work of African narrative practitioners whose work with children, adults, families and communities provides moving and skilful ways of assisting those who are suffering. There are so many African contributions to the field…
The latest multimedia issue of International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work has just been released, and is available free to read, view, share and respond to.
G’day and welcome to this Friday afternoon video presentation from Dulwich Centre in which we invite you to join a project considering the challenges and possibilities in relation to narrative practices contributing to ‘social movement’. First shared in 2015, I’ve also included various links to texts and videos at the following link: https://dulwichcentre.com.au/can-narrative-practices-contribute-to-social-movement-an-invitation-to-join-a-project-from-david-denborough/
This video was the first Dulwich Centre online Friday Afternoon video in February 2015 and represented the launch of the Narrative Therapy (draft) Charter of Story-Telling Rights. This Charter is part of a broader project in relation to ‘narrative justice’: * When meeting with people whose problems are the result of human rights abuses and injustices, how can we ensure we do not separate healing from justice? This Charter proposes a framework for considering storytelling rights. We hope it will spark discussions about the rights of people who have experienced trauma/social suffering in relation to how their stories are told and received. We invite you to discuss this Charter with us, with friends, with colleagues, in your organisation and elsewhere. You may like to endorse this Charter or offer suggestions, changes, and or additions. For more information and further resources, visit: https://dulwichcentre.com.au/narrative-therapy-charter-of-story-telling-rights-by-david-denborough/
I can vividly recall making this video message to Chinese colleagues. It was at the very beginning of the pandemic, when only those in Wuhan were facing what was soon to become global. Please forgive the bad lighting (and bad hair). It was before we had all learnt about zoom and well before we had created a studio at Dulwich Centre. We didn’t know what was to come, but I wanted to send a message of friendship to Chinese colleagues, especially those in Wuhan. Knowing that volunteers in Wuhan were already responding to great hardship, I shared stories of narrative practice from Palestine, from Rwanda and from Malawi that I hoped may be resonant. As a postscript, many months later when Covid-19 was now ravaging other parts of the world, the Chinese colleagues I initially sent this message to then returned videos of support and connection.
I love teaching contexts with Brazilian colleagues – whether in person or online. In this session, organised by Lúcia Helena Assis and Recycling Minds I was posed the following questions: - All narrative practitioners usually honour the native peoples of the place where they live and their ancestors, how could we do that here in Brazil? - Lúcia Helena Assis told us that you wrote a whole book based on letters where you wanted to talk to your great-grandfather and that in a way you wanted to deal with issues that were difficult for you. Could you tell us a little about this? - I would like to know about educational projects with children and young people with reference to narrative practices. In the context of mental health, which projects have been implemented? - Can you please talk a little more about Double Listening, the Absent but Implicit and the practice of External Witnesses in the work you developed with detainees? And, also, about the practice of producing collective documents through music. - Lúcia Helena Assis told us that you know counsellors from three different locations in Kurdistan. Iraq and that these counsellors work with Yazidi women who were captured by ISIS. Could you tell us more about this? - What was your most memorable moment with narrative therapy? - How can narrative practices respond to the conflicts of such a polarised world and to the problems arising from macro socio-economic and cultural contexts? I did my best to respond and share relevant stories.
The workers at the Jiyan Foundation in Kurdistan, Iraq, are responding to Yazidi women who were formally captured by ISIS. I had the pleasure of meeting with Jiyan Foundation workers in Kurdistan back over 10 years ago. During the pandemic they requested an online training, translated simultaneously into both Kurdish and Arabic (hence why I am speaking slowly and deliberately). This clip was in the first session of six days of training in which I sought to convey the narrative metaphor and the concept of dominant and counter storylines of identity.
During the first workshop in Rwanda in 2007 with survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, one of the key moments was developing a collective document entitled ‘Living in the shadow of genocide: how we respond to hard times – Stories of sustenance from the workers of Ibuka’. In this video message to current East African students of narrative therapy, I seek to introduce ways of creating collective documents; share an English video version of that early document from Ibuka workers; and invite participants to create their own documents & songs.
