Narrative Newsletter June 2025: Responding to Trauma, Writing Narrative for the Public, TC23 Conference Free CEs & Updates

Vancouver School For Narrative Therapy VSNT
Jun 27
11 min read

Hello everyone. Welcome back.

Hoping all is going well where you are.

It’s 6:40am. Just finished a morning stretch and meditation out on the deck. All around are the chittering sounds of hummingbirds. Buzz, zip, squeak.

Alongside the hummingbirds rests an orchestra of whistles and jingles from a chorus of colourful birds. The tender yearning bark of local seals holds down the bass line.

Interactions with the crew of hummingbirds are increasing by the day ever since I upped the sugar content in their feeder.

Back in the 90’s I read a book called Sugar Blues by William Duffy and have sworn off refined sugar, ever since. But it’s proving difficult to deny the sweet tooth cravings of these wee birds.

I suppose the best part of where I live is getting to share all this nature-wonder with the growing family and friend’s visitor list - who’ve been showing up since April and continue through September.

Inbound tomorrow is Martin, my longest standing boyhood friendship (we used to share afternoon naps together back in the old neighbourhood). He’s a journalist who knows a lot about just about everything. Looking forward to our politics-to-sports-to-novels-to-family lazy day drifts and possibly playing a few rounds on Bowen Islands majestic 9-hole course.

On another more sober note – wildfire season is upon us. A shout out to all of you in Canada to keep safe as officials are warning prolonged heat waves and lower-than-normal precipitation are expected to create conditions ripe for wildfires this summer, with hundreds already burning from Northwestern Ontario to British Columbia.

A new wildfire this week threatened Squamish, B.C. (about 60km/35miles north of me) – often called Canada’s outdoor recreation capital – adding to more than 225 wildfires across the country, at least 102 of which are deemed out of control.

TRAUMA

Towards the end of March, I had a few meals and drinks with my pal Jack (Saul). Among the various topics discussed was his Moral Injuries of War immersive experience and public art and conversation project (the work is highlighted in the upcoming 3rd Edition of Narrative Therapy).

Jack’s project is a relationally and contextually centered therapy practice with journalists and photographers covering war zones. He frames the experience that brings them into therapy as collective moral injury.

Within the therapy practice (he also interviews returning soldiers) are discussions of all that war accompanies—the atrocities, the losses, and the terrible privations.

Through years of listening to these therapy room experiences he has come to view trauma much differently than most.

As far as I can tell, this non-individualist collective moral injury practice framework is as far removed from a diagnosis of PTSD as one can travel (if you’re interested, catch his interview on VSNT.live).

From Jack’s POV, collective moral injury appears to occur when people feel individually responsible for, or complicit in, behaviors that violate their fundamental values. This finds a fit with VSNT’s relational practice of narrative therapy as he believes a transgression of values (what a person believes they stand for) cannot be resolved using conventional trauma informed treatment approaches (since these forms of suffering are rooted in moral conscience, not fear).

To take up this practice approach to trauma and suffering the psychologist/therapist must consider locating the cultural, social, ideological, political, and institutional conditions that help to relationally sustain the moral injury since extreme events of war disrupt/dismantle the social, cultural, relational, familial, and moral order (and intensifies longstanding suffering).

An integral part of Jack’s practice, project, and process of un-suffering the isolated experience of trauma is to create live public witnessing audiences (in other words communities of concern) through hosting public conversations (about the experiences of trauma).

We also discussed a more recent public conversation project he calls the Private Drama to Public Healing project. Within this project, he and his partner have designed a beautifully engaged (live and in person) public conversation to emphasize the importance of bringing personal struggles into the public square. I believe the intention is to foster empathy, understanding, collective relational healing, and ultimately - changing public and mental health policy, practices, and understanding.

The action of transporting the experience of private pain and trauma into the public domain (with the intention of influencing public understandings and policy) is a practice first described to me by Charles Waldegrave in the 1990’s (and central to the work of the Just Therapy Team in New Zealand.)

At one point in the conversation Jack smiled and said: Stephen your therapy and focus on teaching narrative therapy to therapists around the world is important, but connecting with the public directly could really be where it’s at these days.

The statement resonated. Stayed with me.

CONNECTING MORE DIRECTLY WITH THE PUBLIC

"A book is not an isolated being - it is a relationship,

an axis of innumerable relationships."

– Jorge Luis Borges

Historically, VSNT faculty have taught workshops alongside clients by inviting them along to teach in our training programs and Therapeutic Conversations conferences. We continue to consult with various community groups alongside former clients and have made a point of including insider client knowledges in books and articles.

I’ve also run multiple family groups of upward to 60-70 participants – with a client insider team acting as the response/reflecting team.

But what I’ve never done - is written or published anything directly for the public. Nor have any of my dearest, closest, and super smart narrative teaching colleagues. It may be time to re-think this.

I did however come close once. At the height of the Vancouver Anti-anorexia League days of glory, the leader of the League and I were approached by a large publishing house.

We drew up a terrific book proposal, summary and design. But, for many reasons (including how another group of narrative colleagues were writing a book on anorexia/bulimia) – we put our writing project for the public aside.

We have forever regretted this decision. Since the insider driven Vancouver Anti-anorexia League narrative therapy book, we imagined, might have been a powerful insert into the public space of anorexia.

In the last Chapter Summary Section in the 3rd Edition of my upcoming book Narrative Therapy I wrote how my intention was an invitation for readers to experience the immense joy, freedom, and creativity a daily practice of narrative therapy can provide.

My reference to ‘readers’ refers to therapists, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, Grad students, professor’s, supervisors, etc. Not the public.

