Friday Afternoon Videos

This video talks about a co-research project where Amanda invited women to reflect on what they perceive to be some of the causes of perinatal depression. Interesting insights were shared.

This video describes a series of narrative responses to the hopelessness, despair, and fear felt by some community members in late 2018. These narrative responses included collective document creation, discussion groups, letter-writing campaigns, and a focus on invitations to solidarity and to collective action.

This video explores the effects that structuralist thought has had on Western psychology, it's dominance in cultural ideas about mental health and the different historical events that have contributed to this. It's essentially a deconstruction of some of the ideas; a deconstruction that shows the foundations to be invented, not discovered, and exposes the limitations to our thinking when we accord these ideas truth status.

Emerging stories of experiencing childhood sexual abuse within the family tell of silences, hazy memories, and confusion. When silence is woven into religious and family culture, the individual’s journey of healing can linger in despair and suffering. This project is about belief in Narrative Practices, about belief in creative thinking which can enable unique cultural connections with those we work with, and about a belief that families have the ability to heal from sexual abuse that has occurred in the family.

This Friday afternoon video is a critique of the historical and modern day mental health systems, arguing that these systems are constructed to internalise sociohistorical problems via individualist methodologies that can be degrading of people’s lives.

In this Friday Afternoon Video, narrative therapist Natalie Smee demonstrates her work with four women using narrative therapy principles and practices to respond to women who are impacted by domestic violence. The video describes the interview process and explores the impact and ‘acts of resistance’ the women described throughout the sharing of their stories. The use of externalising metaphors and stories introduce a way of viewing domestic violence and other difficulties in their lives, in a hope to decrease the influence of domestic violence in the women’s lives and to increase their personal agency in dealing with it. The video draws on the migration of identity, collaborative documents and insider knowledge to build a witnessing resource for abused women. It invites the audience on a journey with the women through the viewing of an interview which combines elements of all four women’s responses. Although each woman’s experiences and journey had been torrid and unique, they were committed to the notion of sharing stories of migration to be collated into a collaborative resource for the witnessing purposes of other women who are considering their own migrations from violence.

Seeing through a narrative lens provides opportunities to refresh and reconsider approaches to the 'performance' of counselling, and the ways in which we might collude with or resist the influence of power and discourse in practice. In this video Carmen…

In this Friday Afternoon video, narrative therapist Grace Drahm will focus on the different maps of narrative practice that she has utilised to support Aboriginal young people and their families develop storybooks and therapeutic documents which centres and honours their Aboriginal worldview.

In this video Ryan Carpenter highlights some of the work he is doing working with folks who have experienced incongruences with their sense of self and lived experiences.

This Friday afternoon video by narrative therapist Anthony Newcastle describes the work around Didgeri which began as a regular opportunity for Aboriginal men and young men to learn to play the didgeridoo, yet grew into a local collective initiative to help give voice in support of men who had experienced sexual abuse in their youth.

Narrative Therapist Ian Percy offers ways of conceptualising mindfulness that includes, and diverges from, prevailing discourses and practices. In this video, Ian will offer a brief guided method that brings gentle attention to somatic experiences before proposing that mindfulness can assist in sustaining preferred skills and the consolidation of desired values and ethics. These expanded applications of mindfulness can be integrated with storied meaning-making.

In this Friday Afternoon video, Narrative Therapist Yael Gershoni will demonstrate a way of finding points of departure for re-authoring “alternative stories”. The concept is that the multi-generational family of origin can be a rich resource of “collective knowledge”.

This Friday Afternoon video presentation by Rachel Herzing outlines approaches to reducing violence that do not rely on remedies tied to policing and imprisonment.

In this Friday Afternoon video, narrative therapist Lauren Graham describes a narrative informed group she developed and conducted for parents whose children are in care, and the ripple effects of linking communities through the sharing of stories and documents initially generated through the group. 

'Beads of Life’ group by Narrative Therapist Sara Portnoy uses narrative therapy principles to help young people with a diagnosis of Cancer to tell the many stories in there lives in ways which make them stronger.

The “box of problems” represents a document of deconstructing conversations which the therapists and the people consulting them can collaboratively create by co-investigating the historical, social, political and economical contexts of problems.

Keri partnered with the Calgary Women's Health Collective (outside of public services) to offer a 'safer space' for women who struggle with mental health troubles to unpack oppression in their lives and explore/enact preferred identity claims. Keri is joined by Sanni-Ilona Paljakka, Loree Stout and Frank McGrath in mentorship and solidarity. But it is the ideas and generosity of the Women's Collective participants that Keri wishes to uphold and honour in this presentation.

‘My Happy Ending’ group work uses narrative therapy principles and practices to respond to children who have experienced violence in their families. The video describes the two-days-one-night group work process and offers reflections on working with children in Singapore using narrative ideas.

This Friday Afternoon video demonstrates the integration of Aboriginal Art with Narrative Practices to create culturally appropriate counselling for Aboriginal practitioners when working with Aboriginal children and young people. Narrative Therapist Vanessa Davis also offers a step-by-step explanation of how she has used 'My Meeting Place' in a one-on-one counselling session, to create and guide Narrative conversations.

