therapy
Posted by Dulwich on Nov 15, 2016 in | 0 comments
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Introducing the Work of the Hearing Voices Network
$15.00This collection includes six articles about the work of the Hearing Voices Network:
Introducing the Work of the Hearing Voices Network— David Denborough
An introduction by David DenboroughThe Use of Humour and Other Coping Strategies— Jon Williams
Everyone’s experience of hearing voices is different. In this paper Jon Williams describes the ways in which he has come to live with the voices he hears and how humour plays a vital part. This paper also describes a number of creative coping strategies as well as discussing the influential work of the Hearing Voices Network.Glimpses of Peace— Sharon De Valda
Trauma can be the main trigger or cause of voice-hearing in many people. In this paper, Sharon de Valda evocatively conveys how racism and sexism shape her experience of hearing voices and how she has in turn used her own experiences to assist other voice-hearers.From Paranoid Schizophrenia to Hearing Voices - and Other Class Distinctions— Mickey De Valda
While not commonly discussed, class relations have a significant influence in relation to people’s experiences of mental health and hearing voices in particular. In this paper, Mickey de Valda describes how experiences of class shape his experience and how this has influenced his work with the Hearing Voices Network.Partnership— Julie Downs
In this paper, Julie Downs (Co-ordinator of the National Office of the Hearing Voices Network) discusses the importance of thoughtful partnerships between those who hear voices and those who do not. Both the hazards and possibilities of these partnerships are considered, particularly in relation to matters of power, politics and control.Altering the Balance of Power: Working with Voices— Peter Bullimore
Through sharing stories of therapeutic work, this paper describes how issues of abuse and power are vital considerations when working with voice-hearers. Not only is voice-hearing often the result of abuse, but voice-hearing itself can be an experience of abuse. Peter Bullimore describes how he is interested in ensuring that abusive voices are challenged and their influence reduced, and how positive voices can be acknowledged and cherished. The paper also tells stories of a recently established group for people experiencing ‘paranoia’ that is having surprising success, and identifies significant factors that influence the process of recovery. The author also shares some of his own experiences of psychosis and how these influence his work in this area. -
Poetic resistance: Witnessing Bahman’s resistance to torture and political violence— Vikki Reynolds, ‘Bahman’, Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett, Colin James Sanders & Gwen Haworth
$9.90This writing presents an orientation to work alongside survivors of torture and political violence centred in witnessing resistance and an activist informed ethical stance for decolonising and antioppression practice (Reynolds & polanco, 2012). This includes descriptions of what constitutes torture and political violence, and understandings of witnessing, and resistance as ever present and useful despite the fact that resistance is often not enough to stop oppression (Wade, 1997; Reynolds, 2010a).
This writing highlights Bahman, a survivor of torture from Iran, and illuminates his poetic resistance to torture, including poems that Bahman wrote during our therapeutic work together. I will provide enough context of the political situation and particular acts of violence and torture so that the acts of resistance in Bahman’s poems are understandable, and make visible structures of safety (Richardson & Reynolds, 2014, in press) and accountability practices. Bahman’s poems are interspersed throughout the text and following each of his poems there is a link to Gwen Haworth’s film of the poem read by Bahman in Farsi and Colin James Sanders in English. Bahman then reflects on the experience of re-visiting his resistance, our therapeutic work together, and his poems through an interview with Colin.
Finally, Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett offers a reflection of this work from her location as a woman from a Muslim background and as a therapist with a commitment to creative resistance (2007).
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The Narratives of Love: Addressing the Issue of Love in a Therapeutic Context— Elena Smith
$9.90This paper explores the effect of addressing the issue of love in a therapeutic context. I have no intention of drawing any conclusions about the phenomena of love as such, but I intend to describe what happened when I purposely chose to address the question of love in therapeutic conversations. I was curious to explore these questions: What are people’s stories of love? What are the practices of love in people’s lives? What are the meanings they ascribe to love? And how does a person’s concept of love shape their thoughts and actions?
