Narrative Therapy began in Adelaide with Michael White (AU) and David Epston (NZ) 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, Alison Newton, Dallas Colley and many others were thinking about what they have come to call Invitational and Ethical Therapy with Restorative Justice Practices with people who use violence and abuse. These practices were developed as counselling responses within progressive community organisations at the time, specifically what is now Uniting Communities and community and then government Domestic Violence responses such as WOWSafe alongside women's workers and advocates. Therapists began exploring how to invite men to cease their violence toward partners, children, and others including other family members and others in the community.

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A special focus also began on therapeutic responses to sexual abuses of children with the Mary Street programme looking therapeutic and ethical investigations and responses of perpetrators (including young people) of sexual abuse on children. Concurrently the Childhood Sexual Abuse programme began at Uniting Communities in Adelaide with counselors responding to people who had experienced sexual abuse and assault. All therapies and responses were supporting people to understand trauma as an effect of violence, harm, abuse and ethical and moral injury perpetrated, including that perpetrated by culture and cultural institutions.

 

These developments since the 80s and 90s, helped shift the focus of responsibility from victim-survivors to the perpetrators. Though they did not occur in isolation nor were they thought of as belonging to anyone practitioner (as 'guru') or team, but were developed in the context of national and international 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 show-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 and justice doing is much needed, such as in India, Chile, Mexico, Spain, South Africa and more. This has continued after the death of Michael White in 2008 by our colleagues, mentors and teachers of Maggie Carey, Shona Russell and Rob Hall (Narrative Practices Adelaide) until their retirement in 2020.

 

Here in Adelaide we continue this therapy and counselling with close fidelity and new thinking in narrative and invitational ideas. The basic texts we study, consult and extend are:

 

       Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Vol. 2). University of Minnesota Press.     

       Jenkins, A. (2009). Becoming ethical: A parallel, political journey with men who have abused. Russell House Publishing Ltd.

        Lear, J. (2006). Radical Hope: Ethics in the face of cultural          devastation. Harvard University Press

        Pare, D. A., & Larner, G. (Eds.). (2012). Collaborative Practice in    Psychology and Therapy. Routledge, Taylor & Francis group.

       Waldegrave, C., Tamasese, K., Tuhaka, F., & Campbell, W. (2003). Just Therapy—A Journey: A collections of papers from the Just Therapy Team, New Zealand. Dulwich Centre Publications.     

       Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and Poststructuralist theory (Second). Blackwell Publishing.

       ​White, M. (2007). Maps of Narrative Practice. Norton.      https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393705164

     White, M. (2004). Narrative Practice and exotic lives: Resurrecting diversity in everyday life. Dulwich Publications.

 

& Any reader on Michel Foucault

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& For Family Therapy Context and Journey, one of the best reads is a personal story documenting the beginnings to new emergences including Narrative Therapy throughout the distinguished career of family therapist Lynn Hoffman.

 

     Hoffman, L. (2001). Family Therapy: An Intimate History. Wiley. https://www.wiley.com/en-nz/Family+Therapy%3A+An+Intimate+History-p-9780393703801

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

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Warm regards,

 

Sonja Baram, Pshko Marden, Mark Byrne, Tony Fletcher,