Journal Potuguese Release - February 2024 - Flipbook - Page 26
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dissatisfactions arising on his part and paralyzing her. These are therapeutic
conversations that took place during the year 2020 and were crossed by the
COVID-19 pandemic which brings as a challenge the development of resources to
maintain the therapeutic process.
In the dialogue with the reader, I intend to report fragments of the practice,
seeking to give visibility to: 1) externalizing conversations as a ludic dialogical
resource and promoter of preferable changes, 2) the production of therapeutic
documents in the format of therapeutic chronicles (Campillo Rodriguez, 2011;
Paljakka, 2008), a useful resource for pointing out remarkable moments in the
participants' reauthoring process, and 3) to the share of moments in which the
use of online technology helped the co-construction of generative therapeutic
relationships, making it possible to move forward in the conversational process.
Chatting With Some Textual Friends Before Entering the Therapy Room
Michael White (2012), despite the expressive systematization capacity of his work
as a whole, privileged the developments of his practice so that the spirit of
narrative therapy could be expanded, without letting it be tied down by any
preponderant discourse of this or that therapeutic school. David Epston, echoing
this plurality of meanings in narrative therapy, points out both the irreverence,
improvisation, and imagination present at the center of everyday life and the
indignation with the injustice that generates human suffering (2019). Thus,
narrative therapy actively questions the individual centralization of human
problems and invites one to think about their insertion into the dominant social
discourses that configure people's lives.
As a therapeutic stance, this questioning promotes an egalitarian relationship
between therapist and client and denies norms that subject people to standards
on how they should be, feel, and act. Such a decentered position of the therapist
facilitates a joint construction of choices that clients wish to assume about their
problems and difficulties, based on the values and beliefs that guide their lives.
Thus, change is built from new shared meanings toward the dissolution of the
problem, as suggested by Anderson and Goolishian (1988).
Narrative therapy discusses the deconstruction of the therapist’s power, from a
Foucauldian perspective that emphasizes power not as an institutional
implementation from the top-down, but as one that develops and refines itself at
The Bad and the Good Ghosts: A Story of Reauthoring in Narrative Therapy with Children
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, February 2024 Release, www.journalnft.com, p. 2446.