I go further on to write: To this end, the book provides numerous up-close clinical experiences, demonstrations, and session transcripts - written alongside recent theoretical updates - that offer therapeutic alternatives for the field of mental health to consider. In addition, each chapter brings forth the difference between narrative practice values, and internal state psychologies time-honoured traditions supporting global accounts of life, universal categories of human nature, and those that naturalize, generalize, and promote individualist theories of the self.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how the Vancouver School could help narrative therapy become more of a cultural object of the people and - much more of the people’s instrument (and extending what narrative practice has always attempted to become).

I’ve been wondering if there might be a way to begin translating and writing up what myself and the VSNT teaching team has learned from tens of thousands of hours sitting inside the therapy room - in a reader friendly public kind of way.

Not impossible but, certainly a stretch. Ha!

I’m beginning to feel that letting the public into the real-life experience of what we as narrative therapists believe, the values we hold, and how we receive clients and problems inside the therapy room – a fair bit differently - could be of service to the public and therapists alike.

Historically, the idea of writing a narrative therapy informed book for the public was often championed by a host of my non-therapist friends, family members, and clients.

And it was the friends who always advised me to try and write a book about therapy ‘in the same way I would tell a good story at a party’. Interesting.

I’ll have to begin figuring this writing-for-the-public thing out someday soon as a handful of book offers from American and international publishers have landed on my doorstep.

A few are more like easy learning narrative therapy guides for therapists (that I feel all my narrative pals might also consider writing). Other offers are asking me to write directly to the public about the NIRI couple therapy project (NIRI - narrative therapy informed Relational Interviewing with highly conflicted couples).

I’ve been creating this non-individualist NIRI couple therapy and relational interviewing/questioning practice by focusing the work on the relationship’s relational values (values that were created, transgressed, and eventually lost) - for the better part of 12 years.

Slipping, sliding, and experimenting with relationally externalizing and contextualizing couple relationships, situating relationships inside cultural norms/expectations, and writing letters of consultation directly to the relationship etc.

OK then - we’re all friends here. So for the first time I’ll try to imagine and translate a NIRI relationship therapy proposal for a public audience:

Many couple relationships in therapy I see in my practice eventually come to view and relationally understand their couple relationship as a relational "third" entity – one that is separate from "you" and "the other" individual.
Couples report viewing the relationship as a "third" entity encourages a focus beyond individual needs and toward the well-being and values of the relational system itself.
There is you and there is me and what WE create together – physically, emotionally, intellectually, morally etc. – becomes our relationship and how we practice/live our relationship.
Please remember your relationship cannot take care of itself (remember this when you ask your relationship to wait on the sidelines for attention and love while you take care of all your other relationship obligations and responsibilities to work, children, friends, extended family etc.).
Your relationship’s relationship to other relationships is central to how you live your lives and can sometimes also become quite hazardous to your intimate relationships well-being.
Couples do not descend into patterns/repetitions of conflict on their own.
Couple relationships are deeply embedded within and influenced by the wider cultural system of norms, beliefs, expectations etc.
The couple relationship becomes whatever the intimate couple serves it.
This narrative informed relational perspective also suggests a consideration of the relationships experience when you are about to say or do something within the relationship (will this grow our relationship up or grow it down?).
Couples report that longstanding patterns/repetitions of conflict are often a reflection and expression of the values the relationship once cherished – that have been transgressed, forgotten, lost.
Reviving and reclaiming the values the relationship once cherished is of major importance if the relationship is to become its best possible version of itself.
Ask yourselves if it would be beneficial to invite yourself and your partner to consider - what any particular statement, action, or inaction will do and/or feel like to the relationship’s experience itself.
The value connected to this idea/practice lies in doing things not solely because they suit any one person’s individual needs or desires, but because they suit the best interests of the relationship.
This moves the relationship from a me to a We consciousness.
From me practices to We practices.
From individuals to Us. To a Team.
Couples report how there is value for the future relationship to consider what the history of relational values are most important to the relationship itself.
What are the values the relationship cherishes and will continue to flourish through.

*Oh, I believe I may have such a long way to go with this writing for the public thing! Readers, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.

PRAGMATIC OR AESTHETIC RELATIONAL RECEIVING

CONTEXTS (Of Understanding)

I do wish I’d followed through on an idea to write up an alternative version of the DSM - written through the perspectives of my favourite poets.

Can you imagine how (pick your favourite diagnosis) would be offered multiple contextual counter-description(s) if the troubling experience was described by my favourite Irish poets like Yeats, Heany, Muldoon – or the likes of Angelou, Rumi, Oliver – well you get the point.

In my latest book I tell a story of how American Poet Laureate Billy Collins observes this difference between pragmatic/scientific systems of understanding, and more aesthetic ways of experiencing relational phenomenon in his poem Introduction to Poetry.

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

The practice of narrative therapy finds itself more compatible with the Poet Laureate’s desire to engage a (client) story by holding it up to the light like a color slide, rather than beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

The former practice is associated with artistic/aesthetic relational commitments, while the latter akin to solving a mathematical problem (one that always holds a correct answer).

There is of course a certain beauty found within the precision and dependability of applied and physical scientific disciplines (e.g. mathematics, chemistry, physics, medicine, etc.), that is unfortunately, not found in psychology’s attempt to medicalize problems since, it could be argued that psychology is not respected as a hard science.

UPDATES ON THERAPEUTIC CONVERSATIONS 23

OCTOBER 2025

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

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

Get the lowest prices and up to a year's worth of CE hours (FREE!)

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.

Click here 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

*Click Image to be directed to the the TC 23 Conference Website*

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.