2016
Posted by Dulwich on Sep 17, 2016 in | 0 comments
Showing 1–16 of 31 results
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From ‘disorder’ to political action: conversations that invite collective considerations to individual experiences of women who express concerns about eating and their bodies — Kristina Lainson
$9.90This article describes an interweaving of narrative practices which has proved helpful for a number of women experiencing concerns about eating and its effects on their bodies. Through the stories of two young women, this paper illustrates how, by inviting collective ideas to individual experiences, and by recognising and naming their own commitments and agentive responses to societal expectations, the women became able to move away from ideas of ‘stuckness’ towards a sense of themselves as influential both in their own lives and possibly in the lives of others similarly concerned.
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Definitional ceremonies as rituals of hospitality— Sarah Strauven
$9.90This paper describes the project of Abdul Shirzai, Badam Zazai, Shakila Yari, Jahangir Safi, Niaz Mohamed Miyasahib, and Sarah Strauven.
In looking for ways to respond to the difficulties Afghan refugees are experiencing in Belgium, both related to fleeing their war-torn home country and rebuilding their lives in a new and foreign country, they have created a mobile and interactive exhibition.
This small project is a citizen’s initiative framed within collective narrative practice and defined by volunteerism and informality. A crucial part of the exhibition is the definitional ceremonies that the group have come to understand as ‘rituals of hospitality’.
These rituals represent an antidote to the negative effects of asylum policies: impoverished and damaged-centred single stories of their lives and identities on the one hand, and inhospitable experiences on the other hand. These rituals include the creation of receptive spaces, multi-textured stories, and art pieces that stir imagination and conversations that compel reflection. The group hopes to cultivate an active receptivity, openness, and wonderment in their ‘audiences as hosts’ that will inform how people will define their responsibility towards refugees in the future. Through visiting local communities with their exhibition, they aspire to bring about social change.
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Stories of the body: Incorporating the body into narrative practice— Eleni E. Karageorgiou
$9.90This paper is an attempt to incorporate the body into the practice of narrative therapy so as to offer richer possibilities for therapists to work with clients’ stories. The paper presents various case studies working with various body ‘issues’, such as quadriplegia, multiple sclerosis, sexual intercourse, stress, and body image. Maps of narrative practice brought to these issues include externalising conversations, outsider-witness conversations, re-membering conversations, and addressing personal failure.
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Uncovering Bulimia’s demanding voice: Challenges from a narrative therapist’s perspective— Kassandra Pedersen
$9.90This paper presents responses to a series of challenges faced during work with a 17-year-old girl who sought to reclaim her life from bulimia’s demanding voice. Kiki was at first unwilling to participate in therapeutic conversations, and initial contact occurred through her boyfriend, who became part of an anti-bulimia team. Encouraged by her boyfriend, Kiki, who was determined to ‘stop throwing up at last’, decided to attend sessions. Through externalising conversations, bulimia was personified as ‘The Guy’, who ruled her daily life with judgements. Kiki described The Guy’s effect on her life and developed a stance resisting his influence. The process of working with Kiki raised a number of challenges: assisting a person who initially declined to participate, overcoming pathologising discourses, resisting the tactics of the problem and its allies, supporting a preferred identity in an unsupportive environment, and keeping Kiki’s preferences and beliefs at the centre of our work. This paper explores the use of narrative practices, including externalising conversations, double listening, identifying unique outcomes, and the failure conversations map, to address these issues and support resistance to bulimia.
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Collective narrative practice with young people with Aspergers Syndrome who have experienced bullying— Kit Hung (Chris) Tse
$9.90This paper presents an experience of collective narrative practice with young people with Asperger Syndrome (Aspergers) who have experienced bullying. In Hong Kong, it is common to hear about bullying of young people with Aspergers. This article first discusses some dominant discourses relating to Aspergers and bullying. It then documents the innovative methodologies of the ‘Smartphone of Life’, which connects young people and assists them to develop second stories with alternative identities.
