The 'storied' helper: narrative ideas and practices in counselling and psychotherapy

This paper is intended as an introduction to the use of narrative ideas, languages and practices in counselling and psychotherapy. It explores the skills and knowledges that are involved in narrative ways of working for bothpractitioners and those who consult them. Counselling is understood as comprising a social process within a ‘storied world’. These ideas are illustrated through one particular ‘shortstory’. A narrative perspective enables us to consider the stories that are hidden as well as the stories that are privileged within the both contemporary cultural discourse and the professional discourses of counselling and psychotherapy.     

Developing skills in counselling and psychotherapy: a scoping review of Interpersonal Process Recall and Reflecting Team methods in initial therapist training

The authors conducted a scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature associated with Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) and Reflecting Team (RT) methods in order to find evidence for their use within skills development in therapist trainings. Inclusion criteria were: empirical research, reviews of empirical research, and responses to these; RT or IPR for skills development in counsellors/psychotherapists undertaking initial training. Six papers were identified (four IPR, two RT), all from the USA. Of the four IPR papers, three were themselves reviews, the fourth empirical paper being of poor methodological quality. There was some evidence that IPR is more valuable in developing reflective practice than in initial skills training. The small number of RT studies, of varying methodological quality, made it difficult to draw any conclusions about the appropriateness of this method for initial skills training. However, the method appeared to have been broadly welcomed by students for its potential to be inclusive and collaborative. The limitations of this current review are acknowledged, and research recommendations made.     

Learnings from a qualitative study into counselling supervision: Listening to supervisor and supervisee

This paper draws on the authors' recent experience of piloting qualitative research into helpful and hindering events in supervision using interpersonal process recall with three supervisor‐supervisee dyads. This paper presents in some detail the findings from one dyad. The authors draw on their experience of the research to raise questions relating to ethics and methodology and the implications for practice are considered.     

Narrative Ideas for Consulting with Communities and Organizations: Ripples from the Gatherings

This paper reviews Michael White's early work with communities and extends ideas and practices from that work into the realm of consulting with organizations. We draw on Michael's writing and the records of two specific projects, as well as the recollections of team members in those projects, to describe how ideas and practices that were originally developed in working with individuals and families came to be applied in community settings. Specifically, we show how the central intention of the work is to use narrative ideas and practices in ways that allow communities to articulate, appreciate, document, utilize, and share their own knowledges of life and skills of living. We discuss the basic narrative ideas of stories, double listening, telling and retelling, making documents, and linking lives through shared purposes. For these projects, the teams developed structures that made it possible to use the basic idea with whole communities. We show how this work with communities has offered inspiration and ideas for our work in consulting to organizations. Finally, we describe and illustrate a particular way of working with organizations that carries the spirit of Michael's community work into situations requiring shorter blocks of time and more limited commitments than the original community contexts.     

Scaffolding a community of competent practitioners: positioning and agency in a training program for narrative counseling

This article explores the scaffolding of learning experiences in a postgraduate program in New Zealand that offers training in narrative counseling. The authors draw on positioning theory to identify student shifts in learning, and in agency, that help build an increasingly skilled and peer-generated context for learning. We describe a selection of exercises and one key assignment, introduced in the course in a particular order, that we believe enable students to step into positions of agency which ultimately allow a competent community of learner-practitioners to emerge. We also describe a dance of positioning for ourselves as teachers in this program. We suggest that, at any given time, our own positioning is tied up with possibilities for student positioning. Acknowledging relationships of power in classrooms, we explore ways to align poststructuralist counseling practices and the teaching of these practices.     

Using poetic documents: An exploration of poststructuralist ideas and poetic practices in narrative therapy

This paper explores the use of poetic documents in narrative therapy practice. It considers the ways in which feminist and poststructuralist ideas inform these practices and speculates about the extent to which a 'poetic-mindedness' might sustain the practice of double- (or multiple-) listening. The author illustrates these explorations with examples from her own therapeutic practice.     

Attachment narrative therapy: integrating ideas from narrative and attachment theory in systemic family therapy with eating disorders

This paper proposes that recent developments in attachment theory, especially the move to the study of representations, offers some helpful new directions for systemic family therapy. Some of the findings of a close association between early attachment experiences and the coherence of the narratives are reviewed. It is suggested that this offers a useful link for systemic approaches in showing how early interactions in families promote not only particular emotional attachment patterns, but also shape the content and style of the narratives that are formed. These implications are then explored in the context of work with anorexia nervosa. It is suggested that commonly observed patterns, such as avoidance of conflict and apparent difficulties in discussing relationships and feelings, is consistent with transgenerational experiences of insecure/avoidant attachments. Some implications for systemic therapy with families are outlined and an illustrative case study is offered.     

