Journal October 2026 Special DISPUK Release_Full Version - Flipbook - Page 117
116
I was then—and I still am today—captivated by those moments in conversations
and in life when a person, through often overlooked or entirely new stories,
revealed themselves to us, and to themselves, in new ways.
The Special Perspective
In a beautiful passage in his book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
(Gilligan, 2000), the American psychiatrist James Gilligan writes about people9s
desire to feel known enough to be recognized and worthy of another look.
I have a feeling that this is something that often happened when I watched those
old VHS tapes: that we saw conversations in which people were, from the start,
regarded as worthy of another look. A look that saw not only all the problems
they had so often been associated with, but something completely different that
was worth knowing about them. And that through the stories told during the
conversations, people became known enough to be recognized for something
they wanted to be recognized for—both by others and often by themselves as
well.
For many years, I have been preoccupied with learning to ask the questions that
bring out those kinds of stories, and I know that many of our students at DISPUK
have shared that desire: to learn the narrative questions.
But in recent years, my colleagues and I have been talking still more about
something that seems to be there even before the questions. Something without
which the exact same formulation of a question is still not the same question. A
certain context—a look, a frame, a spirit—that adds to the words.
There is something special about the way Michael White and Maggie Carey, David
Epston and John Winslade, and all the other narrative practitioners I have
admired over the years, meet and look at the people they have conversations
with. And I have a feeling that there is something about the way they see people
that might be just as important as the wonderful narrative questions, maps, and
ideas for documents.
Afterword: What Is the Spirit of Narrative Practice?
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, October 2026 Special Release, p. 113-130
www.journalcnt.com