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Talking about sex: Narrative approaches to discussing sex life in therapy— Ron Findlay
$9.90How do we discuss sex issues in therapy with a narrative and post-structuralist, postcolonial approach? This paper discusses the ethics and practices of narrative approaches to talking about sex in therapy. It discusses ways to reduce the influence of shame and embarrassment, promote local knowledge and skills, and to minimise the impact of the gender and sexuality of the therapist.
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Exploring the Meaning of Tattoos— Mike Boucher
$0.00In this short paper the author describes some of the multiple meanings that tattoos can hold for people, including ‘markings of transitions’, ‘rejecting normalising judgements’ and ‘remembering important learnings’. Through describing the stories of one woman’s tattoos and their meanings, this paper invites therapists to consider the significance that tattoos hold in some people’s lives and ways of taking this into account in the therapy room.
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Feminism, Therapy and Narrative Ideas: Exploring Some Not So Commonly Asked Questions— compiled by Shona Russell & Maggie Carey
$9.90In this paper we have been interested to engage with some not so commonly asked questions about feminism, therapy and narrative ideas. So we asked a number of therapists who are engaged with narrative ideas some questions about what feminism means to them, how it influences their work and what feminist issues they are currently grappling with. What followed was an invigorating and challenging process.
Many of the people we approached expressed that they wished they could spend more time thinking about these sorts of questions. Some people spoke of regret that these sorts of conversations are not more common.
In response, we would like to invite all readers to become involved in an ongoing project around these issues. In future editions of the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work we will be organising a regular column on the theme ‘feminism, therapy and narrative ideas’. At the end of this piece we have listed a number of different themes about which we would love to hear from practitioners. We hope that the following questions and answers will spark your imagination and that you will then write to us with your thoughts and reflections.
But first, on with the questions – and perhaps the first one is the most difficult … What is feminism?
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Journeys in the bush— Ben Knowles
$9.90This paper begins a process of joining ideas and practices of Narrative Therapy and Bush Adventure Therapy. Through examples drawn from 9–12 day bush journeys with young men and women who are experiencing difficulty in their lives, it invites the reader to imagine the storying potential of such experiences and consider the practices that surround and support them. The paper highlights the importance of developing and maintaining collegial relationships that support young people to realise and extend their existing knowledge and skill. It explores how we traverse between the known and familiar territories of people’s lives and the otherworldly landscapes of the bush journey to create fertile ground for making new stories.
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Narrative practice as an ethical position and the moral legitimacy of narrative therapy— Christoffer Haugaard
$9.90Narrative practice involves questioning and resisting dominant cultural truths in both its theory and practices. It may even function as a form of activism. This paper attempts to raise questions about the good of such an activism and the moral legitimacy of practitioners engaging the people who consult them in cultural resistance. I shall attempt to extract hints of an implicit ethical position in narrative practice, and point to a moral rationality for raising questions about the legitimacy of acts of cultural resistance, and suggest some possible implications of such an enquiry. This draws on the ideas of moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre.
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Protecting Relationships from the Ongoing Effects of Childhood Sexual Abuse— Jussey Verco, David Tully, Geoff Minge
$5.50This paper describes ways of working with male partners of women who experienced sexual abuse as children. In response to requests from women, groups were held with male partners to provide information about childhood sexual abuse, to enable the men to speak about ways in which they have tried to support their partners, and to discuss men’s experiences and responses. Opportunities were also created to deconstruct unhelpful or ‘dangerous’ ideas around the complexities of childhood sexual abuse.
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The Getting of Wisdoms— Cate Ingram & Amaryll Perlesz
$9.90An action research project was conducted by a public family therapy agency, in Melbourne, Australia, to investigate the impact of the writing of client stories and the subsequent reading of these stories to others in similar circumstances. This paper describes some of the effects this process had on individuals and families who authored their ‘Wisdom Narratives’ in the hope of inspiring and supporting others. Going through the process of putting their story/struggle into words on paper enabled people to recognise their own agency and influence, while reading stories out loud back to the author engendered self-compassion. In conclusion, the creative process of penning narratives of change might now be considered as having an important impact in generating self-worth and sense of agency.