This Friday Afternoon Video by Narrative Therapist Linda Moxley-Haegart provides an overview of narrative practices used with children who are dying and their families in a hospital palliative care setting.

In this Friday Afternoon video, narrative therapist Siu-wai Lit presents the experience of using Narrative Therapy Group that gives voice to the neglected counter narratives of the unwed teenage women with pregnancy experience through the innovative practice for double-story development, in which the members not only experienced personal growth, but also realised that they have a choice – to be continuously dominated by the problem-saturated story or to take a step to walk out!

In this Friday Afternoon Video, Kristina Lainson explains the concerns about eating and its effects on bodies are often articulated in terms of individualised pathologies. This video describes an interweaving of narrative practices which has proved helpful for a number of women experiencing such concerns. By inviting collective considerations to their individual experiences, and by recognising and naming their existing commitments and agentive responses to societal expectations, it became more possible to move away from ideas of ‘stuckness’ towards a sense of being influential both in their own life, and possibly in the lives of others similarly concerned.

In this Friday Afternoon video, narrative therapist Mohamed Fareez proposes the use of the 'Life Certificate' a narrative therapeutic document that allows us to document the preferred stories of our lost loved ones. Examples of how the 'Life Certificate' is used in practice will be discussed, along with narrative inquiries to facilitate the renegotiation of our relationships.

In this Friday Afternoon Video, narrative therapist Jennifer Swan explores the work done with the 'Squid Group' and the use of 'Chosen Family Trees', which was a practice innovation to find a way to 'thicken up the roots' of the Tree of Life for people isolated from lineages of support due to migration, violence and mental health issues. 

In this Friday Afternoon video, Yuk King Lau brings together narrative therapy and systemic family therapy in her practice with students encountering difficulties in school attendance.

In this Friday Afternoon video, Ryan introduces the concept of “Troublemakers” and how they are named and externalised in men’s domestic violence groups through the use of cards.

In this Friday Afternoon video, Julie introduces cultural studies methodologies as conceptual and conversational resources that help us have meaningful and productive conversations about peoples' relationships with the commodities and practices of popular and media culture. The video provides a brief overview of cultural studies, questions for reflections, sample questions from the three domains of inquiry (political economy, textual analysis, and audience reception), and suggestions for further reading.

In this Friday Afternoon Video, Caca Wong presents an exploration on using art in narrative practice for children and youth to express their experience as well as acknowledging their skills and knowledge on facing ‘Anxiety’.  Through the exercises of Art, they have chance to externalize and re-authoring their anxiety stories with hopes and dreams.

In this Friday Afternoon presentation, Chad shares some stories about his use of ceremony and ritual - what he calls Liturgical Practice - in therapy and introduces some of the thinkers and ideas that have informed this work.

In this Friday Afternoon Video, narrative therapist Carry Gorney discusses 'Seeing is Believing'. 'Seeing is Believing' is an exciting new approach to working with the mother-infant relationship that is based on a preventive intervention for new parents STEEP (Steps Toward Effective, Enjoyable Parenting) which was originally evaluated at the University of Minnesota.

This video explores stories of resistance that are embedded in the negative disempowering stories that are often told by those under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

This Friday Afternoon video presentation outlines the process and experiences that were co created in Melbourne in 2015 as narrative therapist Cyndi Darnell and a group of individuals met weekly for 15 weeks to apply the principles of group Narrative therapy within a sex and pleasure context.

In this Friday Afternoon video Marc talks about a Collective Narrative Practice project which involves exploring the Bicycle as its central metaphor. He will provide an overview of this collective practice methodology and share specific examples of how he has explored this metaphor with the use of ‘place-based’ narrative questioning practices within his own context.

This video explores the use of narrative documentation in work with people from refugee backgrounds, specifically in contexts of responding to trauma. Through the lens of narrative  documentation, a number of narrative principles and practices are explored, including eliciting responses to trauma,…

In this Friday Afternoon video, Chris Tse presents an experience of collective narrative practice with young people with Asperger who experienced bullying in their lives. This project intends to connect young people together collectively.

Apart from swimming with her Border Collie and being a taxi for young people who live with her, Carolyn's working life is primarily with children. Having been taught by Michael White in the early 90's, Carolyn now practices Narrative…

This video explores the intersection of Critical Disability Theory with the principles of Narrative Practice. Norman Kunc & Emma Van der Klift are narrative practitioners who have disabilities; Norman has  cerebral palsy and Emma is Autistic.  In a conversation…

Yeemei Wong worked in Hong Kong as a school social worker where she met many young people and their families who lived in disadvantaged circumstances or in poverty. Yeemei then started studying Narrative Therapy in Australia and began to practice…

In this video Phillipa recounts fragments of a collective narrative film methodology and illustrates a process of using narrative practices and film in a community setting to discover, link, document, celebrate and inspire creative responses to violence. This project…

Jeff has been working with Narrative ideas for almost 30 years, the past ten spent enriching his work with ideas drawn from Interpersonal Neurobiology and Affective Neuroscience. Secretly, though, he has always harbored an interest in making movies, and…

Julie Tilsen is the author of the book 'Therapeutic conversations with queer youth: Transcending homonormativity and constructing preferred identities'. In the first part of this video, Julie discusses queer theory as a theoretical resource for therapeutic practice. Next, Julie…