Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear ReaderThis edition is a mosaic of stories on love, loss and legacy.We live in times of growing uncertainty and hatred depending on where we are located in terms of geography,…
This is an audio recording of a paper that was originally published in Dulwich Centre Review, a precursor to this journal, in 1985. In this paper, childhood fears are considered within the interactional context of the family. It is argued that the survival and growth of such fears is dependent upon the presence of a "fears life-support system". The details of this life-support system can be derived by an examination of the family members' inadvertent participation with a fears lifestyle. Interventions to disrupt this participation are discussed. These interventions include the introduction of a non-threatening interactional description of the problem and a structured ritual to challenge the fears lifestyle. A case example is given.
This audio practice note describes a letter-writing campaign dedicated to sharing insider knowledges of Queer Joy. Letter-writing campaigns seek to create a context to share community knowledges of care in ways that can be accessed by members of the community of concern. This campaign begins with a queer invitation to allow members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in our province to write letters about their experience of cultivating queer joy. These letters are then distributed in sessions if a person is struggling to create queer joy in their life. This audio note reviews the care put into the letter-writing invitations. It includes responses from three letter writers and outlines the effects for both readers and writers. I hope that others can create seeds of queer joy in their lives through listening to how others have traversed, creating their queer joy.
Culturally resonant metaphors can highlight local skills and knowledges and strengthen connections to community, culture and history in ways that can sustain us in difficult times. In this video, Annonciata Niyibizi Muhayimana shows how collective narrative practices like the Tree of Life and Team of Life can be adapted to celebrate local cultures. Annonciata introduces the metaphor of Ingata Yúbuzima, the Ingata of Life, a Rwandan metaphor based on the handmade rings used to carry a load on one’s head. The ingata is a treasured item in everyday use, offering protection to those carrying a heavy load. It can be used with assistance and when help is not available. Annonciata shows how she elicited the knowledge of the mothers she worked with about making, using and caring for ingata, and how this local knowledge became the basis for rich metaphors about values, skills, hopes and connection. Individual ingatas were created as a record of what the women wanted to protect, and a giant collective ingata wove their stories together. Ingata Yúbuzima offers a resonant image of protection formed from everyday materials that enables people to skilfully bear weight without being hurt by it. This video is an extract from a presentation that was part of Annonciata’s completion of the Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work at The University of Melbourne.
This video explores the intersection of narrative therapy, fashion and gender identity through the co-creation of a gender-neutral paper doll dress-up game. Drawing from narrative therapy principles, it challenges the rigid gender norms historically reinforced by fashion games, offering a playful yet meaningful tool for identity exploration. Alongside the game, a community collective document is being created to amplify queer voices, sharing stories of resilience and resistance against dominant societal discourses. By integrating creative mediums into therapeutic practice, I examine how narrative therapy can help individuals shape and express their preferred stories.
In recent years, we have seen a rise in anti-LGBTIQ+ violence and hate across the settler colonies of so-called Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Turtle Island North America. This video interview describes a response to anti-trans and anti-drag hate. It spotlights an individual therapeutic exchange that grew into a web of collective care, action and activism. In the context of counselling, people’s responses to discriminatory violence are often pathologised, creating contexts of blame and shame for people who are living through oppression. This video conversation retells significant fragments of a therapeutic relationship. It includes collective narrative practices such as letter writing, externalising and deconstructing the effects of doxing. We invite practitioners to reflect on how we might take our practices from the therapy room to the streets for protest and collective action, and to stages for drag, cabaret and performance art, as we take up our solidarity with targeted groups.
In 2024, this journal published a paper by Hamilton Kennedy highlighting the dismissive responses often experienced by people who hold beliefs that have been labelled as delusional. Hamilton argued that this dismissal constitutes a form of epistemic injustice. We received a number of responses to this article, and decided to interview the author about the wider research project they are engaged in. Hamilton has developed innovative qualitative research methods to explore the history and meanings of beliefs that have been labelled as “delusions”, and to collaborate with research participants in non-pathologising ways. In this interview with David Denborough, Hamilton reflects on some of the practical and ethical considerations involved in conducting research with people whose beliefs have been labelled delusional. They set out how their approach differs from much research in psychiatric contexts, favouring a stance of solidarity, care and reciprocal trust.
Therapeutic documents can serve as lasting records of the skills and knowledges that have helped people through hard times. When shared, they can foster community and solidarity by challenging limiting narratives and making space for counter-narratives to be seen, heard and celebrated. This practice story describes the creation of a therapeutic document in the form of a short animation, which was developed through narrative therapy sessions with Felicity, an Autistic woman and parent of two Autistic daughters. It shows how an apparently small moment can contain “bits of brilliance” that can become the basis of a significant counter-story.
