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.