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Narrative Therapy Centre P.O. Box 31030, Westney Heights RPO 15 Westney Road N. Ajax, Ontario. Canada. L1T 3V2 |
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Narrative Therapy Centre |
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Of Toronto |
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About Collective Narrative Practice |
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Collective narrative practice involves a hopeful and respectful approach to responding to individuals, wider groups and communities experiencing trauma and significant hardship.
Key principles: · To enable people to tell their stories in ways that make them stronger. · Enable people who are experiencing hardship to make a contribution to others who are also experiencing hard times. The experience of making a contribution sustains and generates hope. · Even if we initially only hear a story of trouble, hardship, loss, despair, there is always more than one story. · People are always responding to the difficulties they are facing. · It’s best to start small. Our role is to ‘play our part’ in sustaining and building on the local initiatives of individuals, families, groups, communities. · When whole communities are affected, we seek collective ways forward – this involves finding ways to share skills between different members of community, and between communities. It also involves enabling the community to experience making a contribution to another community. · These processes require teamwork and partnerships. No one person has to find the solutions. (from Denborough, White, C. November 2007 workshop handout)
Ruth Pluznick and Angel Yuen at the NTC have been involved in collective narrative practices in the following ways: · Using Tree of Life methodology with adolescents living in residential treatment settings · Using Tree of Life methodology with groups of children living in shelters who are currently displaced due to circumstances such as refugee status, mothers leaving abuse, poverty. · Collective narrative documentation in Middle East during teaching assignment with the Dulwich Centre in 2006. The document was titled “Dealing with life under occupation: The special skills and knowledges that sustain the workers of Nablus Palestine” · Linking lives (via documents and sharing stories) of children who are growing up with parents with mental health difficulties · Linking lives (via documents) of mothers who are struggling with mental health difficulties · Linking lives (via documents) of young men struggling with the effects of racism, poverty and violence
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