Journal Potuguese Release - February 2024 - Flipbook - Page 33
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therapists are not involved in the domains of problem-solving or engaging in
conflict, but “Rather, their actions usually reflect a relatively ‘cool’ engagement”
(White, 2012, p. 28). In contrast, clients also assume an investigative reporter
position, reflect on their experience, and contribute to exposing the character of
the problem. They denounce its objectives, purposes, and activities.
This posture reveals the importance of the narrative therapist's decentered
position. It paves the way for the clients to identify and build other plans for their
lives, what they value, and contradict the threatening voices of the problem. In
other words, externalizing conversations offer a shared island of safety for people
to engage in the reauthoring of their lives.
A Story About the Externalized Problem Inspired by the Idea of Poetic
Documentation
For White and Epston (1990), the written word is an ideal path for discoveries
made during therapy which, like documents, can be evoked, read, and recreated.
Written tradition, through “making visible”, highlights extraordinary events, giving
prestige to an alternative narrative (César, 2008). Still, according to Campillo
Rodriguez (2011), writing as a therapeutic resource opens up many paths through
which people can see themselves through the eyes of the other.
During clinical consultations, therapeutic poems build, in a special way, an
opening to new stories, which play with the imagination and give clients the
freedom to experience their own images, sensations, and new meanings.
Discussing the usefulness of therapeutic poems in her work, Sanni Paljakka (2018)
writes:
Due to their unusual form (the lack of requirement for the shiny
completeness of sentences and ideas in prose text), these poems have
opened up a unique way for me to play with ideas. Writing in poetry form
allows me to pit the horrors and hauntings of a problem story against a
confection of possible counter-story ideas with no regard to orderly
sequencing of life experiences or the flow of a therapy conversation. (p. 65)
So, at the opening of the session following the revelation of the Ghost of Fury, I
asked Daniel and his mother to sit down comfortably and listen to a text that I
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.