Narrative Therapy's Relational Understanding of Identity.

We describe how we think of identity as relational, distributed, performed, and fluid, and we illustrate the use of this conceptualization within a narrative worldview. Drawing on the work of Michael White, we describe how this relational view of identity leads to therapeutic responses that give value to interconnection across multiple contexts and that focus on becoming rather than on being. We show how a narrative worldview helps focus on the relational, co-evolving perspective that was the basis of our early attraction to family therapy. We offer detailed examples from our work of practices that help us stay firmly situated in a relational worldview that is counter to the pervasive influence of individualism in our contemporary culture.

Narrative ideas for consulting with communities and organizations: ripples from the gatherings.

This paper reviews Michael White's early work with communities and extends ideas and practices from that work into the realm of consulting with organizations. We draw on Michael's writing and the records of two specific projects, as well as the recollections of team members in those projects, to describe how ideas and practices that were originally developed in working with individuals and families came to be applied in community settings. Specifically, we show how the central intention of the work is to use narrative ideas and practices in ways that allow communities to articulate, appreciate, document, utilize, and share their own knowledges of life and skills of living. We discuss the basic narrative ideas of stories, double listening, telling and retelling, making documents, and linking lives through shared purposes. For these projects, the teams developed structures that made it possible to use the basic idea with whole communities. We show how this work with communities has offered inspiration and ideas for our work in consulting to organizations. Finally, we describe and illustrate a particular way of working with organizations that carries the spirit of Michael's community work into situations requiring shorter blocks of time and more limited commitments than the original community contexts.

Relationships, not boundaries.

The authors find it more useful to pay attention to relationships than to boundaries. By focusing attention on bounded, individual psychological issues, the metaphor of boundaries can distract helping professionals from thinking about inequities of power. It oversimplifies a complex issue, inviting us to ignore discourses around gender, race, class, culture, and the like that support injustice, abuse, and exploitation. Making boundaries a central metaphor for ethical practice can keep us from critically examining the effects of distance, withdrawal, and non-participation. The authors describe how it is possible to examine the practical, moral, and ethical effects of our participation in relationships by focusing on just relationships rather than on boundaries. They give illustrations and clinical examples of relationally-focused ethical practices that derive from a narrative approach to therapy.