“While the telling of stories can be therapeutic, not all storytelling is therapy.” – Jacob

In this blog, I would like to sketch a few desiderata for narrative therapy flowing from the power of storytelling (https://bodytheology.co.za/2018/11/28/the-power-of-storytelling/ ). I have touched upon some of it in previous blogs and shall expound them further in 2019:

[desideratum/ plural noun: desiderata – something that is needed or wanted or required]

• We should explore what “deep listening” entails and how we protect ourselves from compassion fatigue.
• We should explore how language work in the body (of which the brain is part off) and enable clients to “find the words that work”. We still tend to divide brain and body, body and mind.
• We should explore the gap between experiences and language, the space or moment between what we experience before we try to put those happenings into words or narratives – we should find ways to explore the unsaid.
• IPNB (Interpersonal Neurobiology) refers to interpersonal attunement as the experience of a sense of emotional attunement with another attentive individual. I want to go further – as therapists (narrative or pastoral) it is not only an emotional attunement we experience with our clients. We form an “inter-embodied understanding” with the person sitting across us. We should explore what this means.

Then storytelling becomes more than just the telling of stories, but together we author a coherent narrative, “weaving their stories into our own stories”.