Some of my most significant workshop experiences have taken place in Rwanda, in particular a workshop back in 2007 with counsellors and assistant lawyers from Ibuka, the national genocide survivors association. This workshop was the result of an invitation from Kaboyi Benoit and I was there with Cheryl White and Jill Freedman. Fast forward to the present and there is now a narrative therapy and community work course through the University of Rwanda. During the pandemic, I was asked to share some of the histories of connections between practitioners in Rwanda and Australia. This was the video I sent through to be shared in Kigali.
One of the key sparks for the development of collective narrative practice came from a challenge posed by Paulo Freire. In this presentation, I share this story and the key principles of collective narrative practice. I then share the story of work in which a number of these principles first became clear to me. This was with a man, called Peter, who wished to testify from prison about the abuse he had experienced in children’s homes.
In response to a request from Chinese colleagues, in this video I tell the story of how I first learnt about narrative therapy ideas while working at Long Bay Prison in Sydney through being handed an issue of the Dulwich Centre Newsletter on Men’s Ways of Being (edited by Cheryl White and Maggie Carey). In seeking ways to respond to the social issue of men’s violence, I then travelled to Adelaide to study an intensive with Michael White and being introduced to two community projects being undertaken by Dulwich Centre at the time – a gathering for Aboriginal families who had lost a loved to a death in custody, and an alternative community mental health project. Upon returning to Sydney, in schools and in the prison, the first principles of collective narrative practice started to take shape.
How can we use collective narrative practice to respond to current social injustices and social issues? This presentation shares one story of practice in relation to responding to Islamophobia and hostility directed at Muslims in Australia.
The first checklist social and psychological resistance was developed in collaboration with Mohammed Safa in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2006. In this presentation, I share that story and describe how such checklists can be created to honour local resistances and what is precious to people even in the most devastating of times. It is a process and practice that aims to assist practitioners make visible storylines of resistance.
This detailed video conveys all the key parts of the Team of Life methodology and shares examples and songs along the way.
In this keynote to the Fifth International Conference of Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy, I introduced metaphoric narrative practices such as the Team of Life, Tree of Life, Kite of Life, Umbrella of Life and Recipe of Life. These methodologies combine aspects of local folk culture with narrative practice and seek to enable people to make contributions to others and towards addressing whatever broader social issues they are grappling with. I also showed a short video related to the Team of Life approach: “Trying not to fight with friends: Tips from the Stay Strong Football Club”. The keynote ended with a song, trying to demonstrate the principle of transforming anguish to art and social contribution. This song was crafted from the words of ‘Jess’ and in collaboration with feminist narrative therapist Erin Costello.
In this keynote for the Australian Family Therapy Conference, I was joined by two Afghani colleagues, Fariba Ahmadi and Dr Abdul Ghaffar Stanikzai to share four stories of narrative practice: o Family therapy through the Team of Life approach o Consulting Afghan children through a time of crisis (the fall of Kabul to the Taliban) o ‘Surviving the ocean of depression’ audio resources And a project that involved the use of collective narrative practice with Syrian young people in Adelaide who created a video to welcome future new arrivals.
For a keynote address to a narrative therapy conference in Cologne, Germany, I tried to articulate 10 (or 11) key principles of practice through sharing three songs and the stories of how these were created. These include the first song I wrote in a work context using narrative practice. It’s called ‘Pride’ and the lyrics were spoken to me from an HIV positive man, Wayne, who I worked with in Long Bay Prison. The second song is the ‘theme’ song of the Power to Our Journeys Group … a group of folks who heard voices facilitated by Michael White. The final song is a personal one seeking to articulate complex, nuanced laments and the unanswerable questions that can accompany grief.
The organisers of the International Congress of the ÖAS in Salzburg/Austria (June 9th 2023) were seeking to bring narrative therapy and philosophy into dialogue. In my keynote, I discussed four political philosophies which offer continual challenges to me – Indigenous philosophical challenges; feminist philosophies; Foucauldian critique; and the challenges of Paulo Freire – and linked these to practice stories.
Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear ReaderIn the last six months, I have at times felt crushing despair at the human rights violations across the world. As narrative practitioners, how can we respond to the injustice…
This audio practice note and the collective document it describes are part of “narrative projects in support of trans lives”, and are the first to be published in this collection of work. Not to fix anything, but just to offer a millimetre of relief or breath or humour or companionship": A collective document about caring for trans community brings together many stories of care within and with trans community. Our hope is that this document will help connect readers to a sense of community and collective action, and will invite readers, regardless of gender identity, to join us in taking actions of care within a social context that is increasingly hostile to trans lives. These stories, reflection questions, and invitations describe and welcome a wide range of care, including small, personal, and beautifully imperfect actions taken by and alongside trans community.
Trauma represents a profound and emotionally intense experience within the human condition. Beyond its evident impacts on both the physiological and psychological dimensions of an individual, this complex phenomenon encapsulates moments of resistance and strength in the face of adversity. From a narrative standpoint, individuals invariably manifest unique responses to trauma, which necessitate a close and nuanced examination for recognition and comprehension. This article proposes a framework for the systematic collection and organisation of diverse responses to trauma through a checklist of innovative moments of social and psychological resistance, contributing to a greater comprehension of this intricate phenomenon.
In this audio translation of a paper from the journal’s archives, David Denborough interviews Ming Li, a narrative practitioner in Beijing, China, with an interest in the resonances he sees between some narrative ideas and practices, and those of Buddhism, Taoism and other aspects of Chinese culture, history and medicine. Ming draws on multiple domains of knowledge and experience to describe some of the congruencies and points of difference he has noticed, and to explain what draws him to using a narrative practice approach in his own context.
Ben Shannahan began meeting with Beth and her family soon after Beth’s older sister Amberly ended her own life. Their conversations lead to Beth writing a song in honour of Amberly. Here, Beth and Ben share the song along with the story of how it was written and eventually performed to family members and friends.
In this presentation to the International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference in Rwanda, Noor Kulow introduces a range of narrative practices that have been used with children in Somalia who have lost their biological parents early in life. Externalising conversations, the Team of Life approach and traditional children’s games are used to respond to stigma, reconnect children with their hopes and dreams, and respond to trauma and hardship. Movement-based activities like leapfrog and jumping, and traditional games like girir and jar, provide entry points to therapeutic conversations.
In this presentation, made at the launch of the Narrative Practice Research Network, Marnie Sather introduces some of the possibilities and complexities of feminist insider research. Drawing on her experience of completing doctoral research with women who had lost a male partner to suicide, Marnie sets out some of the options for positioning the researcher in insider research – from not disclosing insider status to placing it as the centre – and describes how she came to a position of careful utilisation of her own experience in the research process and in the writing of her thesis.
In this video, KJ introduces the accompanying collective document “How we deal with Autistic burnout: A living document created by Autistic adults for Autistic adults”. This document was created through a series of interviews with lived experience experts who generously shared their skills and hard-won knowledges. KJ describes the process of creating this document, and how they endeavoured to adapt and localise existing practices of collective documentation, for accessibility and cultural resonance with Autistic community values and ways of being.
Recovering assemblages: Unfolding sociomaterial relations of drug use and recovery by Aysel Sultan (2022), Palgrave Macmillan. Reviewed by Tom Strong
As artificial intelligence becomes pervasive, therapists might be left wondering about its implications for narrative practice. This paper explores an unexpected discovery about the power of artificial intelligence in re-imagining a story of injustice. Lucy (the therapist) and Miles (the client) used an AI image creator to assist in the externalisation of problems.
In this paper I explore the use of metaphors in the creation of externalised problem narratives for individuals and larger collectives, as well as in the creation of preferred alternative narratives. Through practice examples, I relate some of the ways in which I have been working with imagination and metaphor in my own context in Western Australia.
In this paper I explore Clifford Geertz’s distinction between experience-near and experience-distant language. In the process, I draw from mad studies and mental health service user epistemology, both written and generated through my work. I also draw on the work of the historian of emotion Tiffany Watt Smith.