Couples Therapy with Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors (CSA) and their Partners: Establishing a Context for Witnessing

This article proposes a clinical practice for therapy with couples in which one partner suffered sexual abuse in childhood. Such couples often encounter unique difficulties with physical contact, intimacy, sexuality, communication, and trust, and their relationship dynamic may be marked by reenactments of past traumatic relational patterns. This clinical practice is founded on the assumption that establishing the witnessing lacking during the traumatic event in childhood can break the traumatic reenactments in adulthood, and spur recovery. The suggested practice may facilitate twofold witnessing: the couple's therapist witnesses the reenactments of the trauma in the couple's relationship; and the survivor's partner witnesses the trauma's effect on the survivor's personal life and relationship. Twofold witnessing can help break the cycle of traumatic reenactment and help the survivor integrate the events of her life into a more coherent, continuous narrative. The partner's presence also facilitates acknowledgement of what happened to the survivor, and helps the survivor elaborate on her stories of resistance, survival, and strength. Finally, each of the partners is able to appear more wholly and fully, and together to tell the preferred stories of their life as a couple, replete with the multiple relational patterns they wish to live, which may contradict the characteristics of the original trauma.     

Prediction,events, and the advantage of Agents: The processing of semantic roles in visual narrative

Agents consistently appear prior to Patients in sentences, manual signs, and drawings, and Agents are responded to faster when presented in visual depictions of events. We hypothesized that this “Agent advantage” reflects Agents’ role in event structure. We investigated this question by manipulating the depictions of Agents and Patients in preparatory actions in wordless visual narratives. We found that Agents elicited a greater degree of predictions regarding upcoming events than Patients, that Agents are viewed longer than Patients, independent of serial order, and that visual depictions of actions are processed more quickly following the presentation of an Agent vs. a Patient. Taken together these findings support the notion that Agents initiate the building of event representation. We suggest that Agent First orders facilitate the interpretation of events as they unfold and that the saliency of Agents within visual representations of events is driven by anticipation of upcoming events.     

The self in autobiographical memory: Effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

Contemporary models of autobiographical memory attribute a prominent role to the conceptualisation of the self. In an attempt to better understand the impact of the self as an organising feature of autobiographical memory, narratives of personal episodes were elicited, either after a questionnaire about the self (self-prime condition) or after a distractor task (control condition). Participants also wrote a narrative of a turning-point memory, which is by definition a self-focused narrative. Narratives were divided into propositions and analysed for the types of statements used. As predicted, when writing self-focused turning-point narratives participants included more statements relating to the meaning of an event and connecting it to the self, and fewer statements focusing on the who, what, where, and when of the narrative. Narratives written after the self-prime also demonstrated characteristics that were similar to turning-point narratives, although not on all measures. This shift in narrative focus in turning-point and self-primed memory narratives indicates an increased attempt to fulfil goals of coherence rather than correspondence (Conway, 2005). These findings lend insight into the nature of the relationship between the semantic conceptualisation of the self, and the process of retrieving event-specific knowledge in episodic memory.     

Values in Family Therapy Practice and Research: An Invitation for Reflection

Values have been shown to be a pervasive part of both marriage and family therapy (MFT) clinical practice and research. Yet, many therapists and researchers remain unclear about how values affect their work. This article examines the influence of Western philosophical assumptions and therapy traditions in light of current understandings of values in therapy. The influence of values in MFT research processes is similarly examined. Implications for how family therapy professionals can be more reflective and sophisticated in their understanding of values in clinical practice and scientific inquiry are discussed. Suggestions for addressing values in MFT training also are given.     

Failing to come to terms with things: a multi‐storied conversation about poststructuralist ideas and narrative practices in response to some of life's failures

This paper is designed to demonstrate some of the multi‐storied representational possibilities available to us as writers and practitioner‐researchers. It highlights some of the opportunities that are available to therapists and the people who consult them when they describe their conversational space as a site for co‐research. It illustrates the reciprocity present in conversations, including therapeutic conversations, by juxtaposing three stories that are interrelated retellings from different writing genres. In positioning poetic, storied and more academic/interpretative texts alongside each other, we hope to trouble the edges between academic and creative writing and also between practice and research. In placing these stories next to each other we seek to disrupt carefully contained ‘client’ and ‘therapist’ positions. We intend to question some current bereavement orthodoxies by demonstrating some less taken‐for‐granted ways in which people, living and dead, can and do continue to sustain each other's lives. We also hope to invite the readers and future writers of this journal to play alongside us in this conversation.     

Narrative, identity and mental health: How men with serious mental illness re-story their lives through sport and exercise

ObjectivesIt has been suggested that mental illness threatens identity and sense of self when one's personal story is displaced by dominant illness narratives focussing on deficit and dysfunction. One role of therapy, therefore, is to allow individuals to re-story their life in a more positive way which facilitates the reconstruction of a meaningful identity and sense of self. This research explores the ways in which involvement in sport and exercise may play a part in this process.DesignQualitative analysis of narrative.MethodWe used an interpretive approach which included semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 11 men with serious mental illness to gather stories of participants’ sport and exercise experiences. We conducted an analysis of narrative to explore the more general narrative types which were evident in participants’ accounts.FindingsWe identified three narrative types underlying participants’ talk about sport and exercise: (a) an action narrative about “going places and doing stuff”; (b) an achievement narrative about accomplishment through effort, skill or courage; (c) a relationship narrative of shared experiences to talk about combined with opportunities to talk about those experiences. We note that these narrative types differ significantly from—and may be considered alternatives to—dominant illness narratives.ConclusionThis study provides an alternative perspective on how sport and exercise can help men with serious mental illness by providing the narrative resources which enabled participants to re-story aspects of their lives through creating and sharing personal stories through which they rebuilt or maintained a positive sense of self and identity.     

