Timing Disclosure Sessions: Adding a Narrative Perspective to Clinical Work with Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Though the literature on the diagnosis and treatment of survivors of childhood sexual abuse has burgeoned in the last 20 years, relatively little guidance is available in the popular or professional literature to assist clients or therapists about issues of disclosure of this abuse to family members. When authors explicitly focus on disclosure, the timing of such disclosure is usually framed within a psychological and/or interpersonal perspective. In this article, we suggest that attention to characteristics of the sexual abuse narrative itself offers an important additional resource to guide decision making with respect to disclosure. We also describe ways that a narrative approach to disclosure can produce empowering conversational practices. A detailed case example provides the clinical material to illustrate this narrative approach to disclosure.     

The Small and the Ordinary: The Daily Practice of a Postmodern Narrative Therapy

In this article, I contrast assumptions of a modernist worldview and a postmodern worldview as they relate to clinical practice. Two exercises are described that help therapists develop insight into and practice with the kind of thinking that is consistent with a postmodern narrative clinical practice. Particular attention is paid to the ways that even the small and the ordinary — single words, single gestures, minor asides, trivial actions — can provide opportunities for generating new meanings. Five concepts that I routinely use in my professional and personal life and that are consistent with a postmodern narrative practice — discourse, externalizing the internalized discourse, exceptions, power as the means to produce a consensus, and characteristics of narrative — are illustrated.     

Reasonable Hope: Construct, Clinical Applications, and Supports

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full-text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ).
Hope may be the most laden shorthand term of all time. Everyone wants it; few know how to articulate what it is. Although family therapists frequently work to restore hope with hopeless families, they have contributed little to the abundant literature on hope. I present a new conceptualization of hope—reasonable hope—that reflects how family therapists think and practice. By subscribing to reasonable hope, clinicians enhance their ability to offer accompaniment and bear witness to clients. I describe clinical practices that, informed by reasonable hope, also facilitate its cocreation. Finally, I suggest supports for clinicians who practice reasonable hope.     

Family Awareness for Nonclinicians: Participation in a Simulated Family as a Teaching Technique

This paper describes a course in family theory geared to "well" family members that combines didactic and experiential teaching techniques. A key feature of the course is that students participate in a simulated family for twelve weeks. Family therapists are skilled at using techniques that powerfully dramatize family process; they can provide a needed and useful service to the community by teaching the dynamics of families functioning to people who have a personal or professional interest in learning more about families.