Narrative Therapy Approach

Okay, I confess: I am a bit in love with the narrative therapy approach to engaging with people and their communities.

“Narrative therapy seeks to be a respectful, non-blaming approach to counselling and community work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives. It views problems as separate from people and assumes people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives” (Alice Morgan, 2000 p.2).

For years I have been aware of and influenced by the foundational work by Michael White and the ever-evolving work by others at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, South Australia.  In October and November this year I was excited to finally attend both Level 1 & 2 Narrative Therapy Intensive courses there.  I literally found it hard to sit still with excitement!  Such luxury in this busy world to be able to set aside two full weeks to listen and learn from not only the facilitators including the wonderfully calm Jill Freedman, but also the diversely experienced participants:  Fifty people from all over Australia and the world including South Africa, Mexico, Denmark, China and America. Areas of practice included social work, counselling, psychology and education.  Again, the diversity of issues and communities these people worked with was inspiring and included people living with a disability, incarcerated people, survivors of torture & trauma, domestic violence (abusers and survivors), indigenous communities, sex therapy for couples, death & dying, family therapy just to name a few!

My early community engagement work drew from the likes of Jim Ife, Frank Tesoriero and Susan Kelly.  Now, by adding narrative therapy training to my community engagement toolkit I feel more confident than ever in the positive impact Engaging Solutions can have on individuals and communities.

Already, my recent training has bared fruit in my work!  I finished training in Adelaide on the Friday and I was lucky enough to have a final digital storytelling workshop session with a group on the Monday.  These final sessions are a time for individual participants to share their digital story with the other participants.  It is always a moving experience where people support each other.  So I took this opportunity to introduce some of the ‘outsider-witness four categories of enquiry’ ideas into this particular group (elderly people living independently in community housing units and experiencing social isolation).  While I always included verbal discussions in these sessions, this was the first time I invited participants to write notes to each other also.  The result was beautiful to watch.  One witness struck up a conversation with a storyteller with “It is not hard to tell from your story that you have endured a lot in your life yet can still see the funny side of life.  Maybe this is why your kindness shines through… Maybe we can all meet up for some humour some time?”