Narrative Newsletter July 2025: Narrative Photographs, Revisiting Double Listening, Healing by Nature, TC23 Conference Updates

Vancouver School For Narrative Therapy VSNT
Jul 31
14 min read

Updated: Aug 12

Hello everyone - Welcome back to this month's narrative newsletter.

This time around we’ll be taking an up-close look at one of Michael White’s extraordinary practice ideas ~ Double Listening.

For the teaching faculty at VSNT, double listening sits at the heart of narrative therapy practice so – I’ll unravel why we value the practice and the ways we use and interpret its meaning.

To do this, we’ll need to link together a bit of relational history and Michael’s development of Double Listening through his fascination and uptake of Gregory Bateson’s ideas on Difference and Double Description.

The newsletter will also introduce a new medical practice of doctors prescribing ‘walks in the forest’ for a ‘dose of nature’ to alleviate a range of health issues; suggest a few good summertime readings; and update you on the latest live demonstration workshop developments at the October 8-11, Therapeutic Conversations 23 conference in Sacramento, California.

But first . . .

A PICTURE'S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

This summer I made a promise to begin cataloging the boxes (and boxes) of photographs that sit silently waiting to be organized in my basement.

I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of analog photographs – the ones that use a chemical process to capture the image. The method of picture taking pre-iPhone. Remember (:

My thought was the process of systematizing the pictures would be quick and easy and take a matter of a few days.

Turns out I’d seriously underestimated how old photos had a great capacity to rush forth a flood of remembering – of long forgotten stories, people, places, thoughts, feelings, awe, laughter, love . . . and so on.

Included on the A-train of memory was everything you might imagine. Scores of random remembrances capturing everything from - family holidays, class pictures, Irish parties my parents hosted, high school friends, visits to the Madigan’s in London and the west coast of Ireland, university, world travels, beautiful babies being born, birthday parties, and countless accounts of camping adventures, dinner parties, music festivals, friends making goofy faces, and on and on we go.

I also came across a series of wonderful pictures capturing a personal account of narrative therapy. Detailing all the extraordinary and fiercely independent characters along with the intensity, creativity, commitment, joy, and laugh-out-loud memories that, I realize, continues to thrive and - live on in the present.

*Stephen, daughters Hannah, Tessa, & Michael White, Psychotherapy Networker*

The pictures evoke a history of our present - one Michel Foucault might note as our genealogy: a way of using historical materials to bring about a "revaluing of values" in the present day. I'm proud to see how we persevere, persevere, and practice our post-structural ideas and non-pathologizing values alongside the day to day 'doing of the work' that is always (always) creating new forms of therapeutic practice.

Call me sentimental but I adore the sum-total of our narrative therapy community. The whole shebang. The kit and kaboodle.

Sitting in the basement alongside our pictorial history, my gaze looks out onto the Pacific Ocean. I pause and appreciate the rising upward arch of where we've been to the dizzying heights of where we might be going. My eyes begin to water. Filled to the brim with gratitude.

Thanking my lucky stars for how all of you have accepted the VSNT faculty and me into your lives and, over time, becoming intricate parts of one another.

Thank you.

Under the current mental health policy conditions, I’m struck by how taxing, perplexing, and humbling the structural restraints that pressure our daily practice can be. And also how challenging the prospect of keeping our narrative practice fresh can sometimes be.

This lends itself as a tribute to all of you who continue practicing narrative therapy despite at times feeling:

exhausted (by the ongoing turn towards government policy twining together internal state psychology with DSM medicalization/diagnosis and evidence-based research methodology),
isolated (by the harsh realities of new public management) and;
overwhelmed (by the neoliberal politics behind these economic policy choices and the subsequent structural and financial restraints placed squarely on the backs of clients and therapists).

To brave these encounters, we must stick together and continue to raise some of the more potent theoretical and therapeutic questions the field of mental health is capable of phrasing. This remains the future of the work.

The upcoming Sacramento, California Therapeutic Conversations 23 Conference is designed to be our community's site of connection, support and celebration of each other. A space where we can grow the future of our narrative therapy traditions, together!! (More on this further down the page.)

Make that a Double: Double Description/Double Listening

“Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.”

~ Gregory Bateson

Early on the learning trail of narrative therapy one fact became fairly obvious: if I was to have any chance of gaining a fuller understanding of Michael White’s therapeutic thinking, one first had to figure out his fascinating draw towards Gregory Bateson’s ideas.

Bateson was an intellectual giant known across numerous fields as an immanent biologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist (and who many considered one of the founders of family therapy). The writings most influencing Michael included the books Steps to an Ecology of Mind and, Mind and Nature.

Trying to find the relationship between Bateson’s ideas and narrative practice was a fair bit tricky and challenging. Ok to be perfectly honest – at times they were soooo bewildering, convoluted and complex. Whew!

