Counterviewing Injurious Speech Acts: Destabilising Eight Conversational Habits of Highly Effective Problems— Stephen Madigan

This paper discusses eight internalised injurious speech habits that contribute to the existence and maintenance of problems in people’s lives. The speech habits discussed are self-surveillance/audience, illegitimacy, escalating fear, negative imagination/invidious comparison, internalised bickering, hopelessness, perfection and paralysing guilt. The paper also provides a full discussion on the practice of deconstructing and destabilising these discursive habits. This process includes exposing and locating dialogic habits, counterviewing longstanding problem descriptions, re-remembering aspects of clients’ lives existing outside of the problem descriptions of them, and revitalising possibility and appreciation through therapeutic conversations.