Madigan End Of Summer Narrative Newsletter
"The way you get a better world is you don't put up with substandard anything."
~ Joe Strummer The Clash
Hello everyone. Welcome back. It’s good to be back.
Apologies for the wait.
During the wait (which in part is largely responsible for the wait) I managed to write enough material for two newsletters. Given the busy lives I assume narrative newsletter readers lead, and not wanting to wear you down, the rather wordy 40-page circular – was divided in two - and looks like this:
The 2nd upcoming Fall 2026 newsletter invites readership into a fairly long bit of writing regarding narrative informed ideas and practice developments on The Social Life of Emotions. Offering reconsiderations on how the contextual and relational shape emotions - beyond and alongside neurobiological wiring.
Also highlighted are two new Vancouver School faculty publications by Helené Grau Kristensen (and her daughter Augusta-Lucia) that include innovative discussions, gorgeous session transcripts and case vignettes on: Narrative informed relational responses to trauma and grief; Relational interviewing practices turning internal state grief psychology, upside down.
The Summer 2026 newsletter below
Celebrating Michel Foucault’s 100th birthday offers reflections on the meaning and influence of his ideas and how the French post-structural philosopher/historian shaped Michael White’s creation of narrative therapy.
In addition, the summer 2026 newsletter outlines how VSNT arrived at our new design for the next February 5-7, 2027, Therapeutic Conversations 24 conference – offering an entry point for intimate and rare, close-up interviews discussing conference presenter’s values, secrets, failures, politics, doubt, courage, commitments, and desire.
I’ll also spotlight two tasty new papers written by VSNT’s David ‘Rock’ Nylund. The first is a blistering critical re-think on the ever-growing phenomenon known as ‘Emotional Regulation’. Drawing from Foucauldian ideas, feminist theory, critical social work, and narrative therapy practices, the article examines emotional regulation as a disciplinary discourse that upholds normative ideals of an emotionally self-governing subject.
The second paper is entitled: The Trouble with Hope – This article offers an important interrogation on the discourse of "hope" as it is widely promoted in social work and psychotherapy. I’ve also included an elegant response back to Rock written by VSNT faculty member Rosa Arteaga.
Foucault’s birthday
Michael White’s ongoing message to our world-wide narrative therapy community was clearly stated:
“Without a clear understanding of Michel Foucault’s ideas, a therapists practice of narrative therapy will be severely limited."
Whether you have decided to take up Michael’s advice on the importance of Foucault into your practice of narrative therapy or, experience his statement as too narrow and/or a sample of unwanted ‘narrative policing’, signifies where a therapist stands and what they stand for.
And although this difference may well represent the primary practice divide in our narrative community, I do feel there is common ground – a place where we all agree. This being how our experience of reading and watching Michael’s expressions of Foucault’s ideas inside the therapy room was deeply meaningful, to all of us.
This year marks the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth and 42 years since his death from AIDS in 1984.
According to Google search, he remains the world’s most cited scholar/thinker with more than 1.4 million citations.
VSNT faculty views Michael’s statement central to our teaching and practice. In a moment resident philosopher and faculty member Todd May will outline his relationship with Foucault and, how this relationship was primary in not being able to complete his graduate studies in psychology.
But first, I’d like to offer a very brief Foucault a-go-go intro that brought me closer towards a better understanding of Michael’s work.
The first article I published in doctoral school was: The Application of Michel Foucault’s Philosophy in the Problem Externalizing Discourse of Michael White.
The project was an (initial) attempt of linking together Michael’s giant non-individualist theoretical/practice leap of externalizing problems with the post-structural ideas of Foucault (Note: VSNT currently refers to externalizing problems as relationally contextualizing problems).
My early fascination landed on the history of Foucault’s three modes of subjectification involving interconnected scientific, cultural and political practices – that turn subjects into objects.
As a student/therapist, I was drawn towards Foucault’s political and historical analysis regarding the process of persons becoming medicalized, generalized and universalized by a culture of interdisciplinary professionals who seemed bent on finding out the ‘essence’ and ‘truth’ of who these subjects of study were.
Foucault’s examination outlines both the historical trajectory and internal state/individualist underpinnings of our modern day psychiatric, psychological, and psychotherapeutic practice.
