Narrative Therapy began in Adelaide with Michael White and David Epston during the 1980s and 90s, to include counselling and family therapy teams in Australia and New Zealand. With Michael and David travelling with fellow therapists, the work quickly spread through the International Family and Collaborative Therapy community, and now into mainstream psychology, social work and other helping activities.

 

Less known, but also developing in Adelaide at the same time, were unique responses to perpetrators and survivors of domestic and sexual violence and abuse. Alan Jenkins, Rob Hall, Maxine Joy and others were thinking about what they have come to call Invitational and Ethical Practices with people who use violence and abuse. These practices were developed within the progressive community organisations at the time, specifically what is now Uniting Communities and community Domestic Violence responses such as WOWSafe alongside women's workers and advocates. Practitioners began exploring how to invite men to cease their violence toward partners and children.

 

This was developed since the 80s and 90s to help shift the focus of responsibility from women victim-survivors to the male perpetrators. These developments did not occur in isolation but in the context of broader social movements since the 1970s, along with feminism, civil rights, family therapies, community justice and restorative justice approaches specifically for families where abuse had occurred. These practices worked into broader responses in regions where political and violent conflict created contexts for further abuses of power.

 

All practices serve to uncover the operations of power and abuse, and expose their effect on survivors. Abuses of power can be shown-up as trapped in narratives, discourses, particular language, actions, and ways of being. If the problem is in the narratives that power constructs, then the remedies are found here also (Foucault).

 

Today Narrative and Invitational practices have been taken up in wonderful parts of the world where therapy and therapeutic activism is much needed, such as in India, Chile, Mexico, Spain, South Africa and more.

 

Here in Adelaide we continue these practices with close fidelity and new thinking in narrative and invitational ideas.

 

Please join us in active and reflective learning as we explore further.  We would love your skilled therapeutic company in our explorations. 

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Warm regards,

 

Sonja Baram, Tony Fletcher, Pshko Marden, Mark Byrne