The narrative practices of externalising conversations, re-authoring conversations, outsider-witness conversations, and definitional ceremonies are used to richly describe the stories of the young people. In this work, the local knowledge and skills of young people in resisting the challenges of bullying are documented through co-creating collective postcards. The article concludes with some reflections about the collective practice and ethical considerations.
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Exploring the bicycle metaphor as a vehicle for rich story development: A collective narrative practice project— Marc F. Leger
$9.90This practice-based paper describes a step-by-step outline of a form of collective narrative practice which uses the bicycle as its central metaphor. A significant theme in this collective narrative practice methodology is an interest in attending to individual and collective experiences of place, and to the possibilities that place-based narrative enquiries can provide in eliciting rich accounts of people’s local knowledges and contribute to a ‘re-inhabiting’ of the significant social geographies of people’s lives.
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Hopeful conversations about voice hearing— Chris Dolman & Michael Spurrier
$9.90Over a period of a couple of years, Michael and Chris met in the context of therapy in relation to the presence of critical and demanding voices in Michael’s life. These conversations covered much territory and this paper gives a partial account of these conversations – an interweaving of a description of narrative ideas and practices that shaped Chris’ approach, together with Michael’s experiences of participating in these conversations, which reinvigorated his interest in contributing to the lives of other people.
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Living in stories: Embodiment in therapy through liturgical practice— Chad Loftis
$9.90Since its inception, narrative therapy has not only been interested in meaning-making with language, but also with other cultural forms including ritual and ceremony. Drawing on this tradition, along with the work of thinkers outside the field, combined with a religious lexicon and several years of experience with ‘liturgical practice’, this article outlines not only the healing potential of therapeutic ceremony but also its political significance. From mock lawsuits to funeral-like mourning ceremonies for Joy and Freedom, this article outlines possibilities, hazards, and essential elements of ‘liturgical practices’, as well as potential categories of ceremony in keeping with common cultural practices, and examples of practice.
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‘When The Crisis broke out, our whole world went upside down’ The special skills and knowledge that are sustaining us during the economic crisis in Greece— Margarita Katsikadelis
$9.90This paper details a project honouring Greek people’s skills of re-claiming their lives from the troubling effects of the recent financial crisis. Canvassing a process that used a questionnaire, collective documentation, and definitional ceremony, this work identifies and celebrates special skills and knowledges that sustain people during crisis.
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Divorcing the voice of fear: A collaborative, narrative approach to anxiety by Evalie Horner and Patrick Davey Tully
$9.90Co-created by a therapist, Evalie Horner, and her client, Patrick Davey Tully, this paper introduces and explores narrative therapy as an approach for addressing issues of anxiety. The paper alternates voices between Horner and Tully as they embark upon and develop their therapeutic relationship. After reviewing a variety of other treatment approaches, they bring the reader into their joint process of narrative therapy, from inception through to the present day. Horner and Tully illustrate the tools they use to deconstruct various discourses and social constructions of truth, including externalisation via the creation of distinct, representative character voices. They discuss how narrative therapy connects past experiences to the present. And they show how narrative therapy engages the client in a pro-active, co-creative process.
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The restoration of contemplation and creative solitude— Josie McSkimming
$9.90This article offers some reflections on a renewed emphasis on imagination and creative solitude within the psychotherapy process. Increasingly, people consult psychotherapists with concerns around the effects of their level of connectedness to social media. The continuous exposure, over-comparing, and self-surveillance demanded by social media may be considered as another set of political sensibilities or social discourses that shape people’s sense of self. This article considers these discourses against a backdrop of the prevailing ‘psy’ discourse, including the potentially deterministic field of neuroscience, along with the compulsory inclusion of ‘mindfulness’ in current psychotherapies.
The stories of two women who desire more creative solitude illustrate their ways of seeing themselves and their struggles differently. Through incorporating the creative ideas of Bachelard and Foucault’s construct of the panopticon (along with dissident counter-conduct), ideas emerge around recreating solitude, reigniting imagination, and incorporating literature into psychotherapy. Not only this, but thought is given to the self-seeing and parrhēsia within Foucault’s later writings which may assist in orienting ourselves as psychotherapists somewhat differently to people’s expressions of resistance to the discourses of compulsory connection to social media and the pathologising of solitude. Creative privacy and solitude may then become more possible in people’s lives.