Foucault’s three modes of objectification of the subject seem to be:
(1) those that categorize, distribute, and manipulate – a who’s in, who’s out, who is normal/not so normal and the process of who had the story telling rites to say what and with what authority - about all this;
(2) those through which we have come to understand ourselves scientifically (e.g. DSM technology); and,
(3) those that we use to form ourselves into meaning-making selves (ideas are produced and as subjects we reproduce and/or resist them)—designate the landscape of Foucault’s subjectification inquiries and indelibly influenced the foundation of what narrative therapy became.
Once I got a bit more of a handle on the meaning of post-structuralisms (often tricky) language codes, I began to grasp Foucault’s meaning between the relationship of power/knowledge, the process and production of norms, and his critique of global truth claims about the identity and character of human beings:
As both participants and subjects of this power through knowledge, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertaking destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power.
And, through listening to VSNT faculty/philosopher Todd May speak about Foucault, my takeaways focused on the relational and constitutive dimension of power/knowledge (Michael often considered himself a constitutionalist - not a postmodernist, social constructionist, nor constructivist).
Todd outlines how all discursive practices (I think the term means - all the way’s a culture creates social and psychological knowledge, norms, practices) are not so much truths but interpretations of truths embedded in a culture’s contingent history, prevailing dominant discourse, whereby the subject (all of us) is considered created by, and creating of, this cultural discourse.
I’ll finish this brief introduction of why and how Michael White the family therapist positioned Michel Foucault’s ideas at the centre of his development of a non-individualist narrative practice.
Michael’s workshops and writings continually returned to Foucault’s proposal that ever-so-popular psychotherapy constructs like the self-realized/self-actualized individual identity would be quite difficult to achieve since all our actions, from eating to dressing, parenting, working and how we practice relationships etc., are tied to, influenced by, and ineradicably shaped through cultural contexts and normative relational structures.
Todd May and Michael Foucault
You might recognize this month’s guest newsletter writer Todd May as the philosopher advisor to the hit TV show The Good Place on NBC and/or philosophical consultant on the New York Times best selling book entitled How to Be Perfect, and/or opinion writer for the New York Times.
He’s all that, but for the teaching faculty at the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy he is our resident artiste, teaching philosopher, longtime faculty member, and great friend to all of us.
I first met Todd while I was living off and on in the city of Olso during the summer of 2014. I’d found out he’d offered to give a free lecture at the Literature House on Foucault’s ideas to support ROBUST - the only all-narrative therapy clinic in Norway where good friend Erling Fiddjestøl was/is the clinical director.
In the space of the 3 hours, he taught, used his NYC humour, and pulled together so much of what I’d been trying to wrestle with. I remember thinking, where the hell has this guy been all my life. And the rest, as they, is history.
Todd’s position with the Vancouver School is one of theoretical guide. To therapists and course participants he holds this other worldly ability to take strenuous, awkward, and tricky to understand post-structural concepts, link them alongside large-scale political projects, and break them down into chewable bites.
Todd analyses and raises questions on how narrative therapy has taken up certain post-structural ideas (like Foucault’s) into practice, introduces new philosophers and philosophical interpretations (e.g. Deleuze, Cavarero, Frankfurt, Merleau-Ponty, Wolf + more) and stays with us while we reconfigure what this all means to what we do, inside the therapy room.
In a word, he invites us to step off the expected path. Nudges us towards a consideration of becoming something different. Creating new lines of flight I suppose.
Todd is the author of eighteen books of philosophy, including the work of French post-structuralists Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
The VSNT summer 2026 narrative newsletter invited Todd to write a few thoughts on his relationship with Michel Foucault – given it was his 100th birthday (that’s Michel’s not Todds).
Todd writes: Michel Foucault got me thrown out of grad school in psychology. He wasn’t trying to. As far as I know, he’d never been to Pittsburgh, which is where the grad school I was getting thrown out of is located. But that didn’t stop him from effectively ending my career in psychology.
The grad school I was attending focused on phenomenological psychology. It saw itself as an alternative to traditional reductive views like psychoanalysis and behaviorism. However, it was still individualistic. The problem was to discover what was wrong with the individual, if not through mommy problems or misaligned behavior, at least through what was wrong with them.
Individualism, whether in its essentialist guise (ex. Freud) or its non-essentialist variant (think CBT your problems are because of your thoughts), focuses on the individual as the source of their problems. It sets aside everything outside the individual in order to locate the problem within who they are. It’s as though everything that needs to be understood in therapy is inside the therapy room. The world—to put it another way—does not enter the room. It stays at the door, or out in the street.
