Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography


Book Description

Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography takes a new pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in contemporary narrative therapy, based in autoethnography and storytelling. The individual client stories aim to paint each therapeutic meeting in such detail that the reader will come to feel as though they actually know the two or more people in the room. This approach moves beyond the standard narrative practice of teaching by transcripts and steps into teaching narrative therapy through autoethnography. The intention of these 'teaching tales' is to offer the reader an opportunity to enter into the very 'heart and soul' of narrative therapy practice, much like reading a novel has you enter into the lives of the characters that inhabit it. This work has been used by the authors in MA and PhD level classrooms, workshops, week-long intensive courses, and conferences around the world, where it has received commendations from both newcomer and veteran narrative therapists. The aim of this book is to introduce narrative therapy and the value of integrating autoethnographic methods to students and new clinicians. It can also serve as a useful tool for advanced teachers of narrative practices. In addition, it will appeal to established clinicians who are curious about narrative therapy (who may be looking to add it to their practice), as well as students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry and methods.




Narrative Practice: Continuing the Conversations


Book Description

Final thoughts from the now-deceased leader of narrative therapy. Michael White’s untimely death deprived therapists of a leading light. Here, available for the first time in book form, is a collection of the work he left behind—writings on topics dear to the psychotherapeutic world: turning points in therapy, conversations, resistance and therapist responsibility, couples therapy, and narrative responses to trauma.




Collaborative Writing and Psychotherapy


Book Description

Collaborative Writing and Psychotherapy delves into the relationship that develops between client and therapist as they embark on a collaborative autoethnographic writing practice. The book explores the notion that both client and therapist change as a result of engaging in a psychotherapeutic process. The dialogic approach allows both voices to be heard together in the exploration of autoethnographic methods (collaborative autoethnography and dialogic autoethnography) and creative-relational approaches. This book will encourage therapists to be more vulnerable with their own life experiences and how these shape and influence therapeutic encounters with clients. Additional contributions include the expansion of psychotherapeutic literature to explore co-creative (creative relational) methods, and to expand autoethnographic scholarship to include psychotherapy narratives. Finally, the book offers ideas to therapists who might want to develop the ‘fellow traveller’ aspect of their professional identity, either in working directly with clients, or as part of their reflective practice. This book will be suitable for therapists and scholars looking to explore the use of qualitative, autoethnographic and narrative methods in research and practice.




Unraveling


Book Description

Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal is an autoethnographic story that explores the intricate relationship among trauma, marginality, and mental health. It follows Mike Alvarez, a precocious gay teenager from an immigrant Filipino family, who loses his grip on reality as he succumbs to so-called mental illness. Divided into two parts, the first half of the book uses evocative storytelling and in-the-moment narration to capture the slow descent into anxiety, paranoia, depression, and suicidality, as experienced by the author during young adulthood. The second half of the book critically reflects upon the story through a series of analytic chapters. In these chapters, the author considers the role of narrative in cultivating empathy for the mentally ill, the psychiatric-industrial complex’s obstruction of that empathy, and the moral dilemmas autoethnographers face when writing about self, other, and the social world. This book will be suitable for scholars in the social sciences, communication studies, and healthcare, who study and use autoethnography in their research. It will also be of value to those interested in firsthand accounts of madness, as told by members of marginalized communities.




Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience


Book Description

Powerful ideas from narrative therapy can teach us how to create new life stories and promote change. Our lives and their pathways are not fixed in stone; instead they are shaped by story. The ways in which we understand and share the stories of our lives therefore make all the difference. If we tell stories that emphasize only desolation, then we become weaker. If we tell our stories in ways that make us stronger, we can soothe our losses and ease our sorrows. Learning how to re-envision the stories we tell about ourselves can make an enormous difference in the ways we live our lives. Drawing on wisdoms from the field of narrative therapy, this book is designed to help people rewrite and retell the stories of their lives. The book invites readers to take a new look at their own stories and to find significance in events often neglected, to find sparkling actions that are often discounted, and to find solutions to problems and predicaments in unexpected places. Readers are introduced to key ideas of narrative practice like the externalizing problems - 'the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem' -and the concept of "re-membering" one's life. Easy-to-understand examples and exercises demonstrate how these ideas have helped many people overcome intense hardship and will help readers make these techniques their own. The book also outlines practical strategies for reclaiming and celebrating one's experience in the face of specific challenges such as trauma, abuse, personal failure, grief, and aging. Filled with relatable examples, useful exercises, and informative illustrations, Retelling the Stories of Our Lives leads readers on a path to reclaim their past and re-envision their future.