“The Terminator” was tricking 11-year-old Nathan into aggression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Nathan’s parents wanted to find ways to support Nathan and to develop their own coping skills. This practice story shows how we drew on Nathan’s particular interest in slugs to help him remember preferred ways of being and to keep everyone safe.
This paper shares a story of practice with a family who initially came to counselling because the 17-year-old son was suicidal. Our work came to focus on the family as a whole and their process of coming back together after being separated for some years in response to the father’s drug use. We developed a new understanding of the mother’s decision to ask the father to leave the family home as an act of bravery that had contributed to the wellbeing of all involved. Through identifying individual and collective wonderfulnesses, the family members developed a new shared identity in which bravery, resilience and calm could provide a foundation for responding to current and future life challenges.
This paper shares a tender story from the Stanikzai family, a family from Afghanistan who now live in Australia. It is generously offered in the hope that this it may assist other mothers and families who are silently grieving in their homes and who we can’t expect to bring their suffering to professional counselling offices. This paper tells the story of Ziba Stanikzai, who was very much suffering after one of her sons, Ajmal, was killed in Afghanistan. This paper is an honouring Ajmal’s life and memory. It is told through the perspectives of each of the authors. It begins with the words of Ajmal’s older brother Dr Abdul. Later you will read a series of letters linking the Stanikzai family with many others. These letters weave together storylines of loss, love and memory. They also represent a nuanced form of narrative family therapy and convey how this was a culturally and spiritually resonant response to suffering.
The extensive medical records of young people living with chronic illnesses can tell a thin story about the experiences and humanity of the person they supposedly represent. Through the story of a narrative document developed with a client, and the responses of others I shared it with, this article explores the skills and knowledges of young people navigating mental health systems while also dealing with chronic illness. From a poststructuralist perspective, the paper considers the effects of what one young person called “fat files” on how clients are “known” in clinical spaces, with implications for how professionals engage in notetaking.
This paper documents a co-research journey with three young people who had been labelled as “socially isolated” and “underachievers”. I introduce narrative ideas such as externalising the problem and its effects, exploring the absent but implicit, re-authoring and investigating the cultural context of how success is constructed in Chinese cultures. I describe the co-research methodology we used and the development of five themes; namely, the young people’s views of the problem, their descriptions of the problem and its effects, the strategies they used against the problem and its effects, what they held to be important, and how the results of our co-research were extended to inform future plans and actions. After sharing the voices of the three young persons, I reflect on lessons from this co-research process.
Spiritual care in a hospital setting regularly involves joining with people in the “betwixt and between” of life. This paper considers Michael White’s (2016) rite of passage metaphor and the way that it supports double-story development by acknowledging the difficulties people experience while also recognising that a hospital admission can include the possibility that one might arrive at a new place.
In this paper I explore a narrative therapy approach to supervision and critical reflection and present the “Reflective Conversation Cards”, a resource to support practice reflection. The cards guide conversation partners through a series of reflective questions informed by narrative ideas, aiming to democratise access to narrative therapy supervision. I present four stories from practice, which show how the cards were developed in collaboration with other practitioners. The practice stories also show how the cards can be utilised by individuals and groups in diverse practice contexts and with practitioners of varied professional backgrounds. Importantly, the practice stories show how the cards can support collaborative conversations that incorporate an ethic of accountability to the people we work alongside.
This article shares a narrative journey with a young man grappling with the effects of problematic substance use. Substance use had disrupted his dreams of becoming a medical doctor, keeping him out of university for a year. I embarked on a transformative journey with the young man and his family, guided by ideas and practices of narrative pastoral therapy. This narrative journey was non-blaming, collaborative, participatory, inclusive and contextual. The family and I wove a new tapestry telling a story of healing, transformation and renewal.
This paper explores challenges posed to double–story development in situations of ongoing injustice. Located within the Indian context, it proposes various narrative practices to address these challenges and facilitate re-authoring. The paper examines two key practices: contextualising stories and narrative explorations of the body. Additionally, it demonstrates how different narrative maps – externalising, deconstruction, re-authoring, re–membering and body-based narrative practices – can be interwoven to respond.
This paper considers the ways that narrative practices can intersect with and add richly to a meaningful and inclusive spiritual care approach. In this paper, Aunty Katrina, a Kaurna Elder, and Jesse, a spiritual care chaplain, reflect on conversations together in a hospital setting and what helped to make these occasions of mutual respect and blessing.
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.
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.