Something about this always struck me as wrong, or at least incomplete. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish did. It pointed out, through a historical reading, that normalization is not the return to an essence or the curing of a sick mind or bad thoughts. Rather, it is a political project that involves inculcating obedience and conformism. It does so by locating a problem of deviance within the individual, diagnosing it, and disciplining that individual with the goal of making them more normal.
How does this happen? Through a set of norms that various psychological practices instill in individuals, starting in the prison and then spreading through Western societies. People are observed, monitored, intervened on, praised or criticized depending on their conformity to what is considered normal in Western society.
This isn’t, as Foucault points out, some kind of conspiracy cooked up by capitalists sitting around a table smoking cigars and trying to figure out how to make us more docile. Rather, it is the product of a contingent history that intersects with, but is not reducible to, capitalism. In fact, we can see its use in non-capitalist societies, for example in Soviet Russia.
The lesson of Foucault’s analysis of normalization is broader, though, than just normalization itself. We’re all brought up and participate in a variety of practices: work practices, hobbies, sports, friendship practices, even practices of love. All of these practices have their norms, their ways of going about engaging in these practices. Some of these norms are rules—they say what it is to be in the practice at all. Others are norms for doing the practice better or worse.
As we conform ourselves to the norms of these practices, we get influenced to be certain ways and to avoid others. This is Foucault’s concept of what he calls modern power (but which I think has always been there). Power isn’t something mysterious that circulates through the ether. It’s simply the way the norms of the practices we’ve been subject to and those we continue to engage in foster certain ways of being and discourage others.
And with these norms comes what Foucault calls “power/knowledge.” There’s a longer story here, but the general idea is that the ways we know ourselves arise from the practices we engage in. For example, there are—we are taught—certain ways of being that are normal and good, and others that need diagnoses and cure. We learn this as we participate in the various practices, including the psychological practices, of modern Western society.
And so, as normalization proliferated through different Western societies, there arose such social (and political!) positions as psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, human resources counselors, school psychologists—and me in my graduate psychology program in Pittsburgh.
Well, that was the beginning of the end. Fortified by Foucault (and also by my initial reading of Gilles Deleuze), I started raising criticisms of individualist psychology in classes and giving class presentations critical of what is now called internal state psychology. Otherwise put, I started asking about how the ways we behave and think of ourselves are often the product of the world in which we live rather than some internal problem that renders us abnormal. In response, after assigning a professor to sit me down to discuss my problems with authority, a certified letter arrived in my mailbox informing me that my financial assistance was being withdrawn. So I went into philosophy, where abnormality is as common as pollen in the spring.
As I say, it was Foucault’s fault.
In February 5-7, 2027, Todd, David ‘Rock’ Nylund, and super fab new associate faculty member Todd Disney are heading up the Theory Meets Practice section of VSNT’s annual Therapeutic Conversations Conference.
*If readers are interested in Todds post-structural philosophical teachings there are hours of his keynotes, workshops, lectures, and faculty meeting discussions on VSNT.live.
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished.Tell about it." ~Mary Oliver
Curiosities and questions on why we do what we do
After that last 2026 newsletter came out, the Vancouver School teaching faculty completed our first VSNT 5-day Foundations certificate training of the year. Remarkably, each of us showed up to the teaching with something fresh to discuss/demonstrate with our participants.
No one on the faculty was asked to do this. Nor had we agreed to do this. Everyone just did. And as much as the new material faculty presented was excellent, my focus and fascination led to questioning why the faculty had done this, what had collectively inspired this – when it wasn’t required.
Over the next few months, intrigue over what these questions might bring forward regarding therapist inspiration, change, values, relationships, commitments, and context began to follow me around, wherever I went.
Two days after the 5-day training I jumped on a plane to teach in Hong Kong. Narrative powerhouse and good pal Angela OK Tsun co-organized the narrative therapy informed relational interviewing (NIRI) couple therapy workshop with the Hong Kong Marriage and Family Therapy Association, Professional Practice and Assessment Centre, and the Department of Applied Social Sciences of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Angela informed me this was my 8th Hong Kong teaching visit, dating back to one of the first major pro-democracy protests, notably the Student Umbrella Movement of 2014 (leaving me star struck by how young the student protesters were).
I’d also taught workshops right up through early 2020 and witnessed anti-government protests escalating and how Universities became intense battlegrounds (the centre point being Hong Kong Polytechnic University).
This most recent trip back to Hong Kong I was teaching at PolyU. So much had changed. Regulated. Narrative therapists carried on.
