Acceptance with joy: Writing as a means of embodying compassion

This article reports on research using writing workshops conducted with three women who distanced themselves from problematic relationships with their bodies that were induced by eating disorders. The article focuses on the use of writing tasks based on appreciative inquiry and outsider witnessing processes, practised with a group of women in a manner that provided space for the participants to story compassion for their bodies. The article explores the writing tasks that the participants were invited to undertake, and discusses the subsequent interviewing and outsider witnessing process as forms of narrative therapy practice. The article also documents the process of capturing a participant’s voice in a rescued speech poem

Whose future? Whose choosing?: Counselling in a context of (im)possible choice.

Critically reflexive practice is at the heart of counselling, and even more so when clients come face to face with (im)possible choices. As counsellor educators, the authors show counselling practice at the edge of uncertainty. This article features a counselling context in a secondary school. It describes a fictional situation where action is called for in the midst of undecidability, at an impasse in the life of a young woman client. The article explores the aporia that confront the young woman and the counsellor, in the context of education, career, families, cultures and communities. The authors show that these explorations produced transformational questions for their teaching practice as counsellor educators

"I cannot see my way clear. I cannot see the blackboard": Deconstructing personal failure stories

In this article, a failure identity story of a student counsellor is deconstructed. Self-data on the experiences of her six-year-old self in a school were generated through an outsider witness ceremony, as suggested by White (2007) in Maps of Narrative Practice. The data take the form of a rescued speech poem, as proposed by Speedy (2005). The article reflects on the process of data generation and of using a failure conversation map, as discussed by White (2002) in his paper “Addressing personal failure,” to analyse and deconstruct the failure identity/ies available to the student counsellor. The process of the research, the writing, and the analyses of the failure story contributed to the development of an ethical counselling practice by the student counsellor

The social construction of a family therapy training programme

D.Litt. et Phil.Please refer to full text to view abstrac

Gender discourse, awareness, and alternative responses for men in everyday living

In this paper, the authors use examples from their experiences to explore the nuances and complexities of contemporary gender practices. They draw on discourse and positioning theories to identify the ways in which culturally dominant, and difficult to notice, gender constructions help shape everyday experiences. In addition, the authors share their view that there are benefits in developing skills in noticing contemporary practices made available by dominant gender constructions. Such noticing expands possibilities for ways of responding and relating that might produce outcomes for men and women that fit with their hopes for living

Doing hope … together, in everyday living and in counseling research

This chapter describes the practices of doing hope together in a kaleidoscope of personal and professional narratives woven into and between people’s lives. Narrative therapy practices such as compassionate witnessing and narrative documents are called on to story small steps of doing reasonable hope in everyday life and in counseling research. The chapter draws on the witnessing of a farewell ritual between a grandmother and grandsons, witnessing diners at a café and excerpts of narrative documents to produce, acknowledge and richly describe practices of care that contribute to the doing of hope together. These small and ordinary, yet significant, incidents take place in the entangled spaces of discursive and material, between humans and humans, as well as between humans and matter-materiality. The chapter also weaves vignettes from everyday living and counseling-research data

Considering counsellor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Part 2: How might we practise?

The registration environment offers particular challenges for the identity of counselling in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand. Counsellor education cannot hold itself apart from such challenges as it enters what the authors suggest is a third phase in its development (see Part 1, the companion to this article, earlier in this volume). Counselling in New Zealand has spent many years investigating and debating statutory regulation, and professional associations have implemented various internal regulatory practices that have had implications for counsellor education. Counselling and counsellor education in other parts of the world, and related professions in New Zealand, have engaged more actively with registration in a variety of forms. This article describes these various regulatory activities with the intention of making visible some possible directions for counsellor education in New Zealand. While we cannot predict with any accuracy what these possible directions would each offer to counselling, our review of various forms of registration leads us to make a case for pluralism and partnership. Advocating for pluralism in counselling, Cooper and McLeod (2010) suggest that it involves both sensibility and practice. The authors of the current article explore a pluralistic sensibility, emphasising its potential to produce a professional landscape in which practices of pluralism and partnership may emerge

Stitching hope through loss in celebration

This chapter focuses on the revisiting and re-storying of hopeful actions and practices in the face of emotional hurt, physical pain, sorrow, loss and shattered dreams. Painstakingly slow recovery from major surgery coincided with the shocking and immeasurable loss of a beloved mother. This chapter grew out of conversations reminiscing about a graduation ceremony in the year following the loss. Memories, of a gold dress, carefully stitched together the concern, love, attention, compassion, and admiration of a mother and her support for her daughter’s hope of an academic future. These memories later became the focus of an outsider witnessing practice and re-membering conversations as a means by which to re-visit, re-story and re-member the celebration of the graduation ceremony. Eleven years after the loss and as an aspiring academic, the small, but significant steps of speaking through the hurt of injustice, the immense loss of not only a mother, but central person in the life of a young woman living with disability, opened up the space to discuss the discursive and material practices of Ashlie’s lived experiences

Considering counsellor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Part 1: Looking back in order to look forward

Professional education is integral to the life of a profession. This article offers an historical review of counsellor education in Aotearoa New Zealand from the point of view of educators in one programme. It suggests that inquiry about what has been might contribute to shaping what might ensue in counsellor education. Suggesting that counsellor education might be described as on the verge of entering a third phase, the article traces the first two phases, reviewing influences of government policy, the wider profession, other stake-holders, and counsellor educators themselves on the directions and forms that counsellor education has taken. Following these traces through history, the article looks toward a third phase, offering a series of questions about the possible opportunities and leadership responsibilities available to counselling education and educators. By ending with inquiry, the article seeks to make a contribution to a dialogue among counsellor educators that might actively contribute to shaping the future of counsellor education. This article is Part 1 of this discussion; Part 2 follows in the third section of this volume

The "F" word: The challenge of feminism and the practice of counselling twenty years on

This article revisions feminist thinking from the point of view of seven practitioners/researchers currently working in New Zealand. It arises from embodied pain, passionate commitments, and a shared curiosity about purposeful feminism in our work. We explore the challenges for us as counsellors to express feminism in our practice in ways that will meet the needs of women and men. The article aims to challenge practice by performing a number of feminisms in response to particular contexts. It speaks our practices as women