Journal December 2025 Release - Flipbook - Page 19
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I am the lion.
Who fights death
To bring life
To tell
Fierce stories peacefully strong enough
To stand
in the shadow
All the while the voice of Self-Sacrifice became rampant; encouraging her to fall
on her own sword, put everyone out of their misery, and die honourably as a
tragic heroine.
Self-Sacrifice was relentless. It knew exactly where to kick her when she was
down.
SS whispered: “You know where to find the blade Joanna. There is no hope for
you. Take it and cut it until it’s over.”
SS brought with it chilly reminders of the cruelty of the gestapo, the starvation
and torture of the concentration camps in Germany.
This decisive “struggle” to live or succumb to her death lasted for three weeks.
She began vomiting after meals. I was out of my depth. I did not know how much
longer I could hold her. I was drained, anxious, and afraid: SS was clearly planning
on getting me out of its way.
All I could do was to hold space. It felt as if I was stubbornly standing in a
doorway, trying to block the problem’s entry into Joanna’s story, but it
shapeshifted and slipped past me and attacked both of us as it squeezed past.
It felt as if her intervals of living out her preferred story and then a return to the
problem were cyclical and becoming closer together. There were many cycles of
admission, electroconvulsive therapies, psychotropics and new medication
An Apprenticeship in Extremis
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, December 2025 Release, p. 5-44.
www.journalnft.com