In a strange way, although significantly different in scale, scope, and politics, the changes in Hong Kong reminded me of my recent 10-year experience teaching narrative therapy/supervising high couple conflict therapy teams twice a year in Norway (arguably the last remaining social democracy on earth).
The senior clinicians I supervise explained how they were gradually, overtime, having to respond to their personal shock and the systemic harm of a new neoliberal public management scheme shaping Norway’s mental health system.
Power had shifted. Policy hacks waded in and structured how therapy was to be done. Therapists were not prepared. Nor were they happy.
During these times of significant cultural and neoliberal political change across Europe and North America, I found myself feeling less interested in a therapist’s knowledge and narrative practice skills and more concerned with questioning how do therapists continue on/maintain their practice of narrative therapy?
How did they understand not giving up? Were there specific values, lived experiences, politics, passions and adventures involved that held their commitment to the mental health community steady? Where did they draw this inspiration from? Was there a common international thread?
Returning home, my travels soon went eastward from Bowen Island to visit my twin daughters Hannah and Tessa living in New York City. The beauty of this relationship creates elegant worlds we take in, be in, bathe in, laugh in, belong in. And drink it all in we did.
As luck would have it, very busy NYC friends, therapists and extraordinary relational thinkers Jack and Esther were in town. We managed to slip in a few visits alone and dinner with my daughters.
All four, different as they are from one another, raised similar historical, philosophical and contextual questions. Not on the level of what they were doing, but more towards the interconnected symphony, ecology and politics of why they are doing what they are doing - in the way they do.
For example, seemingly out of nowhere Hannah, a newly graduated Master of Science nurse practitioner, had begun writing a cheeky-lively-informative Substack regarding what health providers don’t always inform women about women’s health. It’s a fabulously informed read and as her father, I’m proud of what she’s doing. What intrigues me most is (again) how she understands the inspiration, values and creative ethos as to why she is compelled to assist women in this way? In this way that takes up so many hours in her day.
Last week I returned to NYC. Hannah was getting married. Tessa stood by her side. The clans gathered, connected, celebrated. Love. My-oh-my
Arriving back from New York I taught for VSNT again and gave a few international (NIRI) couple therapy workshops including annual trainings in São Paolo Brazil and Oslo Norway.
"There is a quiet light in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always there." ~ John O’Donohue
Following these adventures, I scooted over to Ireland for 10 days to visit long-time friends where passionate exchange about art, literature, politics and talk of their latest movies made, circulate throughout our days.
One has received most of the major movie making awards one could receive. But they still wake up every day and create for hours on end. They don’t have to. Their legacy has been sealed. I’m curious why they do.
Among the many highlights in Ireland was spending a tasty bit of shimmy-shaky-turn-the-world-of therapy-upside-down time with one of the brightest and by far the funniest mentor I’ve ever been blessed by ~ Dublin’s own daughter Imelda McCarthy. Hands down the best systemic thinker, theorist and therapist in Europe by a country mile.
After lunch we sat for hours over handsome pints of Guinness at a favourite pub of mine in Dalkey. We revisited the pioneering phase of psychotherapy that began over 60+ years ago, and how systems thinking moved the field beyond internal state psychology and promised new ways of conceptualizing multi-person interactions, communications, and the relational domain. This was by any measure a quantum leap.
We discussed how the family therapy field relied on anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s theories (e.g. Ecology of Mind: a theory that individual human minds are not isolated inside heads, but are part of a larger, interconnected cybernetic network that includes social relationships, and the natural environment) and the ways progressive family therapists from the Mental Research Institute, Milan Associates, Ackerman Institute, Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic (and numerous others), went such a long way towards stepping away from focusing on the single/individual client. Opening a pathway towards the web of relational interconnections within which problems could arise and are sustained.
Imelda and I lamented on how systemic family therapy took the Batesonian message but restricted its application to micro human systems (family) - as if they could be addressed apart and disembodied from their cultural norms and contexts. We didn’t feel Bateson would have approved.
Imelda continues to be the same passionate intellectual, political and therapeutic force she always was. Doesn’t have to be. She too has a highly respected legacy sealed. But she does. Giving me pause to wonder why and through what values - kept her commitments to students, community, justice, the poor and the dispossessed, growing further.
Returning home I imagined what the stories were behind the passion, ethics, history, grit, politic, care, creativity and mattering that influence the family, friends and colleagues mentioned so far?
By mid-Spring VSNT began stitching these questions and plot lines together and wondered if we could integrate them into what the next Therapeutic Conversations conference in Vancouver, might become.