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Researching People’s Experience of Narrative Therapy: Acknowledging the Contribution of the ‘Client’ to What Works in Counselling Conversations— Amanda Redstone
$5.50This paper explores the possibility of developing a way of evaluating narrative therapy conversations that acknowledges clients’ contribution to ‘what works’ in counselling conversations, and at the same time contributes to further rich description of clients’ preferred stories of identity.
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Decentring Research Practice— Andrew Tootell
$9.90This article presents a brief account of one therapist’s journey to develop a research approach that was consistent with their values and practice as a therapist. This journey led to the development of a ‘De-centred research practice’ based upon an ethic of collaboration and equity, which seeks to document the ‘local’ skills and knowledge of the research participants.
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Working for Ethical Research in Practice— Kathie Crocket, Wendy Drewery, Wally McKenzie, Lorraine Smith, John Winslade
$5.50As counsellor educators, therapists, and researchers practising from social constructionist understandings within a university context, we are called frequently to think about the interrelationships between practice and research. In this paper, we suggest that as practices, research and therapy have much in common. Furthermore, we explore the possibilities that are created when both therapy and research are considered to be ethical relational practices.
Listening to Tileah I was provoked to contemplate my own use of language when working with clients. I enjoy the narrative model of practice and I am aware that for some there is definitely stigma attached to the process of counselling or therapy. I have only had one experience of working with an Indigenous person as a client and I will be sure to look at my use of language. I like the idea of it just being a yarn, it takes the pressure and onus off of the client to do something.
Hello:
This is Andrea from Toronto.
I found particularly helpful the discussion in the FAQ around the use of metaphors of conflict and combat. I expect to be working in healthcare settings with critically ill patients and their loved ones (mostly children and parents), and I anticipate hearing them use these kinds of combative metaphors during our conversations. I also anticipate meeting many people who are mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted from “fighting” these problems. I appreciated the comments in the FAQ about combative metaphors, and the suggestions around exploring other kinds of metaphors which may be less conflict-laden and draining on their emotional resources. Thanks again for making this material available!
I have started to use collaboration with clients when I am asked to write a report. I ask clients what they see as the areas of change and challenge of which they want others to be aware. I also at times share my report with the client first to be sure it accurately reflects their experience. In this way they are both acknowledging their ongoing journey and being acknowledged for the work they have done.
Mike here, in London. I too was interested in “We were unwittingly adjusting people to poverty or other forms of injustice by addressing their symptoms, without affecting broader social and structural change.” It’s a really difficult question. I was involved for about 10 years in working with people suffering from homelessness. Sue Mann’s story really rang true for me. One thing I was involved in was a choir for marginalised people, literally helping them find their voices. That, I felt, was useful, and collaborative. But I have always been suspicious of things like distributing left-over sandwiches to people sleeping rough on the street, as if that made it OK for them to be there as long as we give them some stale sandwiches. Or giving them tents or sleeping bags. What message does it send? Even though it may be well-meaning.
Hi, I’m Mike. I work as a couples counsellor in London, England. My main training was 50% psychodynamic and 50% systemic. Narrative work was touched on briefly, for one module, and I am looking forward to learning more. Couples certainly do bring stories, often rather thin stories. “My partner is selfish.” Or “My partner had an affair”. Full stop. That’s all there is to know. Even in happy couples, people seem to get shaped into rather thin roles: this partner is the one who’s good with people, that partner is the one who’s good with money, this one cooks, that one drives. If the relationship ends, they may discover, actually *I* also can drive, cook, manage my money, make friends, I am a complete person.
