Journal December 2025 Release - Flipbook - Page 44
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learnt to listen, to read the smallest detail, the absent but implicit meaning in
words, to discover the stories in between the lines; to recognize the slyness of SS,
and to validate the wonderful personhood of Joanna as she was taking herself
back. Every letter from him was a gift, a gift that never stops giving because I am
now privileged enough to teach my students what he had taught me and to
continue to learn from them.
I recently asked a student if she might share what she’s learnt from my teaching
of narrative therapy, and she shared the following:
Jo, you never stood before me as a lecturer merely delivering content. You
were not a dispenser of theories or keeper of tidy therapeutic formulas. No you were the match. And somewhere inside me, long before we met, there
was dry wood waiting, quiet, patient, almost invisible, until you struck the
flame.
What you offered was not a syllabus, but a stirring. You wove no neat
boundaries between learning and living, between the therapy room and the
wide, open world. And so, what began in the hum of a class spilled into my
life like water slipping its banks - unstoppable, unpredictable, nourishing
everything it touched.
You made narrative therapy more than a profession. In your presence, the
ideas breathed. Stories were not simply techniques; they were threads of
connection, binding people to one another, binding me to a deeper purpose
I hadn’t yet named. I began to see that every conversation was possibility,
that the work was not just about healing individuals, but about re-weaving
communities, about listening until the quietest voices found their courage.
You never said, “Go out and serve people.” Instead, you showed me what it
looks like to inhabit a way of being where service is not a project but a
posture. Where asking questions is an act of generosity, and listening is a
form of love. Where dignity is restored not with grand gestures, but with the
small, steady honouring of another’s story.
An Apprenticeship in Extremis
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, December 2025 Release, p. 5-44.
www.journalnft.com
