2025: Issue 2

Read more about the article Protected: Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger by Aunty Barbara Wingard, read by Jean McMahon
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / Audio (2025:2) / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work

Protected: Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger by Aunty Barbara Wingard, read by Jean McMahon

This is an audio recording of a paper that was originally delivered as the opening keynote address at the first International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference, which was held in Adelaide from 17 to 19 February 1999. A later version of this paper was published as “Grief: Remember, reflect, reveal” in the 2001 book Telling Our Stories in Ways that Make Us Stronger (edited by Barbara Wingard and Jane Lester).

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: Wisdom on living with loneliness – Chelsea Size
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / Audio (2025:2) / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work

Protected: Wisdom on living with loneliness – Chelsea Size

This audio practice note describes the generation of a collective document of insider knowledges about living with loneliness with older people living in Eldercare residential aged care homes. In Western societies, older people’s skills, knowledges and values can be treated as irrelevant and obsolete, perhaps especially so for those who are living in residential aged care. Considering the discourses around ageing, frailty and loneliness, this audio note reflects on the operations of modern power and opportunities to address a sense of personal failure in aged care using collective documents.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: We have always been here, we’ve been here before: Responding to ongoing anti-trans fascism and colonisation with history, storytelling, and connection to land and community – Lorraine Grieves
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Video (2025:2)

Protected: We have always been here, we’ve been here before: Responding to ongoing anti-trans fascism and colonisation with history, storytelling, and connection to land and community – Lorraine Grieves

This video contribution highlights the importance of active response and continued resistance – not reaction – to the rise in transmisogyny, anti-trans and racist hate. Lorraine urges all caring adults, helpers and professionals to recognise how colonial, capitalist and white supremacist systems fuel a sense of overwhelm and can create embodied distress, especially for those under attack by these systems.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: Children’s problems and children’s solutions: Celebrating the agency of neurodivergent children – Tarang Kaur
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: Children’s problems and children’s solutions: Celebrating the agency of neurodivergent children – Tarang Kaur

Children, particularly those on the neurodivergence spectrum, have historically not been afforded a great degree of power and voice in their own lives. This has significant implications for the therapeutic space, in which the identification of “problems” and interventions to address them may not take the child’s perspective and skills into account. My work seeks to explore children’s views and understandings of their “problems”, as well as the uniquely skilful actions they take in response. In this paper I describe how narrative therapy principles were adapted for children across a wide spectrum of social skills and degrees of access to spoken language to document – in the form of a scrapbook – various experience-near descriptions of children’s problems and children’s solutions. This living document records the skills, values and acts of resistance demonstrated by a community of neurodivergent children, and offers an opportunity to witness this community’s agency and unique insight into their own situations.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: “Pockets of freedom”: Creating therapeutic spaces as refuges for Black experiences of neurodivergence – Sandra Coral
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: “Pockets of freedom”: Creating therapeutic spaces as refuges for Black experiences of neurodivergence – Sandra Coral

The influence of Eurocentricism on therapy spaces makes them unsafe for Black people. This is compounded for Black people whose lives are impacted by their neurodivergence, and therapeutic support needs to account for that. This paper demonstrates how integrating the tenets of critical race theory alongside narrative practice can guide therapists and others in helping professions in creating what Makungu Akinyela has called “pockets of freedom”. These are therapeutic environments free from the interpretations and judgements of the dominant culture, and which serve as a refuge for Black people (with neurodivergence) to heal from the effects of colonialism.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: Solidarity conversations: A feminist narrative lens on bulimia and abuse – Kassandra Pedersen
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: Solidarity conversations: A feminist narrative lens on bulimia and abuse – Kassandra Pedersen

Literature often frames bulimia through biomedical models of disease, emphasising biological, psychological and behavioural deficits, and treatments focused on symptom reduction. This paper reimagines so-called “bulimic episodes” as potential acts of testimony or protest against multiple structures of oppression. Drawing on feminist, narrative therapy and anti-oppressive frameworks, I propose an alternative language to bulimic episodes, using the metaphor of tides as a way of redefining bulimia.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: Psychedelic-assisted therapy from a narrative therapy perspective: A map for practitioners — Christine Dennstedt
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: Psychedelic-assisted therapy from a narrative therapy perspective: A map for practitioners — Christine Dennstedt

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is currently in its second wave and enjoying a renaissance of sorts. This article describes a narrative therapy–inspired approach to working therapeutically with psychedelics. My intent in writing this paper is to provide a model for how narrative therapy ideas in practice can be applied to the three stages of psychedelic-assisted therapy: preparation, medicine work and integration. In describing this map for practitioners, the rites of passage metaphor, as applied therapeutically by Michael White, is used to outline the phases a person will move through in their psychedelic-assisted therapy journey.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: From isolation to connection: Young people, narrative practice and canine care — Jack Chiu and Sharon Leung
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: From isolation to connection: Young people, narrative practice and canine care — Jack Chiu and Sharon Leung

This paper presents a project combining narrative practices and human–canine interaction to support young people in Hong Kong who were socially withdrawn and not in education, employment or training (NEET). Such youth often face societal stigmatisation and isolation. The “We Can” project paired participants with traumatised rescue dogs, fostering mutual healing and reconnection with the young people’s preferred identities and their wider community.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: “Love always”: Letters written by dying mothers for their children — Tanya Newman
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: “Love always”: Letters written by dying mothers for their children — Tanya Newman

This article shares stories of dying mothers writing letters for their children. The author conceives of letter writing as a way for mothers to re-member their preferred identities, and the letters as portals for future re-membering for children. The article includes examples of questions asked in interviews with mothers, the thinking behind the questions, and excerpts from the letters these conversations enabled.

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September 12, 2025
Read more about the article Protected: A Exploring narrative therapy and therapeutic letter writing in a genetic counselling context — Stephanie Badman
2025 / 2025: Issue 2 / International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work / Peer-reviewed papers (2025:2)

Protected: A Exploring narrative therapy and therapeutic letter writing in a genetic counselling context — Stephanie Badman

This paper explores using narrative therapy in a genetic counselling context to support people having predictive genetic testing for neurogenetic conditions. Using case examples, I describe my use of narrative therapy practices in this setting, with a particular focus on therapeutic letter writing. I set out the ideas from narrative therapy that I considered in the development of my letter-writing practice.

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September 12, 2025

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