I think it will be an important part of my practice to investigate with clients which elements of our systems (social, cultural, political, economic) that are contributing to or mitigating their problems and suffering. I was particularly struck by the following sentence from the Just Therapy article: “We were unwittingly adjusting people to poverty or other forms of injustice by addressing their symptoms, without affecting broader social and structural change.” I think it is incumbent upon those of us in helping professions to work with the people we are helping to begin addressing the systemic issues that are contributing to (or creating) their problems. Otherwise, we may fall into this trap of “adjusting people to injustice.”
Hello! My name is Andrea and I am a Masters student in a spiritual care program located in Toronto.
After reviewing this chapter, I’m reflecting upon the question that was raised: “how do we respond to grief when that grief has been caused by injustice?” and thinking about it in the context of working with seriously ill children and their families in a hospital/hospice setting. Patients and families in that setting also face grief that has been caused by injustice (in the form of incurable illness), and I see how the narrative metaphor can be used to help those families begin to reclaim their own lives in the face of tremendous loss caused by uncontrollable circumstances. I can see how the Articles of the Narrative Therapy Charter of Story-Telling Rights would be tremendously helpful when working with patients and families as a framework for telling and receiving their stories about their lives and their problems.
For me, the material in this chapter also raises the question of how we can help to facilitate healing in a world where systems are seemingly becoming more unjust and creating deep suffering. My initial thought is that we continue to listen to each other’s stories with deep compassion, and the teachings of this course will help to provide us with new ideas and skills on how to do this.
Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk was incredible. The one line where she said “a single story creates a stereotype. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete”. This blew my mind. I am ashamed to have ever participated in the single story belief of anyone let alone whole cultures, communities and countries , continents and so on. I know that moving forward I will endeavour to hear more stories and to encourage others to tell their story. I am about to run a photovoice narrative project to do just this, give a whole community the opportunity to change their stereotype.
“Narrative therapy doesn’t believe in a ‘whole self’ which needs to be integrated but rather that our identities are made up of many stories, and that these stories are constantly changing.”
I like this, I find it very compatible with my beliefs as a Buddhist. In Buddhism, as I understand it, mistaken beliefs about a solid, fixed “self” are the source of our suffering.
I work with couples using EFT for couples, and in that approach, there is a big emphasis on externalising the problem as “the cycle that you get trapped in”, and encouraging couples to come up with their own name for it.
Thank you for this. I am a counsellor, and trying to make as much as possible of my notes “in quotes”, that is, writing down things that the clients said. And not my own opinions.
hello
I the ED of a Friendship Center in Terrace, BC where were mostly target the indigenous population in our city of 12,000. I found your video interesting and something that we may want to try. Havee you been able to to do any follow ups studies to gage the long term effect of your program?
Regards
Cal Albright
ED
Kermode Friendship Center
http://www.keremodefriendship.ca
Terrace, BC
Canada
Hi Cal, thanks for the interest. At this point the only followup has been through conversations with with people who return to volunteer on additional walks or engage with our other programs.
However, a group of fourth year medical students at a local university have offered to run a pre and post measured study / report in 2020 as part of their studies which should be interesting.
Let me know if you would like more information.
CD
Thank you for this overview of Narrative Therapy. I am returning to practice after some time away, and these reminders are timely and appreciated.
Hi Chris
I really enjoyed watching your video about Narrative Walks. My project is based in Blaenau Gwent, in South Wales, Uk. I’m wondering whether I might use such an approach in my work with our Youth Service, who support young people between the ages of 11 and 25. Have you any thoughts on this? Are there any resources available, either free or to purchase?
Best wishes
Paul
Hi Paul, m
Much of my early attempts of the program were with the 15-20 year old age bracket and I found it worked really well. When I recently had an opportunity to run the program again with this age bracket – I extended the finish time so that could spend more time at the stop points and have a fire at the last resting place to talk about our intentions after the walk. This meant that we used head torches for the 2km which added a bit of a sense of theatre to the day. It was pretty cool.
If you email me on hello@embarkpsych.com I can send you the manual. Or ask any other questions via this page so others might share in the answers.
CD