Journal December 2025 Release - Flipbook - Page 39
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David held me to the fact that Joanna was not a psychiatric patient; she was not
anorexia/ bulimia, she was an intelligent, attractive, and talented woman who
had been turned into a chronic psychiatric patient with no prognosis. I used to say
to her: “I wish I could manually change your mind and somehow let you see
yourself through my eyes, not through the eyes of anorexia/bulimia/chronic
psychiatric illness”.
David demonstrated through his email responses to our therapy stories that if we
separate Joanna from the problem, we could constitute different accounts of her
identity and personhood from stories told by her husband, her children, her
parents, and her co-workers on the smallholding. Joanna was known to be
friendly, loving, generous, and kind; the nemesis of anorexia/bulimia. As we were
working on building her preferred story or resistance narrative, we outlined SS as
the fiend, the villain, the deceiver, and Joanna’s killer if it had a chance. Foucault
has argued that dominant discourses always produce resistance. David showed us
how to conduct our strategy of resistance. This only became possible when we
stopped seeing the problem in her life as an illness, but rather as an invisible killer
that takes over the minds and lives of unsuspecting women.
What did I learn?
When we first met, Joanna was on a psychiatric roundabout. I felt silenced and
ineffective despite my innate inclination to protest when I saw injustice. An avid
protester of Apartheid, abuse of any kind, marginalization, and unkindness, when
it came to the expert knowledge of psychiatry, I bowed to the experts because
“what do nurses know anyway?” This was one of the main reasons I wanted to
learn narrative therapy: to be able to take therapeutic conversations further than
identifying a problem and then referring it to a bigger expert, like a psychiatrist.
David showed me how to rediscover my voice of protest: against the societal
discourse of anorexia/bulimia. He used language to give form and shape and
personality to the problem of anorexia, making it possible for us to explore its
ways, agendas, lies, and trickeries. I started visualizing anorexia as a big tick on
the back of a dog: sucking the host dry and poisoning the person. I started seeing
how hard Joanna worked to be a so-called “normal” person, to be accepted into
mainstream society, and what the penalties were if she was not perfect.
Perfectionism surfaced as one of the critical voices she was living with. Whatever
An Apprenticeship in Extremis
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, December 2025 Release, p. 5-44.
www.journalnft.com
