Therapeutic Letter Writing Campaigns: Creating Communities of Concern in Narrative Therapy

Stephen Madigan invented the idea of therapeutic letter writing campaigns as a way to assist people to re-remember lost aspects of themselves – through what he coined as ‘communities of concern’. The campaigns assist persons to be re-membered back towards membership systems of love and support from which the problem has dis-membered them from.  Creating letter writing campaigns through communities of concern was a therapeutic means to counter-balance the issue presented and restrained by the problem saturated story and the effects of this on selected memory. Campaigns recruited a community of re-membering and loving others who held on to preferred stories of the client, while the client was restrained by the problem. Their lettered stories often lived outside the professional and cultural inscription that defined the person suffering and were also stories that stood on the belief that change was possible.