Body · Brain · Story
Storying Bodies,
Reminding Brains
Body · Brain · Story
Narrative and Neuroscience
Hardly a day seems to go by without neuroscience making the news for claiming to explain yet one more aspect of human behaviour. Who has not been enchanted by multi-coloured images of brain scans suggesting the precise locations of fear, anger, empathy, even love?
About This Workshop
This one-day workshop will critically explore the relationships between narrative and neuroscience. It will loiter around the benefits and hazards of neuroscientific discoveries for narrative therapy. Important distinctions between mind, brain, body, affect and feeling will be probed. Tantalising new paradigms of neuroscience, which may be more resonant with the philosophical bases of narrative practices, will be presented. Most importantly, time will be given throughout to practice skills for embodying stories and storying affect.
We sincerely apologise — due to a fully committed 2026 schedule with various service providers, we currently have no workshops planned for the remainder of the year. We would love to hear from you if you'd like to be notified when future dates become available, or if your organisation is interested in a custom training program tailored to your team's needs.
Our Commitment
Reflective, Evidence-Informed Practice
We hold a deep commitment to rigorous, critical, and reflective practice. Clients and those who refer to us can be assured that our practitioners are serious, accountable, and professionally grounded — not only in therapeutic skill but in ongoing engagement with social science research.
In complex legal and family matters, our work draws on both qualitative and quantitative research evidence. This includes cases that are subject to cross-examination, where our observations and reports must be defensible, precise, and ethically sound. We do not approach this work through the lens of competing therapeutic modalities, which we find an unhelpful and reductive frame.
Instead, we engage with the broader body of social science research that illuminates the phenomena at the heart of our work: how families form and fracture, how violence and coercive control operate, how cohesion and disunity unfold across relationships, generations, and societies. We investigate and mark how the carefully chosen ethical values of respect, safety, fairness, accountability, and responsibility are lived and understood across diverse communities.
The Body as Story
What the Body Remembers
We live our lives in bodies. And bodies carry stories — not only in memory, language, or cognition, but in sensation, posture, breath, and movement. Long before we have words for what has happened to us, our bodies have already registered it.
Narrative therapy has always held that people are the experts of their own lives. Storying Bodies, Reminding Brains extends this principle into the somatic realm: the body, too, is an expert. It holds knowledge that the mind has not yet fully translated into language. The work of therapy, in part, is to create conditions in which those bodily stories can be respectfully approached, named, and — where a person chooses — re-authored.
Neuroscience & Narrative
What We Now Know About Brains
Contemporary neuroscience confirms what many people have long sensed: that trauma and distress are not merely psychological events. They alter the very structure and function of the brain — shaping attention, memory, emotional regulation, and the capacity to feel safe.
Research in interpersonal neurobiology (Siegel), polyvagal theory (Porges), and the neuroscience of trauma (van der Kolk) has expanded our understanding of how the nervous system responds to threat, disconnection, and overwhelm. These frameworks do not replace narrative or social analysis — they deepen it.
At Adelaide Narrative, we hold these bodies of knowledge in thoughtful tension. We do not reduce people's experiences to neurological events, nor do we ignore the body's wisdom. We ask: what does this person's nervous system know, and how might that knowledge be honoured in the stories they are beginning to tell?
Somatic Narrative Practice
Bringing Body & Story Together
Somatic narrative practice is an emerging area of therapeutic inquiry. It draws on narrative therapy's commitment to externalisation, unique outcomes, and re-authoring — and extends these into the felt experience of the body.
In practice, this might involve:
• Noticing what arises in the body when a particular story is told — tightening, softening, a held breath, a shift in posture. • Exploring what the body's response might "know" about the person's values, history, or longings. • Inviting curiosity about embodied exceptions: moments when the body felt different, freer, more at home in the world. • Considering how dominant stories about bodies — shaped by culture, gender, trauma, and diagnosis — have been internalised, and what alternative descriptions might be possible.
This is not a technique. It is an orientation — one that takes seriously the whole person, not just the narrating mind.
Cultural Context
Bodies in Social & Cultural Context
Bodies are never neutral. How we experience our bodies — what we feel entitled to feel, express, or claim — is profoundly shaped by culture, gender, race, age, ability, and history.
Narrative therapy's commitment to social analysis is essential here. When we attend to the body, we must also attend to the social contexts that have shaped how that body has been regarded, touched, disciplined, admired, ignored, or pathologised. Stories about bodies are not only personal — they are political.
We approach somatic narrative work with attention to power: who has historically had authority over bodies, and what it means to help someone reclaim the authority of their own bodily experience as a site of knowledge, resistance, and renewal.
"There is no separation of mind and body."
— Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion
Further Exploration
Continue the Conversation
If you are curious about how somatic narrative approaches might support your own journey, we invite you to reach out.