Journal December 2025 Release - Flipbook - Page 21
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willing to communicate by email, to which David would be the only respondent.
He made it very clear that most of the weight of this practice might fall on my
shoulders as he was leaving for Christmas holidays.
Virtual response team.
We were more than happy to share all correspondence with the League. In
preparation for our Virtual Response Team, we studied the resources offered and
invited David to become a member of Joanna’s support team. Joanna wanted to
rewrite her life story, rejecting the notion that she was destined for an obscure,
albeit tragic and dramatic end.
By the time I wrote a reply to David as The Virtual Response Team, Joanna had
made positive changes in her life. She avoided self-harm for a week, focused on
her children, and enrolled in a reflexology course.
Both Joanna and I were aware that apparent wins over the problem story might
potentially lead to setbacks. In the past, Self Sacrifice provided her with limited
periods of "choose time" before drawing blood again and insisting on starvation.
Her focus on self-care was an effort to establish a different pattern, though our
attempts at change were still minimal and not yet resilient enough to prevent
recurring harmful behaviour.
Miraculously for us, David had a change of plans, which made communication
with him more accessible over the December holidays. He assured us that there
was no urgency to get everything up and away and that we might take our time
working ourselves into such a strange conversation. This was a tremendous relief.
Our discussion-without-an-end.
David relied on us to co-create the invention of a new practice which, to his mind,
had never occurred before in the history of psychotherapy:
“Jo, can you discuss at some length that as far as I know, we (and I am counting
yourself and them,) are inventing a practice that has never occurred as far as I
know before in the 'history' of psychotherapy. Can you ask if they mind being
pioneers, and for that reason, there will probably be some twists and turns that
we cannot predict right now. We will only know about such twists and turns when
An Apprenticeship in Extremis
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, December 2025 Release, p. 5-44.
www.journalnft.com
