Co-story-ing

Abstract

This article offers a guide for using collaborative story writing (co-story-ing), an assessment technique as well as a therapeutic intervention for children who demonstrate fears, extreme shyness and difficulty in establishing relationships. Co-story-ing draws from Gardner's Mutual Story Telling Technique. Co-story-ing guides clients as they develop a wider repertoire of strategies and explore the consequences of employing new strategies in a safe context, the story.     

Using Comedy to Explore Racial-Ethnic Identity with Clients: A Narrative Approach

ABSTRACT

The physical and mental health benefits of humor and comedy have been widely documented. This article presents a therapeutic framework outlining several clinical applications of comedy designed to facilitate client exploration of racial-ethnic identity. It also discusses how comedy can enhance narrative therapy approaches by serving as an engaging and effective tool for assisting clients in the process of externalizing storytelling, identifying exceptions to problems, and authoring new and positive stories about racial-ethnic identity.     

Utilizing a Music Listening Technique in Inpatient Psychiatric Group Counseling

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate through a hypothetical case example how counselors can utilize an expressive arts technique called music listening in inpatient psychiatric group counseling. The authors give a rationale to implement here-and-now interventions, specifically music listening, in response to the critique of current inpatient therapy in psychiatric hospitals following a shift from long-term inpatient psychiatric care to brief stabilization admissions.     

Acting Theory Applied to Counseling: Stanislavski Continues to Contribute to Psychic Healing

ABSTRACT

This article explores a specific aspect of Stanislavski’s methods of training actors to examine the potential benefits for helping clients in the cultivation of new perceptions through empathy, which may, in turn, help toward psychic healing. Stanislavski’s methods of training actors, which is rooted in understanding the human condition, are the underpinnings for most modern acting theories. This discussion builds an additional bridge between acting theory and counseling theory to investigate additional therapeutic benefits of acting in a clinical setting. This article adds to the conversation of the possibility of expanding applications of drama therapy based on specific aspects of acting theories.     

Emplotting the traumatic self: Narrative revision and the construction of coherence

Abstract

In this article we provide a constructivist‐narrative conceptualization of the origins and psychotherapeutic methods for treating trauma. We believe that the experience of trauma ensues when lived events outpace peoples’ abilities to emplot or narrate these events from the perspective of dominant life narratives. The sights, sounds, and smells associated with traumatic events preclude such emplotment. The therapeutic objectives of narrative therapy include finding ways to develop meanings for the trauma and subsequently to integrate these with the dominant narrative. Two case studies are provided to illustrate our conceptualization and therapeutic approach.     

The Wisdom Jar

Abstract

Supervisors can use a wide range of skills and exercises when terminating counseling supervision with supervisees at the end of a practicum class. This article presents an experiential creative activity, the Wisdom Jar, as a metaphor for discussing specific lessons with supervisees. The use of creativity and the integration of symbols and metaphors provided supervisees with images to reflect upon after completing a counseling practicum clinical experience.     

Pray erformance

Abstract

Female prisoners in recovery may anticipate defeat when projecting possibilities for their future hopes and dreams. These clients often identify with and attach to the role of prisoner and addict. This article describes a 12-week group treatment program, titled by the author as “Prayerformance.” In this work, female prisoners in recovery have an opportunity to connect spiritually and psychologically by using techniques like role play, improvisation, spontaneity training, storytelling, character development, mask work, and movement.     

Inventing a “Mid Level” to Make Ends Meet: Reasoning between the Levels of Complexity

Abstract

This study provided 5 weeks of direct strategy instruction about narrative elements and relations in 4 first-grade classrooms (n = 83), all with materials that made minimal decoding demands on children's reading. Two comparison classrooms (n = 40) received comparable instruction on language development and poetry. A battery of assessments given at pretest and posttest showed that the intervention benefited children's comprehension of narratives in the picture-viewing modality as well as narrative meaning-making in listening comprehension and oral production modalities. Understanding and recall of main narrative elements improved, as did inference-making skills and understanding the psychological aspects of stories. Implications for enhancing beginning readers’ emerging narrative knowledge in primary grade classrooms are discussed.     

Universal stories: How narratives satisfy core motives

Abstract

For millennia, narratives have been a primary mode of oral discourse. Narrative presentation of information has been shown to facilitate interpersonal and group communication. However, research indicates that narratives are more than merely an adaptive mode of communication. Narrative is a fundamental – and perhaps foundational – element of social and cultural life. The present article posits that the centrality of narrative in social life is due to narrative’s ability to help satisfy the five core social motives, as identified by Fiske belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust. In so doing, this article reviews empirical and theoretical work examining basic narrative processes, autobiographical narratives, and entertainment narrative consumption to illustrate how narrative thought helps to satisfies core human motives and in turn, how the narrative construction process informs self and identity formation.     

Facing the Music

Abstract

This article outlines how group practitioners can harness creative strategies to assist addicted clients in verbalizing and addressing the losses associated with addictive disorders. This article overviews the implementation of an experiential process that includes a warm up activity, a psychodrama, and utilization of empty chair techniques to address addiction related grief and loss. In addition, these models assist clients to discuss change and healing from the interpersonal devastation of addiction. Finally, the appropriate use and timing of these models are discussed and a case study is included to illustrate these principles in action.     

