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.
