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For me, there9s no limit to how you could use wonderfulness inquiries. If you
think about it, it9s about believing that people are not their problems. The
problem is the problem. It9s a whole way of thinking about people, of operating
inside of that stance, which is quite different. It9s like a doorway into another
country than traditional psychotherapy interviews. I9m not meaning to give
traditional psychotherapy a bad name at all—it9s just that it9s a very different
orientation.
I don't have a playroom at present, but I can see so many options for kids for that.
What9s important to remember is the audience. What9s important is that the child
is hearing this or the young person is hearing this from others; the importance is
that it9s brought to life. I9d be doing that with parents or other people in the room
co-creating that story with a sandtray or puppets. I9m very, very playful in my
practice, which is the key to narrative therapy with children. The foundational
book in narrative therapy for working with children is called Playful Approaches to
Serious Problems.
I was talking on the phone this morning with the mother and her five-year-old
little boy, who I will call Eli. I met with them about six months ago, and he was
dealing with enormous fear about being on his own in the house and at school,
and it came upon him from seemingly nowhere. What we did was to bring a lot of
playfulness into how we engaged with the problem, because the important thing
to remember about wonderfulness inquiries is that they9re just the beginning.
You9re bringing forth stories of someone9s wonderfulnesses so you can then
engage those in standing up to the problem. Otherwise, to quote Tom Carlson,
you just end up with a cute interview.
But where does it go in terms of engaging with the problem? With this little boy
we came up with all sorts of imaginative ways of engaging with the problem, and
one of them was that he and his father were going to make tiger masks and go
out in the garden to scare the fears away because he had identified that the fears
came from the garden, and he actually told me in the first interview that an alien
had come down and taken one of the worries out of the tree in the garden.
Kay Ingamells on the Wonderfulness Interview in Narrative Practice
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, August 2026 Release, p. 94-110.
www.journalcnt.com