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We could be heroes: How film and comic book heroes helped a peer support group to reconnect with their gifts— Rachel Tolfree
$5.50This paper outlines how conversations about film and comic book protagonists enabled members of a peer support group to become the heroes of their own stories, finding meaning, strength, and purpose in their difficulties and the things that make them different from others.
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Fascinating Racism in the age of the Greek crisis: Stories of resistance— Georgia Korre
$9.90This paper describes a project undertaken by a part of the Antiracist Group of the University of Crete in the city of Rethymno between September 2012 and April 2013. Given that the onset of the Greek Financial Crisis has been accompanied by an increasing prevalence of racist and nationalistic discourses, this project intended to address the problem of racism and its multiple effects in our local community. We made use of specific narrative tools such as narrative documents, externalising conversations, and conversations that highlight unique outcomes. This paper is a presentation of our work in three parts. The title was inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay, Fascinating Fascism (1975).
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Thickly describing together – utilising collaborative ethnography in narrative therapy work with young people— Jonathan McClelland
$9.90An ethnographic stance involves attention to the ‘exotic’ within the familiar – often using the trick of being a ‘foreigner’ to a situation as a way of teasing out what is going on behind what appears ‘natural’ or ‘obvious’ to those who are stuck in the situation. This article explores the potential contributions to narrative therapy of tools and viewpoints from anthropology, specifically the concept of ‘collaborative ethnography’. The article engages with the difficulties of maintaining an ethical approach when working with adolescents in the mental health field, which often does not take the viewpoints and contributions of adolescents seriously, and points the way toward a way of working that does not privilege the expertise or use of power often exerted in this arena.
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Troublemaker Cards: Promoting the language of responsibility and prevention in men’s domestic violence— Ryan Greenwell
$9.90This paper describes the use of Troublemaker Cards in men’s domestic violence behaviour change groups as an innovative approach to expose and challenge the dominant ways of being and thinking that support men’s violence and abuse towards women. While language that minimises men’s responsibility-taking for their actions is available and ubiquitous, the Troublemaker Cards offer an alternative, and promote the gendered and political understandings of violence and abuse in a respectful parallel journey of discovery. The externalising language used on the cards keeps the men’s identities separate from these discourses, and yet supports an attentiveness to their relationship with them. Guided by the cards in a ‘cool engagement’, the men are invited to explore and deconstruct the Troublemakers as well as build the foundations for second-story development. Evidence from practice suggests that once men experience this separation and foresee alternative territories to step into, they can better describe their relationship with the ‘Troublemakers’ in a ‘hot engagement’. In a context of accountability to women and children, the men create opportunities to propose how they will prevent potential future abuses and take action based on preferred relationships to the Troublemakers, such that they are not unwittingly reproducing dominant ways of being.
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Two-way learning as respectful community practice: Honouring, co-creating and facilitating access to the knowledge stories of the Men of the Mimosa Creek Healing Centre— Troy Holland
$9.90This article comprises two related accounts: first, a short history of an attempt to develop respectful practice in a two-way learning partnership with a community; second, a description of a collective narrative practice knowledges project with Aboriginal Australian men who are participating in a residential rehabilitation program.
Developing respectful practice is explained in terms of acknowledging and responding to the effects and operations of invasion, colonisation, privileges, and power, and earning and responding to invitations to become a participant and to be influential in a community. The collective narrative practice knowledges project demonstrates ways of externalising and historicising problems; cataloguing existing and aspired-to knowledges; acknowledging and honouring existing personal, familial, and cultural knowledges; being influential but de-centred in the co-research of new knowledges; and the documentation and reciprocal exchanges of knowledges.
