Valeria Kvasnevska draws on Michael White’s ideas of “saying hullo again” to re-member her home in the Ukraine and the way of being it held.
This groundbreaking paper introduces an alternative metaphor for working with those experiencing significant grief. Guided by the “saying hullo” metaphor, Michael White introduces
Therapists have a lot of power to help or to harm. In this time of intense escalation of anti-trans discourse, policy and legislation, it matters more than ever to listen to the people who are most directly affected: trans and gender-expansive people.
This article critiques the ways mainstream psychotherapy participates in the “ally–industrial complex”, a term coined by scholars and activists to describe performative allyship that reinforces existing hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from G. Patterson’s (2018) critique of cisgender scholars in transgender studies, I explore how psychotherapy – particularly as practiced by cisgender therapists – often recentres professional authority and individual virtue while masking the field’s complicity in trans and queer marginalisation.
This article is written as a companion to “Discovering the good man: Double-story development with a survivor of repetitive ongoing trauma in immigration detention” (Pelly, 2019). While the earlier paper explored double-story development within continuous detention, this article examines what becomes of re-authored identity when detention recurs after a period of relative freedom.
When women are forcibly displaced, structurally violent migration processes can have dramatic and devastating effects on experiences of motherhood. This paper shares stories of two women who overcame narratives of shame and guilt, individually developed second stories of motherhood, and then came together through letter writing and narrative conversations to collectively create a renewed sense of belonging.
Many qualities that may be considered “genetic” are, in fact, inherited through stories and the ways they are narrated and re-narrated. This article describes therapeutic conversations with a heterosexual couple who had recently confronted a medical diagnosis of male infertility. Grounded in a relational understanding of identity and using the couple’s Tree of Life, I illustrate how fertile ground was generated for the identity of a child conceived through sperm donation.
This article describes a creative narrative practice using music and song. It draws on collective narrative practice, rescued speech, and poetic and collective documentation, and fuses these with musical performance to create a new practice: collective narrative song creation.
Narrative therapy offers powerful approaches for honouring neurodivergent insider knowledge to resist thin, pathologising conclusions. To explore and extend these approaches, I interviewed loved ones as neurodivergent co-researchers using narrative principles to re-dignify their living experience.
Western grief discourse remains shaped by modernist norms that individualise and internalise struggles with grief. This article proposes that grief-related symptoms often reflect resistance to cultural expectations that the bereaved should “let go” of the deceased and confine them to a static “museum of memories”. We argue that re-membering a deceased child – actively restoring their presence in the ongoing life of the parent – plays a vital role in supporting bereaved parents.
Adelite Mukamana (click for bio) Adelite Mukamana is a clinical psychologist and genocide studies scholar with more than 20 years’ experience in mental health, psychosocial support and peacebuilding. A survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, she brings…
Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear ReaderI am writing from Delhi, India, where we have been witnessing young people lead collective action against injustices in this country. A recent social movement has been sparked in response…
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.