2009: Issue 4 Archives - The Dulwich Centre

Tales of travels across languages: Languages and their anti-languages— Marcela Polanco and David Epston

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:14:22 +0000

This paper is a collaboration between an apprentice bilingual translator/narrative therapist (Marcela) and one of the originators of narrative therapy (David). Studies of translation and bilingualism offer interesting and useful contributions to the renewal of narrative therapy. As narrative ideas migrate cultures, these crossings can enrich, acculturate, and diversify narrative practices. At the same time, considerations of bilinguality or multilinguality can influence our practice within languages. The example of therapeutic practice that is offered illustrates how narrative therapeutic conversations can move between and across multiple namings of people’s predicaments. In this process, understandings need not be ironed out, as often happens in monolingual conversations. Instead, multilinguality puts names in play as transitory constructions, susceptible to renewal or reinvention.

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Team Garra: Using the Team of Life to facilitate conversations with Brazilians living in Sydney— Viviane Oliveira

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:08:57 +0000

This paper outlines an application of the ‘rites of passage’ and ‘migration of identity’ metaphors from narrative therapy and community work, in conversations with Brazilian immigrants in Australia. The author also employed the ‘Team of Life’ methodology, which was highly culturally-relevant, given the Brazilian people’s love of soccer/football, as well as the ‘narrative timelines’ methodology and ‘definitional ceremony’ map of narrative practice.

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Finding resiliency, standing tall: Exploring trauma, hardship, and healing with refugees— Michael Boucher

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:06:35 +0000

This document records some of the traumas and hardships faced by refugees living in Rochester, New York. Along with the effects of these hardships, the document also records the accomplishments that refugees have made, and how refugee communities resist the effects of trauma and hardship, as well as what sustains them. Finally, the document records some things the refugees wanted people working in social services, as well as members of the broader community, to know about refugee experience. This document was prepared using methodologies and ideas from collective narrative practice, including collective narrative timelines, collective narrative documents, ‘double-listening’, and recruiting audiences.

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Narrative work and the metaphor of ‘home’— Katie Howells

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:03:43 +0000

This paper explores how homes – both as physical places and as metaphors– can be taken up in narrative therapy practice. The author first explores various meanings that people attribute to the concept of ‘home’, and then outlines some options for the relevance of the home metaphor to various maps of narrative practice. The paper then recounts three examples drawn from practice: first, re-authoring conversations with a couple leaving one way of living, dominated by addiction, to reclaim another; second, the documentation of the skills and knowledges of a young woman working to ‘stay close to home’ in dealing with anorexia; and, finally, a remembering conversation supported by the metaphor of home with a woman wanting to review her husband’s membership of her ‘club of life’ following his infidelity.

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From print to e-books in therapeutic story writing: A mother’s tale— Nikki Evans

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:00:09 +0000

This paper describes how narrative therapy provided the background for developing a resource for troubled children and young people. The resource, Eloise’s excellent experiment, is the result of combining the professional with the personal as the author and her daughter used their storytelling, writing, and illustrative skills to tame ‘The Worries’.

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The ‘Mighty Oak’: Using the ‘Tree of Life’ methodology as a gateway to the other maps of narrative practice— Janelle Dickson

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 03:56:50 +0000

This paper describes using the ‘Tree of Life’ narrative therapy methodology with a young man who was experiencing bullying, and had himself engaged in anger and aggression. This thorough account of narrative practice shows how a ‘stand-alone’ methodology like the Tree of Life can be a ‘jumping off’ point for using the other maps of narrative practice, including re-authoring conversations, re-membering conversations, definitional ceremony, and therapeutic documents. In this way, the ‘Tree of Life’ methodology provides entry points to other narrative conversations and practices, which blend into each other and complement each other for an effective therapeutic engagement.

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Parent–teen conflict dissolution— Ninetta Tavano

Dulwich — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 03:53:08 +0000

This paper describes how Michael White’s ‘conflict dissolution map’ can be used with parents and adolescents to assist in ‘dissolving’ conflict in narrative therapy sessions. The author explains how the practice of ‘repositioning’ is combined with definitional ceremony and outsider-witness practices to create conversations that allow family members to re-engage in ways that are based on acceptance, care and respect.

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