However, once I began to conceive the outer edges of Bateson’s ideas my relationship to narrative therapy, without exaggeration, fully and completely changed (and further enhanced after going through a similar learning process with Michel Foucault’s ideas - we’ll save that story for another time).

Without question I owe most of my knowledge around the complexity of Bateson’s ideas to a brilliant doctoral school professor, Douglas Flemons.

He taught an extremely difficult course on Bateson’s book Mind and Nature - a course that completely terrified me and every single one of my smart-minded classmates. Fear, worry, and nausea shaped the year end as to who passed and who failed. If you were lucky enough to pass, one made a beeline for the exits.

I, however, took the course twice. Ha! Not because I had to. I wanted to. Needed to. And yes, my classmates thought I was absolutely bat-shit crazy out of my mind to do this.

It was Bateson's concept of Double Description (and the difference double description creates) that fascinated me most. Because in reading Bateson and Michael simultaneously, I came to realize at the heart of what informs what is arguably (in my estimation) narrative therapy’s most important practice of Double Listening was Bateson’s notion of Double Description.

Bateson's idea of double description represents a method of analysis that posits how new information emerges from the juxtaposition/collocation of two or more differently collected or coded information sources.

This is exemplified by ‘binocular vision’, where two slightly disparate two-dimensional images combine in the brain to create the sensation of three-dimensional depth - revealing information 'not present' in either image alone.

To me (as a therapist) I understood the concept was about comparing similar phenomena to yield information not evident in either phenomenon by itself. This insight was at the core of how I imagined Bateson believed the relational ecology of mind and living systems operated/connected.

Bateson famously defined information as "a difference that makes a difference". Adding to this was explaining how no experience had a set of meanings that exists - independently of other experiences. Welcome to Bateson’s relational world!

In this view of double description, it is the differences between the phenomenon that generates/creates new information. In other words, we only pick up these differences when we actively ‘draw a distinction’ between how: this here phenomenon is different to this other phenomenon.

Simply put, within in Bateson’s work we may only pick up differences when we actively ‘draw a distinction.’

So, in my highly non-scientific way, I began to see how Michael’s creation of narrative therapy and Bateson’s ideas seemed to share foundational commonalities in their approach to understanding complex systems (and the creation of new meaning) by attending to and integrating multiple perspectives or "stories".

As narrative therapy practitioners have all come to understand, the practice of double listening challenges the "single-storied" representations of life often experienced by the clients we see. For example, single story reporting of an experience of trauma often leaves people feeling trapped in a single dimension of hopelessness and shame.

By actively engaging a second and/or multiple other stories, the process/curiosity counters the reductionist view of persons as merely passive recipients of trauma. So, double listening can be taken up as a narrative practice where therapists intentionally listen for "two stories" or multiple accounts of the story being told, simultaneously.

The lead (or dominant) story told by the client is often an account of the person's experience of trauma, and the second story, equally vital, is the person's responses to trauma through accounts of what they value in life and how they responded that are often disqualified or overlooked.

Hence, narrative therapy’s practice of double listening is organized around the idea of a multistoried version of life (regarding what a story/problem-story can mean or how it can be told at any given time). This therapeutic concept affords therapists a suppleness to relationally view persons and problems not as fixed, fossilized, or under any one unitary description, theory, or label.

However, there appears to be a common misunderstanding we often hear when people speak about and/or teach/supervise on Michael’s practice of double listening, that may need a little clarification.

When narrative practice suggests people are multi-storied, I don’t believe it means we carry stories within us. And I don’t believe Michael’s intention meant the therapist's job is to discover alternative stories that are already there – to simply replace the old with the new ones.

Rather than thinking people have an individualized essence that it is the task of therapeutic practice to discover, our narrability implies that therapy is as much a matter of creation as it is of discovery (Personal conversation and thanks to VSNT faculty, Todd May).

So, it’s not as though there is a dominant story that is suppressing other stories that would otherwise be told. We are not multi-storied in that sense (Personal conversation and thanks to VSNT faculty, Todd May).

In fact, to think that would be to think that we all have some essential character, divorced from the social, political and relational environment in which we exist. We are perhaps however the kinds of beings that can create and live many different stories – particularly when we place different stories side by side – as Michael’s double listening (following Bateson’s double description) always intended.

The purpose, then, of placing different stories side-by-side through double listening is a practice intention to create information/stories not evident in either phenomenon by itself.

Let me explain through an example of how we practice couple therapy: VSNT’s narrative therapy informed practice of Relational Interviewing (NIRI), are guided through Bateson’s theoretical understandings of relationships that suggest how no experience has a set of meanings that exists - independently of other experiences.

