This article aims to show how reflexivity helps create transparency and dialogue that is required for forming and sustaining ethical research relationships, especially when prior relationships with participants already exist. The article draws on literature relating to ethics and reflexivity and uses two stories, illustrated by conversations with research participants, to demonstrate how ethical issues emerge through conversation when planning research and how participants can use those conversations to inform later ethical decision-making practices. The article also presents literature, theories, and poetic representation that go some way toward explaining and describing the vulnerabilities experienced by researchers when using reflexivity. Reflexivity, although enabling the conduct of ethical relational research, also requires researchers to come from behind the protective barriers of objectivity and invite others to join with us in our learning about being a researcher as well as remaining human in our research relationships.

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This paper draws attention to issues for supervisors who support counsellors working with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse from the perspective of trauma theory. The author describes the effects of vicarious traumatization and the unconscious dynamics that contribute to this experience. A narrative approach is included as another way of supervisors listening to distressing stories, both those of clients and of their counsellors, and re ects on the value of bearing witness to those stories in supervision and of recognizing them as a source of healing.

Background: An in-depth, small scale narrative inquiry into ex-clients' experiences of counselling was undertaken, using a local community counselling agency which highlighted several important themes, including reviews and endings. Aim: To show clients' lived experience of reviews and endings. Methods: Narrative case study methods were used, alongside researcher reflexivity. The meanings were co-constructed between the ex-clients, their counsellors and the researchers. Results: Clients stories show the inter-relationship between reviews and endings, and that even when experienced negatively, clients can see the value of reviews. This paper also notes the therapeutic importance of mutuality and negotiation in decision making about endings. Conclusions: The process of undertaking collaborative, narrative inquiry can be empowering for all involved. Clients, counsellors and managers can question funders about their assumptions about the number of sessions offered when they inform themselves with research.