Live Workshop: Developing Questions #8 – Receiving client stories & session note taking
About this Session
VSNT faculty Helene Grau, Stephen Madigan & David Marsten and the membership watch a 5 minute video clip of Michael White discussing the structure of stories and a 10 minute video tape of how Stephen tracks stories and the practice knowledge and structure these stories are received into.
Date
May 29, 2020 at 9:00 am - 10:00 amPacific Time
Organizer
VSNT.live & the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy
Comments (2)
Miss the last session? Catch up
Thanking the membership for all the lively discussion we had today. The receiving structure each narrative therapist constructs on how we listen to, and where we place client stories is SO vitally important to our training and practice. Much more discussion is needed.At this point, I’m thinking that each of us might want to draw out the four most important practice foundations that provide the home and structure for these stories to be received. The practice, meaning and art of double listening is one of the foundations for me. Cheers.
This really got me thinking – for me the foundational ideas are underpinned by ethics and my values (such as not pathologising people, always exploring relational, cultural context and its impact on problem, not imposing meaning or advice or generating a sense of failure in the conversation and many other precious ideas and practices) . I try to stay alert to any moving away from these values by noticing when I start to feel any regret or discomfort about the impact of my work or questions or the way a conversation is going. It’s like a kind of alarm signal that brings me back and I think Michaels ideas of pain as testimony and absent but implicit are helpful here- if I’ve taken a ‘wrong’ turn in a conversation and it jars or feels wrong, what value am I violating that I hold dear? Or for the family, why didn’t the question feel ok?
I also agree with David that new ideas come into the foundations/ receiving structures all the time.
Thanks again for your discussion and thoughts and providing this space to think and develop – its just brilliant .