*On a side note: at this time VSNT was also finishing off a brand-new website. Lisa Höstman laboured for several months. Lisa ~ you’ve done a beautiful job. We thank you.
We’d also like thank Communications Director Sasha Hawkins who is leaving after 3 years to launch into her post-MSW career. Good Luck!
BIG welcome to new Communications Director ~ Mara Somerset Lee*
“Either you do it like it’s a big weight on you, or you do it as part of the dance.” ~ Ram Dass
An intimate new Therapeutic Conversations conference design
When first finding narrative therapy it felt like I no longer had to separate where I stood politically from what I did therapeutically. This was new.
I was captivated by narrative’s song of justice, politics, courage and difference. How the practice relationally pushed, scaffold up, and created the ordinary story towards something sublime. Poetic. Extraordinary.
All of us gathered inside our narrative therapy community train and practice hard. Sharpening skills and spending gobs of money we don’t have on narrative conferences and all manner of trainings. A project we hope might propel ourselves outward beyond Graduate school teachings and modern day let’s find a proper way to label you psychotherapy.
Narrative’s learning espoused a view of others and elsewhere contexts differently, how to utter and shape narrative questions uniquely, to unbloat problem saturated stories, and listen for the quiet unappreciated line. And, when the world walks into our therapy rooms - consider the politics of identity making.
We have all done this.And yet, despite all these training efforts, I find the best training experiences take place in post workshop discussions where ideas are written on the back of bar room napkins in the relaxed let your-hair-down companionship of others.What continues to stir my narrative practice imagination is the luxury of getting to know the intimate particularities and passions of the everyday people behind the remarkable work they are practicing, teaching and writing about.Once you enter and engage this open and intimate conversational setting of questioning presenters about why and how they understand what they do (beyond the content of what they’re teaching) it scaffolds up the meaning making and turns the presenter questions back on us. Affording room for personal/critical reflections about why each of us do, what we do.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forgetwhat you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
~Maya Angelou
This year’s TC24 conference live demonstration presenter workshop material is designed to serve as a backdrop for broader discussions about the ecology of the presenter’s personal history – shaping the practice, ideas, and writing they do.
An entry point for conference participants to learn through intimate close-up interviews discussing a presenter’s values, failures, politics, doubt, courage, commitments, politics, and desire.
Affording participants a relaxed ‘back of a bar napkin let-your-hair-down experience’ setting. Listening to stories of what presenters fear, commitments to keep creativity alive, perceptions on what their relationships with clients represent, doubts they experience, everyday agony and ecstasy’s, histories of training, the best they trained with, political stands that propel them along, their secrets, ambitions, relationships and passions, and how they explain what keeps their narrative therapy practice creative, enthusiastic and passionate.
Newsletter readers: We are saving you a front row seat to interact, question and experience these personal presenter interviews.
Participants engage teaching rooms where multiple presenters present together, interview one another, reflect with the audience, and interview the audience. Yes, this will be special. Unique.
Some workshops on trauma, abuse, and gender violence, narrative informed relational interviewing and other soon to be decided topics will run 5 hours in length, alongside a wide variety of shorter skill-based presentations on topics like the use of psychedelic medicines, session transcript supervision, developing questions, letter writing, the experience of sorrow, disordered eating, and more.
Alongside these workshops is a dedicated stream on ‘When theory meets practice’ for those interested in poststructuralism, Foucault, queer theory, poetics, cultural theory, climate change etc.
All CEU afforded TC workshops will use the ‘getting to know the presenter interview and reflections’ format.
* TRUST REGISTRATION. Good until October 15, 2026
Participants: you don’t have to wait until the TC schedule is set to register.
If you know you’re coming register early and on the cheap*
New VSNT faculty writings
By May 2026 I was spending loads of hours inside the therapy room, figuring out the new narrative therapy book David ‘Rock’ Nylund and I are contracted to write for a Spring/Summer 2027 release,hosting visitors, reading a ton of spy-fiction, and rereading VSNT teaching faculty Todd May’s books on French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
Then I began pouring over drafts of VSNT faculty teammates Helené Grau Kristensen and Rock’s new neo-narrative practice writings (five articles in total between them). Helenés articles are reviewed in our upcoming Fall newsletter. Now let’s have a brief look at two of Rock’s articles below.
Emotional Regulation + The Trouble with Hope
As many in our community know, over the past few years longtime VSNT faculty member David ‘Rock’ Nylund lost his brother and both parents.