NIRI presupposes couple relationships in therapy make meaning through operationalizing that “this set of experiences are different from . . . this other one”. The couple’s receipt of ‘news of difference’ requires that relationships perceive a contrast between two or more descriptions (i.e., expressions of preferred values vs. expressions of conflict).

As earlier noted, Bateson stated his understanding of this relational phenomenon as – “It is the difference that makes the difference” (where the difference Bateson refers to is viewed as information).

Within NIRI sessions, questions constructed to remember the history of relationship values creates a double description – different to the couple’s current relationally stuck experience of conflict.

NIRI’s implementation of Bateson’s landscape of difference creates an ever-rising tension within the conflict, whereas for example, more traditional couple therapy approaches seem to focus on the expressed side of a conflict that NIRI feels are in need of a double description.

NIRI first session interviews are intentionally structured to produce double descriptions, tensions, and difference between the present saturated experience of conflict/loss/grief and the preferred history of values (and practices of these values). This is done by painstakingly mapping out rich descriptions and remembered relationship stories while the experience of conflict that often brings the couple to therapy is present but not yet addressed.

The experience of conflict is relationally in the room alongside the couple’s relationship values - bringing forward a difference and the possible creation of an experience/solution/practice that is entirely new.

The NIRI practice of relational questioning acts to intentionally amplify differences (respect/lack of respect, listening/not listening etc.) between what the couple begins to remember about their preferred relationship values and - what the experience of the conflict has helped the relationship remember to forget.

For the relationship, the tension brought forth by the difference (a tension NIRI continues to escalate throughout the session) – creates a potentially rich experiential space yet to be articulated and to one day be materialized.

These days my interest sways towards another super difficult to decipher philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. I’m fascinated with how he rejects traditional views of difference as a lack or negation and instead emphasizes its creative and productive power – alongside another idea that difference precedes identity. We’ll save this for another time.

NATURES' WAY

I’m not sure what it’s like for all of you but I tend to do my best thinking anytime I find myself outdoors, especially during the summer.

Perhaps it has something to do with an excess of vitamin D, more daylight hours, access to tomatoes (that taste like a real tomato), art shows in the park, hiking, gazing at beautiful sunsets, being in and on the ocean, etc.

Doctors, all the way back to early the physician and philosopher Hippocrates (circa 460 – c. 370 BC), have advocated for the healing power of nature.

Nearly two centuries ago the American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote how “We need the tonic of wildness”. He appears to be touching on an idea that all human generations have known, intuitively. Time in nature rallies the spirit.

More recently, study after study has found that a connection to nature enhances our hedonic well-being (sense of happiness) and our eudaimonic well-being (sense of worth and purpose), while lifting us from experiences (described in psychological terms) as anxiety and depression, and boosting our physical health. Contact with nature lowers our pulse, reduces cortisol levels, improves immunity, lengthens our attention span and reduces stress.

One idea, called attention restoration theory, holds that nature captures our involuntary attention with “soft fascination” (love this term), which seems to afford recovery from the screen-driven things that demand our attention and bombard our experience for much of the day.

Four decades ago, the great naturalist E.O. Wilson termed this the “biophilia” hypothesis, writing that “For more than 99 percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms . . . In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years, even in the tiny minority of peoples who have existed for more than one or two generations in wholly urban environments.”

Recently, during a walk in the forest alongside my regular and always interesting interlocutor, they made me aware that for the past five years, more than 1.3 million Canadians had received a medical prescription for a ‘dose of nature’ to alleviate health issues.

The PaRX program was launched in Canada by the BC Parks Foundation in November 2020, eventually expanding to other provinces throughout Canada. Crafted by a range of health care professionals, the program recommends at least two hours per week of time in nature, in chunks of no less than 20 minutes at a time.

Some 18,000 Canadian medical practitioners are now writing these ‘nature prescriptions’, aiming to counter a growing health issue: a majority of Canadians (and I suppose this fits with many other countries), live in urban areas where access to the natural environment can be limited, and where sedentary lifestyles can lead to chronic disease.

It is unclear, however, just what counts as ‘greenspaces'. Does sitting in a pocket park in the city offer the same benefits as hiking deep in the heart of an old growth forest?

Whatever the case may be, I can’t quite put into words just how much I love taking friends and family visitors to Bowen Island to the deep forest on a favourite trail called Faire Fen. To a person, after giving their final hug and fond good-byes, they state how immensely relaxed, refreshed and happy they feel. And this is good.

SUMMER READING

I’m not quite sure when I first developed the tradition of reading 2 hours a day. I believe the word for this daily practice is ‘bibliophile’ (the more common term used might be bookworm. Ha!). Which is of course distinct from a bibliotaph (one who hides away or hoards books); or a biblioklept (one who steals books). Just so we’re clear.

