Review-Therapist as host

Narrative Therapy Centre

Of Toronto

Review

Therapist as Host: Making my Guests Feel Welcome

By Jodi Aman

International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work

2006 No. 3

CLICK HERE to read the full article

A short review by Rick Eckley….

My narrative neighbour, Jodi Aman, from Rochester, N.Y., “re-members” her great grandmother, Frances as a special woman highly skilled in making others feel at home. “She fed most of New York…talked and laughed with them, shared their stories and comforted them.” Through her hospitality and the baking that helped her express it, she made a big difference in people’s lives. Re-membering Frances got Jodi asking, “How did being in her company affect…people so drastically? What does hospitality like this provide a person?”

Asking these questions inspired Jodi to think about how her own values and skills about hospitality contribute to her narrative therapy practice. The result is an article entitled Therapist as host: Making my guests feel welcome in the 2006 No. 3 edition of the Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. This article explores how the practices of hospitality have affected her work as a therapist and what she has learned by stepping into the role of good host more purposefully.

Jodi’s article is a warm and intimate invitation to consider the ways our narrative practice might benefit from using the metaphor of being a good host to understand our relationships with clients. Using examples from her own practice, she shows us how being a good host can have concrete effects on many aspects of narrative practice. Its influence, she makes clear, extends to creating marketing materials, writing therapeutic documents, setting up office space, doing paper work, giving people necessary information about oneself as a therapist and even making diagnoses!

By showing me how I might join her in applying these skills, Jodi’s writing generated a sense of excitement at the positive influence these practices could have on my own work as a narrative therapist. But even more, her article left me with a very personal interest in the importance that embracing the practices of hospitality may have for her and Frances.

I was left wondering what Frances would make of the fact that her practices of hospitality are still affecting people all these years later. What might it mean to her to see that Frances has passed on these practices to her great granddaughter? And what would it be like for her to know that “people who [have] trouble in their lives, [are] grieving, or otherwise struggling” are still being helped by her hospitality practices, now by the way that Jodi practices them?

I am curious what it’s like for Jodi to be carrying on this legacy of helping through hospitality. What does it mean for the women of the family to have kept this legacy alive? What does it say about the kind of people they have chosen to be?

The answers to these questions may lie outside the scope of Jodi’s article, but I wonder if the reflections they generate might assist Jodi in carrying forward her narrative hospitality even more richly.

CLICK HERE to read Jodi Aman’s paper.