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We are deeply grateful to Psychotherapy.net and interviewer Lawrence Rubin for
generously granting permission to republish this interview in the Journal of
Contemporary Narrative Therapy. We appreciate their support in helping make
these important conversations more widely available to practitioners, students,
and communities of care.
The Wonderfulness Inquiry
Lawrence Rubin (LR): I’m here today with Kay Ingamells, a therapist, educator,
and author who lives in New Zealand. We’ll be chatting today about the
Wonderfulness Inquiry, a fascinating and foundational intervention embedded
in narrative practice. Hi, Kay!
KAY: Hi, Lawrence! Thanks for having me today. So, I9d like to begin by saying
where it comes from. As most people reading this may realize, David Epston, one
of the founders of Narrative Therapy, originated the Wonderfulness Interview. It
came about through necessity as he found himself in live interviews with children
and families where he knew that what he had to bring was not going to be
sufficient, and he needed to invent something pretty much on the spot. That
evolved over time into a very clearly formulated, distinct practice, which, to my
mind, is as important as a Narrative Therapy practice as externalizing is.
It9s absolutely foundational to my practice, and I say inquiry, not interview,
because it is an inquiry into what is remarkable about somebody. It9s an inquiry
into what David Epston would call their moral character, or what Sasha Pilkington
would call their virtues. So traditionally, for the last however many decades, the
way that people have come to know people through therapy has been through a
particular lens, which David has called the crisis of representation. Here, people
are represented, to you, by you, to themselves in therapy interviews through a
lens of pathology, stigma, or a diagnosis.
A wonderfulness inquiry turns that tradition of focusing on the crisis or symptoms
on its head. And so, what I9m doing at the beginning of an interview, whether it9s
with a child or young person or a family or an adult, starts from the other
direction. I might begin with a question like,
