Narrative Therapy Consultation I

I just had a consultation session with my course tutor, Sue Mitchell, in Australia and had to put this down for my own record.

I appreciate the "absent but implicit" in my work but find myself fumbling to uncover more of it for my clients. What I learned is that the presence of significant others in the session can distract me from being curious, from asking more about the importance of the absent but implicit.  In a mother and son session, the mum's complaints about the son distracted me into trying to defend the boy.  What might be helpful for me is to set the context for them so that the mum becomes an audience to the son's telling.

In terms of the practice of Outsider Witness Group (OWG), I thought I knew the differences between this and the traditional forms of reflecting.  The challenge for me was finding the right time to use it.  However, one fine distinction escaped my notice.  This difference was not in the therapy room itself but occured outside of it.  The traditional practice of reflecting was used to help "unstuck" a therapist, so when Sue was explaining that OWG is used to help strengthen and develop the evolving preferred story and to keep it alive, it dawned on me that it was not about timing the use of OWG but that I had unknowingly positioned it as an "unstucking" practice.  I'm now more aware of other counselling discourses that permeate my clinical practice and am more prepared to navigate my practice through the uneven terrains ahead.

In the conversations with Sue, she also supported me in finding out what I hope for my clients.  I hope that clients can be liberated from judgement, this judgement can be self-judgement or judgement by others.

Re-authoring Conversations

I am doing a series of reflections as part of a post graduate course on Narrative Therapy.  Overall there will be about ten reflection papers on various concepts and practices that currently form and shape Narrative Therapy.

This is my first encounter with re-authoring in a collective manner used as a means of achieving unity in diversity (Denborough, 2008).  I began to wonder how such a collective approach could be used in group work with a diverse group of youths who come from the same school but from different classes.  Thus their age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and family backgrounds are highly diverse.  These youths were referred due to the possible risk of early school leaving. 

One of the common themes that these youths experience is negative peer influence and reading the article opened up a possible approach for tracing the history of this peer influence in their lives.  Some of these youths wish to resist peer influence but seem to have only vague ideas.   Based on the use of collective timelines done by Alfonso Diaz-Smith (Denborough, 2008), I formed some of these draft questions that could be asked to facilitate a re-authoring process.  During the process of drawing out these timelines, I hope to uncover the vagueness to reveal a richer story around resisting negative peer influence.

Resisting Negative Peer Influence

·        When did you realize Negative Peer Influence can create trouble for you?

·        Who saw that Negative Peer Influence was creating trouble for you?

·        How did it affect the people who see you in trouble?

·        When did you start thinking about resisting Negative Peer Influence?

·        Why would you want to resist Negative Peer Influence?

·        Who would support you in resisting Negative Peer Influence?

·        How have such people supported you? And why would they support you?

·        What does all this say about you, your values or beliefs?

·        When did you try resisting Negative Peer Influence?

·        What have you tried and what are some ways you may want to try?

·        What would you do differently after hearing everyone’s stories?

I like the idea that a collective effort has the potential to dissolve some of the barriers between these youths through a shared sense of purpose.  Most of the times these youths may feel isolated, especially boys who are brought up in a culture where they are expected to act tough and handle their own problems.  When they try to tackle problems on their own it can lead to a sense of despair and thus they succumb to peer pressure. 

Youths are at an age where identity development usually takes place, and a collective timeline project is another avenue for socially constructing such identities.  There are possibilities for re-membering and outsider-witness group practices to further strengthen the plot (Carey & Russell, 2003).

References

Carey, M., & Russell, S. (2003). Re-Authoring: Some answers to commonly asked questions. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work(3), pp 19-43.

Denborough, D. (2008). Chapter 7: Collective narrative timelines and maps of history. In Collective Narrative Practice: Responding to individuals, groups and communities who have experienced trauma.