Examining the Use of Digital Storytelling and Immersion in a Multicultural Counseling Course

This article explored the use of digital storytelling as a method to support multicultural counseling competency. Thematic analysis examined the experiences of 9 students who created a digital story through an immersion activity in a multicultural counseling course. Qualitative data revealed 4 themes: (a) initial discomfort with technology, (b) initial reservations with group work, (c) digital storytelling as a learning tool, and (d) multicultural counseling competency. Recommendations for counselor education and future research are provided. Este artículo exploró el uso de la narrativa digital como método para apoyar la competencia en consejería multicultural. Un análisis temático examinó las experiencias de 9 estudiantes que crearon una historia digital mediante una actividad de inmersión en un curso de consejería multicultural. Los datos cualitativos revelaron 4 temas: (a) una carencia inicial de familiaridad con la tecnología, (b) reservas iniciales en cuanto al trabajo en equipo, (c) la narrativa digital como herramienta de aprendizaje y (d) la competencia en consejería multicultural. Se ofrecen recomendaciones para la educación de consejeros e investigaciones futuras.     

Disrupted narrative and narrative symbol

In this article a specific type of narrative, which often appears in analytic sessions, is discussed. It is characterized by a seemingly ordinary, everyday topic and by a peculiar disruption of the narrative flow. The threefold structure of this type of narrative is described, along with its main characteristics. One element of this type of narrative is very similar to symbolic content or complex symbolic structures, e.g. dreams, the sort of material that can be used for the purpose of interpretation. The similarities as well as the differences are elaborated in the article. Thanks to the observed general structure and ‘symbolic’ nature of some parts of the narrative, it is easy to notice some of the unconscious elements, which are not familiar to the patient's ego, and to make an interpretation. Because these elements are close to the threshold of consciousness, the patient willingly accepts an interpretation based on them. This is especially true for patients whose dominant function is thinking. A temporary, working name for this type of narrative is proposed in the article: ‘disrupted narrative’ ? and for its disruptive part ‘narrative symbol’.     

The Cocreation of Crazy Patchworks: Becoming Rhizomatic in Systemic Therapy

In the field of systemic therapy, there has been much discussion recently about the narrative self. This concept refers to the idea that the self is narratively constructed in and through the stories which someone tells about him/herself. The story is thereby not only viewed as a metaphor for selfhood: Selfhood is not compared to a story, it is a story. But what kind of story are we talking about here? If the self is a story, what does that story look like? These questions are explored in this article. Starting from the possibilities and limitations of traditional and postmodern visions on the self as a story, an alternative vision is illustrated. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, we not only create a useful view of the way narrative selfhood is constructed within a therapy context, but we also stimulate therapists to coconstruct—together with their clients—patchworks of self‐stories. By using story fragments of our own practice, we illustrate the rhizomatic thinking and its possibilities in therapy.     

Outsider Witness Groups as a Means of Professional Growth in Family Therapy Training: An Exploratory Qualitative Study

This exploratory qualitative study examines the experiences and meanings associated with family therapy trainees’ participation in the narrative practice of Outsider Witness Groups (OWG). At the Barcai Institute in Tel Aviv, we incorporate OWGs into our live clinical supervision courses. In some sessions, we offer the families undergoing therapy the opportunity to listen to the reflections of the group of trainees regarding what they witnessed during the session. Twenty-nine family therapy trainees participated in the study in five focus group interviews. Analysis of the interviews yielded four core themes regarding the trainees’ experiences: (i) Exploring the stance of the therapist; (ii) The art of listening; (iii) Reflection on hierarchy and boundary setting; and (iv) Negotiating self-disclosure. The findings indicate that family therapy trainees stand to benefit significantly in their professional journey, development, and growth from integrating OWG practices into their training. OWG fosters the development of critical reflectivity in trainees, including the deconstruction of common and taken-for-granted assumptions. It also fosters practices related to family therapy, and perhaps also to therapy in general. The findings also suggest that taking part in OWGs during training may contribute to family therapy trainees’ development of critical reflectivity as a means of introducing a more critical and political approach to therapy and developing their own preferred stories as therapists.     