Foster Care Chronicles: Use of the Arts for Teens Aging Out of the Foster Care System

This article describes the use of narrative and drama therapies as creative therapeutic interventions to engage and assist vulnerable youth. Foster Care Chronicles was a collaboration between a state university social work program and a local department of social services in a child welfare unit. This 2-year exploratory project employed an innovative approach to work with foster care youth, all of whom were within 2 years of “aging out” of care. The project utilized narrative therapy and drama therapy in a group setting by building on youths’ individual and collective strengths in writing, speaking, and acting. As these youth assessed their participation in this program, their reflections addressed developing aspects of self-image, self-healing, self-efficacy, and lessons learned.     

Relation between referential and reflexive processes: an explorative study

Referential process (RP) has been investigated in the psychotherapy domain to understand the mechanisms underlying clients’ problems and identify the process of change. RP shares some theoretical assumptions with another relevant construct in the psychotherapy domain, i.e. the reflexive process. However, the relation between RP and reflexive process has never been explored through an operational approach. This study aims at analyzing the relation between referential activity (RA), conceived as the linguistic index of RP, and two reflexive processes of different complexity, reflection and reflexivity, in a group counseling program. Audio recordings from seven group counseling sessions were analyzed through two procedures: (1) the latest Italian version of the computerized text analysis software developed for analyzing RA, and (2) the analysis of the narrative functions of reflection and reflexivity. Accordingly, reflection processes were mainly identified in the narrative excerpts by adopting the conventional procedure for RA software-based analysis and combining it with the analysis of the narrative functions. More complex processes of reflexivity were detected when the analysis of the narrative functions was combined with an innovative procedure for RA software-based analysis. Overall, these data indicated that a high level of RA is essential for activating reflexive processes of higher complexity.     

Disability sport and activist identities: A qualitative study of narratives of activism among elite athletes’ with impairment

ObjectivesSport and exercise psychology has recently expanded into how it can be utilized to enable social missions like activism. No research, however, has examined activist identities among disabled, elite athletes. This article is the first to engage with this new and complex issue by examining narratives of activism amongst elite athletes with impairment and their adoption/rejection of various activist identities.MethodsThirty-six people were recruited using maximum variation and criterion-based purposive sampling strategies. Data was collected using interviews and fieldwork observations (e.g., observation and social media material). The large data set was rigorously analyzed using a narrative thematic analysis.ResultsAll participants adopted an athletic identity and an athletic activist identity. A small group also adopted a political activist identity that was concerned with challenging disablism. The athletes’ reasons for adopting or eschewing activist identities are identified and connections made to organizational stressors, interpellation, feeling, emotional regulation, narrative, habitus, health and wellbeing. Also revealed is the impact that sporting retirement had on activist identity construction.ConclusionsThe article makes a novel research contribution by revealing two different activist identities within the context of disability sport and what social functions each identity might serve. It also significantly develops knowledge by revealing various organizational stressors experienced by disabled athletes, the importance of embodied feelings and emotional regulation in activist identity construction, the damage that social oppression can have on wellbeing following sporting retirement, and the positive possibilities retiring may have for developing different identities. Practical suggestions are as well offered.     

Story telling: crafting identities

ABSTRACT

Career guidance clients are seeking to craft new identities that better position them in their careers. The focus of the present article is on narrative career counselling's potential contribution in providing a meaningful and useful experience for career guidance clients. To illustrate the potential of narrative career counselling, the story telling approach is offered as an example to illustrate how identity can be crafted in contextually and culturally sensitive ways.     

Narrative inquiry in sport and exercise psychology: What can it mean,and why might we do it?

ObjectivesNarrative inquiry is one form of qualitative research that is burgeoning within the human sciences. However, in sport and exercise psychology little attention has been given to this approach. In this article, we seek to rectify this situation by offering an understanding of what narrative inquiry can be.ResultsIn order to begin to better understand what narrative inquiry as a methodology can be, and gain some theoretical purchase on a difficult field without aiming for a final answer, we first define narrative. Next, a distillation of guiding assumptions and characteristics are offered. Finally, some reasons as to why narratives may be of benefit for the field of sport and exercise psychology are highlighted.ConclusionNarrative inquiry is a useful and important way of theorising and doing research in the domain of sport and exercise psychology. It should not, however, be taken up or practised simply because it is new or fashionable. Informed, principled, and responsible choices must be made by researchers and applied professionals about why and when they might engage with narrative inquiry should they wish to do so.     

Soup,Stitches, and Song

Abstract

This article discusses ways that clinical practitioners can utilize creative strategies in working with clients who are experiencing grief following the death of their adolescent child. It presents a brief literature review regarding this specific type of parental grief as well as practical and helpful ways to utilize books, songs, and tangible projects in the grieving process.     

‘Listen to the story’: narrative and song in Rāmcand Bālak’s Sītācarit,a Jain Rāmāyaṇa in Brajbhāṣā

ABSTRACT

This article explores the different modes of song in the Sītācarit, a seventeenth-century Brajbhā?ā telling of the Jain Rāmāya?a, and suggests a general understanding of the relationship between song and narrative that sees the songs as constituting an added narrative layer. It notes how the modes of song in the Sītācarit evoke different performative settings and aesthetic influences, ranging from the educational to the courtly, and suggests how the intertwining of narrative and song lets us glimpse the poetics of devotion through the lens of the circulation of literary and devotional trends in early modern North India.     

Challenges of Being Simultaneously Gay or Lesbian and Spiritual and/or Religious: A Narrative Perspective

The purpose of this article is to describe the struggle that gays and lesbians face as they incorporate their sexual orientation and identity within the context of an existing religious or spiritual identity. An overview of the religious and spiritual context that makes individuals unique will be followed by how the narrative perspective can help individuals who identify themselves as gay or lesbian with their struggle for identity. Finally, new narrative directions will be suggested for marriage and family therapists and their work with gays and lesbians who are confronted with these issues.