Are you seeking to join with young people who are experiencing ongoing despair and suffering? Find way of honouring the injustices and oppression they may be experiencing as well as the skills and wisdoms they are using to respond?If so, this book has been created with you in mind. In these pages, you will find hopeful and effective ideas and practices for re-authoring young people's lives. Also throughout is a determination to bring forth political considerations that situate lives in broader social and historical contexts. Whether you are new to narrative therapy or whether you are seeking to extend your narrative skills, we hope the moving stories of practice included in these pages will provide you, and the young people with whom you work, hope and possibilities beyond despair.
Re-authoring Life Narratives after Trauma is an interdisciplinary, specialist resource for traumatic stress researchers, practitioners and frontline workers who focus their research and work on communities from diverse religious backgrounds that are confronted with trauma, death, illness and other existential crises. This book aims to argue that the biopsychosocial approach is limited in scope when it comes to reaching a holistic model of assessing and treating individuals and communities that are exposed to trauma. The holistic model must integrate an understanding of and respect for the many forms of religion and spirituality that clients might have (Pargament 2011). It will not only bring a spiritual perspective into the psychotherapeutic dialogue, but it will also assist in dealing with the different demands in pastoral ministry as related to clinical and post-traumatic settings. The book makes several contributions to scholarship in the disciplines of, although not limited to, traumatic stress studies, pastoral care and counselling, psychology and psychiatry. Firstly, the book brings spirituality into the psychotherapeutic dialogue; traditionally, religious and spiritual topics have not been a welcome part of the psychotherapeutic dialogue. Secondly, it underscores the significance of documenting literary narratives as a means of healing trauma; writing about our traumas enables us to express things that cannot be conveyed in words, and to bring to light what has been suppressed and imagine new possibilities of living meaningfully in a changed world. Thirdly, it proposes an extension to the five-stage model of trauma and recovery coined by Judith Herman.
Michael White, one of the founders of narrative therapy, is back with his first major publication since the seminal Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, which Norton published in 1990. Maps of Narrative Practice provides brand new practical and accessible accounts of the major areas of narrative practice that White has developed and taught over the years, so that readers may feel confident when utilizing this approach in their practices. The book covers each of the five main areas of narrative practice-re-authoring conversations, remembering conversations, scaffolding conversations, definitional ceremony, externalizing conversations, and rite of passage maps-to provide readers with an explanation of the practical implications, for therapeutic growth, of these conversations. The book is filled with transcripts and commentary, skills training exercises for the reader, and charts that outline the conversations in diagrammatic form. Readers both well-versed in narrative therapy as well as those new to its concepts, will find this fresh statement of purpose and practice essential to their clinical work.
Are you looking for hope in your work with people who are considered to have chronic problems? Interested in literature and would like to find ways to express this in your work? Developing ideas for consulting with people who have survived abuse? Conscious of issues of power and want to make your practice more accountable to the people who seek your help? Interested in recent developments in social theory and their implications for practice? Or wanting to work collaboratively with others in the generation of new possibilities for their lives? If so, this book will be of relevance to you.
Reauthoring the World invites readers to a transformational way of being in the world. It translates the Narrative Therapy approach and practices for people outside the therapeutic context that are interested in shifting the stories of their own lives as well as the communities and organisations that they work in.
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ...to intervene at a policy level. He did feel that he was getting somewhere with these initiatives, and it wasn't this that he wished to focus on in our conversation. What concerned him most, and what he wanted to explore in our conversations, was that, despite his awareness of the context of the dilemmas he was facing in his work, he couldn't help but feel that he was failing the persons who were consulting him. It was this sense of failure that he believed was contributing most significantly to the despair that he had spoken of at the beginning of our conversation. As we talked, I asked Paul some questions: 'Despair isn't something that persons experience without having had some hope that things would be different. Could we talk about some of the hopes that you have for the lives of others, those hopes that you have experienced being frustrated?' 'You said that many of your agency's recent policy decisions go against what you stand for. Would you talk about some of your values and beliefs that are contradicted by these decisions?' 'In regard to the sense of failure that you have spoken of, could you say something about your appreciation of the possibilities that are available to persons in their lives?' In the conversation that was shaped by these questions, I also asked Paul to assist me to understand the history of these hopes, of these values, and of this understanding of the possibilities available to persons in their lives. In tracing the history of these hopes, values, beliefs, and this commitment to the exploration of the possibilities for persons' lives, among other things he spoke of his aunt's and uncle's contributions: of his aunt's habit of caring about the less fortunate and marginal people in her community, in ways emotional...
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.
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.
It is time. It is time to free our voice. To speak is a revolution. For too long, through the most intimate acts of erasure, women have been silenced. Now, women everywhere are breaking through the limits placed on us by family, society, and tradition. To find our voices. To make space for ourselves in this world. Now is the moment to reclaim what was once lost, stolen, forsaken, or abandoned. I Am Yours is about my fight to protect and free my voice from those who have sought to silence me, for the sake of creating a world where all voices are welcome and respected. Because the voice, without intimacy, will atrophy. We're in this together. You are mine, and I am yours.