Social Justice and Counseling


Book Description

Social Justice and Counseling represents the intersection between therapy, counseling, and social justice. The international roster of contributing researchers and practitioners demonstrate how social justice unfolds, utterance by utterance, in conversations that attend to social inequities, power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and more. Beginning with a critical interrogation of the concept of social justice itself, subsequent sections cover training and supervising from a social justice perspective, accessing local knowledge to privilege client voices, justice and gender, and anti-pathologizing and the politics of practice. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions for readers to engage experientially in what authors have offered. Students and practitioners alike will benefit from the postmodern, multicultural perspectives that underline each chapter.




Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography


Book Description

Awards Innovator Award for Outstanding Edited Collection, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Caucus, Central States Communication Association, 2023. Outstanding Book in Performance Studies and Autoethnography, Performance Studies and Autoethnography Division, Central States Communication Association, 2023. Book of the Year, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Communication Studies Division, National Communication Association, 2022. Book of the Year, Ethnography Division, National Communication Association, 2020. Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography showcases a collection of narrative and autoethnographic research that unpacks the complexity of gender at its intersections, i.e. by ability, race, sexuality, religion, beauty, geography, spatiality, community, performance, politics, socio-economic status, education, and many other markers of difference. The book focuses on gender as it is lived, chaperoned, and chaperones other social identity categories. It tells stories that reveal problematic gender binaries, promising gender futures, and everything in between—they ask us to rethink what we assume to be true, real, and normal about gender identity and expression. Each essay, written by both gender variant and cisgender scholars, explores cultural phenomena that create space for us to re-imagine, re-think, and create new ways of being. This book will be useful for undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional degree students, particularly in the fields of gender studies, qualitative methods, and communication theory.




An Evocative Autoethnography of Living Alongside Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)


Book Description

This ground-breaking book explores and explains the day-to-day realities of living long-term with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). ME is an acquired complex disorder characterised by a variety of symptoms affecting multiple systems of the body. Marked fatigue and weakness, sickness, cognitive dysfunction and symptom flare-up can follow any physical or cognitive exertion. It is estimated that there are 17-24 million sufferers worldwide. The author has lived with moderately severe ME for the last 18 years. Utilising autoethnography as a methodology and drawing on multidisciplinary social science theory, the book tells the story of the author’s own lived experiences of the illness, and how she sought to reimagine a ‘self’ or a life living alongside the illness, that could still be considered a ‘good life’. This autoethnographic book is beautifully and evocatively written. It is a work of scholarship that will be highly accessible to academic and other readers. It is also a comprehensive introduction to autoethnography as a methodology, but it is much more. The images and poetry complement the narrative discussion, and are exemplary as part of an approach that integrates creative work with academic argument. It illuminates the struggles of living with ME and how there can be sanctuary.




Narrative Means To Therapeutic Ends


Book Description

Starting from the assumption that people experience emotional problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not represent the truth, this volume outlines an approach to psychotherapy which encourages patients to take power over their problems.




Transformative Language Arts in Action


Book Description

Transformative Language Arts, an emerging field and profession, calls on us to use writing, storytelling, theater, music, expressive and other arts for social change, personal growth, and culture shift. In this landmark anthology, Transformative Language Artists share their stories, scholarship and practices for a more just and peaceful world, from a Hmong storyteller and spoken word artist weaving traditions with contemporary immigrant challenges in Philadelphia, to a playwright raising awareness of AIDS/HIV prevention. Read the stories, consider the questions raised, and find inspiration and tools in using words as a vehicle for transformation through essays on the challenge of dominant stories, public housing women writing for their lives, histories and communities at the margins, singing as political action, the convergence of theology and poetics, women's self-leadership, embodied writing, and healing the self, others, and nature through TLA. The anthology also includes “snapshots,” short features on transformative language artists who make their livings and lives working with people of all ages and backgrounds to speak their truths, and change their communities.