This article describes the use of narrative practices for LGBTQIA+ young people with a health condition. It presents a collective narrative practice: the Rainbow of Life. This adapts the Tree of Life metaphor to invite rich story development opportunities when working with LGBTQIA+ people. It involves exploring their commitments, special moments and those who stand alongside them in solidarity, and creatively mapping these on to a rainbow image.
This article describes a new practice map, an “Episode of Your Life”, which adapts existing narrative “... of life” practices to an episodic story from a person’s life using metaphors from film and television production. This practice map draws significantly on ideas of “peopling the room” and the Team of Life in order to scaffold safety in imagining the process of telling painful stories through the collectivising of the storytelling process. This practice map specifically does not require that the storyteller tell the story, but rather invites them to imagine how they might tell a story from their life in a way that aligns with their values, hopes and preferred storylines. Some of the significant effects that we discovered were related to the richness of the visual metaphor for adding another layer of possible meaning-making in the storytelling process, and allowing for a “proliferation of what’s possible” in the imagining of the storytelling, such as through the use of time jumps; computer-generated imagery; inviting rich descriptions of preferred relationships, histories and values; and dignifying of stories that otherwise might be left unspoken. Participants were left with a feeling of solidarity and a “safe riverbank” from which to imagine telling their stories.
This article discusses the response of a university psychology department to the devastating earthquakes that struck Türkiye on 6 February 2023, resulting in significant loss of life and widespread destruction. This paper focuses on the narrative practices undertaken by a university psychology department in the affected region, particularly the establishment of a psychological support telephone line staffed by volunteer psychologists.
Western culture and Western health care systems have created places of sexual health care that are highly individualised, privatised and professionalised. For people engaged in sex work, this reduces the possibilities for sharing skills and knowledges and instead leaves people with internalised feelings of shame, guilt and isolation. This paper describes collective therapeutic work that elicited insider knowledges, skills and sparkling moments from sex workers.
This paper explores the use of narrative therapy and community work to respond to the complexities surrounding women’s experiences in the sex industry. It offers practices for therapists and community workers seeking to engage with sex workers in ways that are respectful of their hard-won knowledge and seek to elicit double-storied accounts in relation to hardship, thicken stories of preferred identities, and explore absent-but-implicit values, hopes and commitments.
My Album is a poignant collection of artworks by children and adolescents engaged in “Mobile Arts for Peace” (MAP) clubs across multiple schools in Rwanda. The artworks vividly portray painful pasts, current challenges, and aspirations for the future. The vibrant tapestry of colours, symbols, and metaphors encapsulates the resilience and courage of these young people.
First Nations peoples have been conducting research for millennia. As research methodology, Indigenous storywork puts Indigenous voices at the centre, transforming colonial structures by countering colonial stories that have spread across our land and claimed space. Indigenous storywork might also be thought of as a prequel to narrative practice. It offers synergies for First Nations therapists, community workers and scholars to understand contemporary issues in alignment with Indigenous world views.
In this audio recording of a favourite paper from the journal’s archives, Mary Heath sets out a personal history of her journey toward becoming a critical thinker. She considers two common barriers to critical thinking: cultural disapproval of critique, and confusing critical thinking with criticism. In response, Mary argues that rigorous thinking offers benefits – and not only risks – to cultures as well as individuals.
Download the editorials here Editorial by Cheryl White and Jane Hales Dear Reader,This is Cheryl White and Jane Hales writing together. We hope you are well!We have big news.This edition of International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work…
This video explores Gipsy’s lived experience of chronic illness to give an introduction to disability politics. She invites the listener to investigate their own relationship to disability and able-bodied privilege and how this may show up in their narrative work. Gipsy shares with us the methodology (participant action research) that enabled her PhD research work (on young women’s lived experience of chronic illness) to also be a tool for social change and to create a positive impact for participants by the collective coming together and sharing of stories.
In times of hardship, talking directly about painful or traumatic experiences, overwhelming emotions, or problematic actions with children, young people or families can be difficult. As co-researchers, we invite children, youngsters and their families and networks to contribute in playful ways to unravelling the tentacles of hardship and re(dis)covering a sense of agency, belonging and coherence. Together, we look in unexpected corners for safe places to build a team of support and solidarity. In dis-covering a multiplicity of stories rather than being trapped in one dominant story of trauma or loss, we co-create relief and develop more coherent storylines that weave the experiences and stories about hardship into the fabric of their lives.
Externalising can be useful in addressing conflict in relationships. It can provide space for deconstruction, the consideration of shared values and new meaning-making. It also avoids the labelling and deficit identity conclusions that can accompany internalised accounts. This audio practice note describes an emerging practice for working with couples experiencing conflict: using an artificial intelligence tool to generate science fiction stories to support the externalising of a problem and open space for reauthoring conversations.
