Using the Soundtrack of Your Life to engage with young people — Ian Maund

This article is made up of two elements. First, the development of the Soundtrack of Your Life (SOYL) narrative therapy methodology. Second, a practice story that trials its application. SOYL uses folk psychology to engage young people in narrative interactions. It was created to incorporate many narrative therapy techniques, including externalising, experience-near description questions, identifying survival skills and responses to a problem, re-authoring, re-membering, social histories and outsider witnessing. SOYL was trialled as an engagement tool with a young Aboriginal boy who was entrenched in the youth justice system. The methodology facilitated meaningful engagement, unique outcomes, the development of a preferred story line and reconnection, for the boy and his family, to a lost loved one.