Over the summertime, with access to an outside deck and time to do as I please, reading can sometimes extend to up to 3 and 4 hours a day. Luxury.

Like many people, I always enjoy having both a non-fiction and a fiction book on the go (in my case fiction is either a crime fiction or espionage spy fiction).

I won’t bother you with a long list of fiction authors I follow with earnest however, the non-fiction books I’ve been reading over the last few months that may be of interest to you are:

Jens Ludwig: Unforgiving Places – the unexpected origins of American gun violence
*Makungu Akinyela: Culture, Politics, Spirituality and Practice: a book of resistance and critical theory for disturbing times
Patrick McGee: Apple in China
Charlie English: The CIA Book Club – the secret mission to win the cold war with forbidden literature
**Todd May: Shall We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times
Adam Shatz: The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon

*Makungu Akinyela livens up our Therapeutic Conversations 23 conference in Sacramento as a selected Keynote speaker on Culture, Politics, Spirituality and Practice. This will be his 3rd TC conference keynote dating back to 2007. We’ll host a meet the author book signing for him during the conference.

**Todd May will also grace our Therapeutic Conversations 23 conference in Sacramento as a selected Keynote speaker and in fact - he keynotes on the same day as Makungu. Buckle up!! Todd will be speaking throughout the conference on a variety of theoretical ideas as they pertain to narrative therapy practice and issues of justice.

***I should also like to make special note of VSNT faculty member David Rock Nylund’s latest article entitled Regulating Emotion, Regulating Selves: A Critique of the Emotion Regulation Discourse in Psychotherapy. Another absolutely fabulous piece from one of narrative’s premier writers. Well done!

UPDATES ON THERAPEUTIC CONVERSATIONS 23

OCTOBER 2025

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

CEs for LCSW's, LMFT's and LPCC's meeting the requirements of the California Board of Behavioural Sciences (BBS) + APA approved CEs coming soon.

Early registration for the 23rd THERAPEUTIC CONVERSATIONS conference is now open!

Click here for more information & to register for TC23

WORLD'S BEST CONFERENCE FOR LIVE THERAPY DEMONSTRATIONS

Where Theory, Values, and Skills ~ Meet LIVE Narrative Therapy Practice

Learn the latest Narrative Therapy practice skills on topics that matter to you most to you including workshops on:

Responding to Trauma and Abuse
Gender Violence
Narrative Group Work with Trauma and Abuse
Grief & Relational Grieving
Couples Therapy
Narrative and Psychedelic Medicines
Culture, Politics, Spirituality, and Practice
Eco-Narrative Therapy and Climate Change
Death, Loss & Love
Disordered Eating
Therapeutic Letter Writing
Live Supervision (Gender Violence and Trauma)
Live Supervision (Developing Narrative Questions)
African Centred Testimony Therapy
Narrative Therapy with Children and Families
Trans Youth and Families
Socio-cultural influences in work with Families
Belonging for LGBTQIA Muslims
Reauthoring Structures of Power Relationships
Michel Foucault’s Philosophy in Narrative Practice
The Post-Neoliberal Individual
Poetics, Politics and Identity
Grassroots Organizing for Therapists
Videos of Michael White in action
And a whole lot more . . .

No other Conference Anywhere Compares to Therapeutic Conversations Daily Post-Workshop Conference Gatherings

Participants and presenters get together to kick back, exhale, laugh a lot, share a few drinks and ~ connect with great people from around the globe.

Questions? Please contact Sasha Hawkins at: narrativevancouver@gmail.com

FALL 2025 VSNT NARRATIVE THERAPY TRAININGS

And if all this isn’t enough – let’s introduce you to upcoming VSNT Fall 2025 Narrative Course Trainings:

Foundations I: Theory and Practice

Online 5-Day Certificate Training Course

September 19th - 21st & 27th - 28th, 2025

30 CE credits granted by CCPA

Skill based, purposeful, and theoretically driven training guided by one highly imaginative continental philosopher + six world-class narrative therapists.

Experience live therapy demonstrations, client video taped sessions, and transcripts that prepare you for the therapy room.

NIRI: Narrative Therapy Informed Relational Interviewing

Couple Therapy Training Course

November 7th-8th, 2025

Explore new ideas in working with highly conflicted couple relationships with

Stephen Madigan, MSW, MSc, PhD

Stephen outlines his unique, non-individualist NIRI practice through step-by-step session videos with his clients in Canada, Norway, and the USA.

Foundations II: Applied Skills of Narrative Practice

Online Certificate Training Course

November 14th-16th, 2025

18 CE credits granted by CCPA

Unique live-interview learning course with legendary narrative therapy supervisors

Stephen Madigan & David Nylund.

Engage in live counter-story interviewing, close up supervision, discussion, and focused support as you develop skills to create rich therapeutic questions.