I’m Clayre Sessoms from Vancouver, BC, Canada, traditionally known as Coast Salish Territories. I acknowledge that my work takes place on the ancestral, unceded, and occupied territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Nations of the Coast Salish People whose relationship with the land is ancient, primary, and enduring. I’m an uninvited settler in what is colonially known as Vancouver. Because my place of work is on stolen land I commit to support a reconciliation, which includes reparations and the return of land. Here I study counselling psychology and art therapy, and I get to incorporate narrative therapy at my practicum placement, a site that provides free counselling services for LGBTQ2S individuals.
These materials help me to begin to wrap my head around the complexities of narrative therapy. I especially enjoyed learning about how others have used narrative therapy in practical counselling settings.
I’m moved by how we often tend to hear, accept, or retell the thinnest stories of our lives and the lives of others. I imagine that not valuing the richness of an individual’s diverse range of stories, perhaps, it has been much easier to cling to tired old preconceived notions about others, which can cause undue harm.
I’m left thinking about the TEDTalk by Chimamanda Adichie about the dangers of accepting a singular story of someone else, rather than leaning in and committing to understand the wholeness of that person’s narrative.
I look forward to continuing to learn. Thank you to The Dulwich Centre for providing this accessible forum. <3
in what ways have you entered into collaborations before? What made these collaborations possible?
As a peer worker most of my work was entering into collaborations with young people. I would use curiosity to further inquire into their experience, and looking back wow these narrative practices would have been amazing to use in our youth group discussions! We would use art mostly in telling stories. Many of the young people heard voices and saw characters only they could see. They would enjoy painting these voices, externalising the character, giving it a name and talking about the story and nature of the relationship between the voice and the character. I also enjoyed illiciting these stories, as I could tell they would begin to separate themselves from the voices, allowing for guilt and shame to reduce.
What might make it hard to enter into these practices?
The one difficult way of entering into these practices was the note writing. The managerial culture of my last workplace meant it was not considered good practice to have clients sit with us to write notes. In fact most clients probably were unaware that workers did regularly make notes each time they had contact with the centre. We were a strengths based centre that thrived on person centred practice. I think there is a bit of a stereotype that note writing is quite clinical and removed from person centred practice, hence a certain avoidance of bringing up notes in front of clients.
If these ways of working fit for you, what next steps could you take to build partnerships/collaborations in your work?
I definitely believe I could continue to use art to help young people tell their alternative stories. In mental health many workers draw thin conclusions of clients – bipolar, poor attachment, violent, with even their strengths really talked about in third person. It would be great to start drawing peoples strengths out with the use of story telling, so that clients can start to own their strengths, rather than have clinicans cherry pick these out.
Thank you to Tileah for a wonderful presentation. I love hearing the word “yarn” used in this powerful way (Americans also have that term). The practice of “translating”, of shifting concepts into language that can be more usefully heard, is very powerful. As coaches we can make good use of this to help clients uncover their hidden or forgotten resources.
These stories are amazing examples of what we can discover when we hold onto our “beginner’s mind” and remember that the other person (client, patient) has the information and understanding, not us. We talk a lot in leadership development about “co-creating” and I think this is a beautiful example of two very complementary roles: the person who has the story and the person who helps to explore and shape it.
I like the idea of narrative – there is something about giving people the power to create a narrative, rather than simply appearing in a story told by someone else. Within the narrative metaphor, I especially enjoy the fabric metaphor – the idea of strands. These may touch each other, or not, may go well together in tone or color, or not. But again, there is some power in creating and weaving the narrative.
In my own work with coaching and leadership development, I find that the emphasis on narrative(s) helps make things more tangible, and therefore brings them to their true scale, instead of letting them take on imaginary and unclearly described proportions.
I love this. Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. Such a powerful sentiment. Sometimes through trauma, it is hard to access the words that really encapsulate that experience – though using the written word does help us access those hard to utter parts of our memories … in those cases though perhaps the story we tell ourselves is not one that makes us feel strong in the first instance – so finding a way to tell that story in a way that focuses on the strength of surviving to tell that story is just amazing!