Running a counselling project in primary schools: The role of training and supervision

The provision of mental health resources for young children within a school setting is a challenging proposal. An early project by Kolvin et al. (1981) showed the efficacy of a number of interventions for disturbed children selected by assessment criteria. This highlighted the gap between mental health and education. A small-scale project operating in inner London utilizing volunteer counsellbrs is evaluated to examine the training and supervision needs of such counsellors if they are to be used to provide counselling services for children and, at the same time, further their own qualifications.     

Applications of Collaborative Helping Maps: Supporting Professional Development,Supervision and Work Teams in Family‐Centered Practice

Collaborative, family‐centered practice has become an influential approach in helping efforts across a broad spectrum of human services. This article draws from previous work that presented a principle‐based, practice framework of Collaborative Helping and highlighted the use of Collaborative Helping maps as a tool both to help workers think their way through complex situations and to provide a guideline for constructive conversations between families and helpers about challenging issues. It builds on that work to examine ways to utilize Collaborative Helping maps at worker, supervisory, and organizational levels to enhance and sustain collaborative, family‐centered practice and weave its core values and principles into the everyday fabric of organizational cultures in human service agencies and government agencies that serve poor and marginalized families and communities.     

Career writing: Creative,expressive and reflective approaches to narrative identity formation in students in higher education

This study investigates whether creative, expressive, and reflective writing contributes to the formation of a narrative career identity that offers students in higher education a sense of meaning and direction. The contents of writing done by students who participated in 2 two-day writing courses before and after work placements and of a control group were compared. Employers were also asked to evaluate students' performance. Writing samples were analyzed using the Linguistic Index Word Count program and an instrument based on Dialogical Self Theory. Work-placement self-reports were gathered, examined, and used as anecdotal evidence presented in the form of case studies. The results show that career writing can promote the development of career identity and holds promise as a narrative career guidance approach.     

Gliding across the liminal space between counsellor and counselling researcher: Using collective biography practices in the teaching of counselling research methodologies

Aims: Drawing on their engagement in a specific collective biography research project, the co-authors aim to demonstrate how the weaving together of creative story-telling and the theory underlining collective biography practices resulted in an understanding of rhizomatic research methodologies from within the process. This paper aims to demonstrate one way in which research methodologies training can become more firmly embedded within counsellor training courses. Method: A collective of counselling students and a session tutor colleague used collective biography practices to research their memories of traversing the liminal space between ‘counsellor’ and ‘counselling researcher’. Alongside the resulting collective stories, a collaborative review of the research process examined our chosen ways of working within the project. Outcomes: Engaging in collective biography practices resulted in an experiential shift from ‘learning to do counselling research’ to ‘becoming counselling researchers’. Weaving together research processes and researcher reflexivity generated personal and professional learning. Ways in which these research methodologies complement core components of counselling training, within and beyond the teaching of research, were identified. Conclusions: Collective biography practices offer a way of introducing non-arboreal creative research methodologies into counsellor training. Careful consideration of potential challenges surrounding the introduction of these practices is required.     

Coping with challenge and hindrance stressors in teams: Behavioral,cognitive, and affective outcomes

The purpose of this study was to utilize the challenge–hindrance framework to examine the discrete and combined effects of different environmental stressors on behavioral, cognitive, and affective outcomes at the team level. Results from 83 teams working on a command and control simulation indicated that the introduction of a challenge stressor positively affected team performance and transactive memory. The introduction of a hindrance stressor negatively affected team performance and transactive memory and positively affected psychological withdrawal. When the hindrance stressor was combined with the challenge stressor, teams exhibited the lowest levels of performance and transactive memory, and the highest levels of psychological withdrawal. These effects were due to the adoption of specific coping strategies by team members. Implications are discussed, as well as limitations and directions for future research.     

The concept of culture in the contexts and practices of professional counselling: A constructivist perspective

In this paper we first describe two approaches to the concept of culture as they relate to counselling: the first approach emphasizes the organizational culture of the institution where the counsellor works; the second - the multicultural approach - calls for the recognition of the variety of ethnic cultural backgrounds of those involved in the counselling situation. Then, we present recent developments in the understanding of culture within constructivist perspectives. Last, we suggest a new orientation for counselling training, that of the professional counsellor as a cultural agent, one attentive to context and practices in all their complexities.