During this ongoing sorrow he split his time between working as a tenured social work professor at California State Sacramento -and flying (back and forth) every eight weeks, to his hometown of Detroit, Michigan - 4,026 miles /6,480 km round trip.
As his friends we collectively watched on, marvelled at, valued his grace and integrity - and loved, supported, and grieved alongside him.
And somehow, while no one was watching, Rock recently shows up and shocks the VSNT faculty with three new articles he’s written.
I mean we all acknowledge he’s one of narrative therapy’s most prolific writers but - to write what he did through all the complexities he was managing, on subjects he’d never spoken about, that are gobsmackingly good, was/is astounding.
Rock traveled a different study route from most of us by choosing a doctorate in Cultural Studies and studied under intellectual heavy weights like Judith Butler and Jack Halbererstam. One of his recently published papers is a masterly critique of mainstream psychotherapy’s support of the growing and ever-trendy heavily individualist discourse known as - ‘Emotional Regulation’.
Rock analyses how the mental health field’s resurfacing idea of emotional regulation is achieving near-hegemonic status. He considers how emotional regulation is now widely regarded as a hallmark of psychological well-being. And the capacity to regulate one’s emotions is frequently framed not only as a therapeutic goal but also as a moral imperative.
He outlines how this internal state psychological framing is pervasive across therapeutic modalities, from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to trauma-informed care, where emotional regulation is cast as an internal, self-directed mechanism that individuals must cultivate to be seen as psychologically “well.”
Rock situates psychotherapies emotional regulation within broad socio- cultural and political contexts and offers up a compelling post-structural counter discourse that resists neoliberal presumptions and popular consolidated belief that emotional health (and regulation of emotions) can and should only be achieved through individualized mastery of affect (and the self).
Another of Rock’s new writings is entitled: The Trouble with Hope. Although hope has deep philosophical and political roots—particularly within liberationist and collective traditions the paper focuses on its psychologized deployment within contemporary social work and mental health practice, where hope is frequently reframed as an individual emotional stance, therapeutic goal, or moral obligation.
He first shared the paper (as is customary) with the VSNT faculty teaching crew for reflections.
Below is one response written in a group email by Rosa Alena Arteaga. Rosa is VSNT’s primary voice/leader/therapist in areas of gender violence, abuse, and trauma.
Dear Rock: Thank you for sharing your article—it lingered with me long after I finished reading, like a quiet echo that refuses to fade. It made me think about hope, not as a simple word, but as something ancient, something carried.
What is the history of hope? I imagine it did not begin in light, but in darkness—in the first moment someone endured what should not be endured and still chose to breathe again. Hope, perhaps, is not born from ease, but from rupture. It is stitched together in the aftermath.
I wonder why so many survivors of gender violence return to that word. Is it because hope is the only language left when certainty has been taken? Or because hope does not demand proof—it only asks for possibility?
And then I question it too: is it hope, or is it survival wearing a softer name? Is it justice deferred, reshaped into something more bearable? Is it desire, reaching forward when the past pulls back?
Maybe hope is all of these at once. Not pure, not simple—but layered. A quiet insistence. A refusal to let harm have the final word.
Your article reminded me that hope is not always bright. Sometimes it is stubborn, fragile, even conflicted. But it moves—slowly, persistently—like something that refuses to disappear.
I think this is where hope becomes complicated—when it is imposed, when it arrives as an expectation rather than something chosen. An instruction to “be hopeful” can feel like a quiet silencing, especially when it leaves no room for anger, for action, for rebellion.
Because anger has its own truth. It names what was violated. It refuses to soften what should not be softened. And activism, rebellion—these are not the absence of hope, but perhaps its sharper edges. The parts of hope that refuse to sit still.
When hope is uncontextualized, it risks becoming a kind of erasure. It can ask survivors to leap too quickly toward light without honoring the weight of what they carry. It can suggest patience where urgency is needed, stillness where movement is necessary.
But maybe hope, when it is honest, makes space. It does not replace anger—it walks beside it. It does not quiet resistance—it fuels it. It is not passive. It does not ask for compliance. How to allow hope to be fierce, grounded, and accountable—to history, to harm, to the ongoing demand for justice.
Thank you for opening that space to reflect.
Rosa.
**Special thanks to any and all of you who dared read this newsletter all the way down to the bottom. Thanks so much.
Our next narrative newsletter will return in early Autumn.
Always enjoy hearing your feedback – my direct email is yft@telus.net.
Hoping all remains interesting where you are.
Peace ~ Stephen
FALL 2026 Vancouver School Trainings