Narrative Approaches to Organizational Development: A Case Study of Implementation of Collaborative Helping

Across North America, community agencies and state/provincial jurisdictions are embracing family‐centered approaches to service delivery that are grounded in strength‐based, culturally responsive, accountable partnerships with families. This article details a collaborative consultation process to initiate and sustain organizational change toward this effort. It draws on innovative ideas from narrative theory, organizational development, and implementation science to highlight a three component approach. This approach includes the use of appreciative inquiry focus groups to elicit existing best practices, the provision of clinical training, and ongoing coaching with practice leaders to build on those better moments and develop concrete practice frameworks, and leadership coaching and organizational consultation to develop organizational structures that institutionalize family‐centered practice. While the article uses a principle‐based practice framework, Collaborative Helping, to illustrate this process, the approach is applicable with a variety of clinical frameworks grounded in family‐centered values and principles.     

Constructing We‐ness: A Communal Coping Intervention for Couples Facing Chronic Illness

Communal coping occurs when relationship partners view a stressful health problem as “ours,” rather than yours or mine, and take collaborative action to deal with it. Although research employing linguistic (we‐talk) and other measures of communal coping demonstrates relevance to a variety of chronic illnesses, the literature offers little about how clinicians can actively promote we‐ness and teamwork to help patients and their partners achieve the health benefits this appears to confer. This paper highlights clinical and supporting scientific features of a narrative intervention designed to foster communal coping by couples in which one partner has a chronic illness. The illustrative illness is diabetes, but with modification the protocol is suitable for other chronic conditions as well. Grounded in systemic and narrative models of problem maintenance and change, the communal coping intervention represents a distillation of research and clinical experience with family consultation over several decades. In contrast to more directive and educational approaches, the intervention consists entirely of questions, with no direct suggestions or instruction about how patients, partners, or couples should change. These questions comprise 8 sequential modules (Coping Challenges, Trajectory and Focus, Illness as External Invader, You as a Couple, Past Teamwork in Overcoming Adversity, Present and Future Teamwork, Obstacles to Teamwork, and Wrap‐Up), described here in manual‐like detail.     

Exposing operations of power in supervisory relationships

Through a poststructural lens, we examine how power may show itself in relationships between supervisees and supervisors, producing both helpful and harmful effects. Drawing from our own experiences, as well as conversations with other members of our supervisory group, we demonstrate how privileged discourses around professional status, gender, and race may bring about difficulties including a sense of doubt, worry, inadequacy, and a fear of speaking up. We also illustrate how these difficulties can be addressed in a manner that may lessen their influence, while increasing supervisees' sense of agency.     

Collaborative helping maps: a tool to guide thinking and action in family-centered services

This article highlights "disciplined improvisation" as a metaphor for community-based work with multi-stressed families. It introduces Collaborative Helping maps as a tool that both helps workers think their way through complex situations with families and provides a structure to support constructive conversations between workers and families about challenging situations. The article illustrates this map through a clinical vignette and uses interviews with workers to highlight ways in which the map can both enhance worker thinking and support constructive conversations between workers and families about problems that could easily divide them and lead to polarization and escalating tension.     

Psychotherapy research: an interplay between inner and outer and a succession of meanings

Psychotherapy research is a rapidly developing area of study that aims to explore the integration of inner and outer conditions of an individual’s experience, the interplay between subjective and objective, as well as between individual and collective. Questions regarding a more integrative view and qualitative research in psychotherapy are discussed in the paper. The author introduces some ideas from the studies on psychotherapy effectiveness that were done at Vilnius University by a group of researchers who work in the ‘Centre for research on the psychodynamics of personality’. Clinical psychologists who hold a doctorate degree or who are in doctoral studies in the Department of Psychology at Vilnius University are members of this research group. The subjective understanding about healing episodes and the development of depth premises were the main tasks of these studies. Among other methods, the researchers used the drawing a picture of a healing moment and telling a psychotherapy story recalled by the client to collect data. Two examples of drawing a picture of a healing moment and one example of telling a therapy story are analyzed in the paper. The themes of subjective experience of renewal in psychotherapy as well as the multiplicity of experience and results in psychotherapy are discussed in the paper with case illustrations. This study showed that drawing a picture opens one more dimension of reflection and that it can be an appropriate tool for developing individual narratives as well. Authoring and re‐authoring one’s life narrative is accepted as part of a productive therapy as well as discovering one’s inner authorship. The ability to follow a succession of meanings, as well as a connection to nature and culture could be one of the ways of actualizing an integrative view in psychotherapy research.