Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear ReaderOver the past 20 years, the Tree of Life narrative approach, developed by Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo and David Denborough, has travelled way beyond its original contexts in Southern Africa. Practitioners in…
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, our health psychologists were redeployed to provide support to staff in our NHS acute trust. We aimed to develop a supportive intervention that was engaging and accessible to all staff. Working with Wake The Beast theatre company, we collected stories from staff about the challenges they were facing and the innovative ways they were managing.
This video highlights the crucial role of community participation in supporting traumatised children and young people. Our project focuses on co-creation and community healing, beginning with the collaborative design of a card game developed in partnership with traumatised children and young people along with other community members.
“Resisting erasure: How Muslim women in India are responding to hate and hostility” is a collective narrative document that brings together the voices of Muslim women living across urban India. The document centres the voices of Muslim women responding to everyday Islamophobia. Through shared stories of childhood, education, family life, work, motherhood, faith and public life, the document highlights the skills, values, knowledges and commitments that Muslim women draw on as they navigate hostility, othering and hate.
In this interview with David Denborough, community organiser and narrative therapist Susan Shaw reflects on more than three decades’ work with communities in the United States, exploring the rich connections between narrative practice and community organising.
A group of friends reviews Charlie Jane Anders’ (2021) nonfiction book Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to get through hard times by making up stories and her (2025) novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster, and reflects on the process of reading these books together.
This paper presents a narrative practice metaphor called the Fire of Life. It’s been designed to help tell our stories in ways that make them stronger by yarning about the passions, strengths, skills, interests or hobbies of Aboriginal people, along with the problems that we can face.
This article presents preliminary findings of a locally developed research project that combined arts-based research tools and narrative therapy as a response to the effects of domestic violence on the academic performance of school students between the ages of 16 and 19. Students in selected schools from two regions of Papua New Guinea (PNG) participated in the study.
Open Dialogue (OD) was developed in Finland as a family- and community-based response to psychiatric emergencies. Central to OD’s development have been the conceptual and research contributions of Jaakko Seikkula. I review and reflect on Seikkula’s recent book on OD’s development that shows how dialogic ideas, research, and client and collegial feedback have come to inform OD as he advocates it be currently practiced.
Cosplay has become a popular subculture among teenagers and is prevalent in Hong Kong, yet it is subject to misconceptions and prejudices. The imagined identities formed through cosplay can contribute to the formation of preferred identities. Cosplay can facilitate self-exploration, expression, social connection and the active construction of identity.
A “decentred” therapeutic stance is often seen as one of the hallmarks of narrative practice. But it isn’t always well understood and is interpreted differently by different practitioners. While I was working on my doctoral research with the archive of video recordings of Michael White’s teaching and therapy sessions, I conducted a side project to better understand his approach to decentred practice.
This practice-based paper introduces “Resilience Wardrobe”, a narrative therapy exercise that uses wardrobe and outfit metaphors to support externalising conversations, concretise emotions through sensory detail, and invite the thickening of preferred identity stories.
This paper shares a joyful practice story about re-membering community at the end of life. A “socially isolated” man was referred for social work support to arrange a will. This task became a rich experience of re-membering community and supporting Colin to craft his own after-death care.
This paper introduces “the Marathon of Life”, a narrative project developed in collaboration with four Hibaku Nisei – second-generation survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in Japan. Although they did not directly witness the bombings, their lives have been shaped by intergenerational trauma, moral responsibility and enduring histories of silence. Born into the aftermath of the bombings, these individuals became peace activists.
This paper introduces the “Desired Dream” practice, an innovative psychotherapy approach based on narrative therapy. It involves conversations about dream content that individuals want to see and imagine, as distinct from dreams that occur spontaneously during sleep.
This article introduces the use of the video game Minecraft to complete the Tree of Life narrative therapy process and discusses new possibilities for practice that the medium creates. This is explored through a story of practice with an individual, with whom the practice provided an alternative to a traditional intake session. I also share a story of practice in a group setting, as a program offered within a school.
This paper addresses the phenomenon of personal failure and its relationship with modern power. It describes Michael White’s failure conversations map and the underlying narrative practices that support it. It demonstrates the usefulness of the failure conversations map in subverting modern power and generating preferred identity conclusions with a young woman in India.
This article describes a storytelling group with older people living in a nursing home in the UK, developed in collaboration with creative activity workers as part of a diploma in narrative therapy.
This paper is in Spanish, with an English abstract. In a context of social and gender inequality, such as that of Paraguay, women's collective organising becomes a space where their identities acquire new meanings. This is especially true for women sex workers, whose identities are constructed within a context of prejudice, discrimination, and stigmatisation.
The Cedar of Life metaphor and narrative therapy operate together to provide a flexible framework for indirect therapeutic dialogue, supporting gentle engagement with trauma, particularly for survivors of family and domestic violence.
![Read more about the article The Tree of Life Project: Using narrative ideas in work with vulnerable children in Southern Africa [audio from the archive] — Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo, read by Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo](https://dulwichcentre.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/3-1.jpg)
This audio recording of a paper from the archives of International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work describes the use of narrative ideas in work with vulnerable children in Southern Africa. How can the lives of children who have experienced significant losses be responded to in ways that are not retraumatising and that bring to light children’s own skills and knowledge? What sorts of exercises can be used in camps for vulnerable children? How can children be provided with significant experiences that do not separate them from their families, values and cultural norms? This paper describes a creative adaptation of the “Tree of Life” exercise informed by narrative therapy principles and practices.