JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 77
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of my own heart and spirit. And I could even feel my own life being
transformed along with the lives of the families who were portrayed in the
stories. I somehow felt lighter.
Reading the case stories and learning how to map them was incredibly
freeing. Through the mapping of my own work, I could now see that the
very spirit and heart of narrative therapy was alive in my own practice. I
became aware that I had been freed from following a scripted or step-bystep method of how to do narrative therapy.
The more stories I read, the more I realized how alive Narrative Therapy can
be. To me, narrative therapy became a living, breathing entity that we, as
therapists, can become part of. Narrative Therapy was no longer about
asking a specific set of questions or following a specific map. I believe it is
this epiphany that allowed me to be a narrative therapist rather than simply
doing it. It was completely freeing!
Learning how to map the work of others, rather than just learning to follow
an existing map, provided me with a sense of freedom that I had never felt
before.
The stories that I had read during the class gave them new life for me in my
work as a therapist. When I first heard about narrative therapy from one of
my professors, I immediately knew that there was something special about
it. It felt as if I had found a kindred spirit. Then, when I learned that there
was a map that I was supposed to follow, that kindred spirit started to get
lost. This backwards approach to learning narrative therapy through
exemplary tales was like a reunion of sorts. I could now clearly see how the
practices that were used by the storyteller therapists were born of their
deep care and concern for others.
Some final thoughts on pedagogy
When it comes to the practice of teaching learners to become therapists,
pedagogy or theories of learning have been a bit of an afterthought. Surprisingly,
very little attention has been paid, to the various disciplines that oversee the
teaching of future therapists, to the question of how someone comes to learn the
A Literary Means to Pedagogical Ends: A Review of Fortuitous Outcomes
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2025 Release, p. 63-78.
www.journalnft.com
