The challenge of change.

Abstract

Potent life experiences are both magnetic and elastic-magnetic in the sense that they attract new meanings across time and elastic in that they expand to help structure and inform those new experiences. For me, a particular episode some years ago has gradually become a metaphor for understanding the experience of personal change, and I am periodically reminded of it whenever I am helping someone fashion significant life revisions.In the Gulf Stream waters that course along the continental shelf on the eastern seaboard of North America, scuba divers are sometimes wont to do what is colloquially known as a "drift dive." They are transported by boat to the brink of the shelf, and an anchored line is set adrift in the swift waters, borne by a large fluorescent buoy. Drawn by the warm flow of the Gulf Stream currents, the line sweeps along the edge of the shelf at approximately a 100-foot depth, and the boat followsThis chapter is a slightly expanded version of the article "The Challenge of Change:

Why narrative therapy need not fear science and ‘other’ things

“…Narrative and constuctivist theory has been useful to psychotherapy in many ways. It has introduced expanded conceptualization of the human condition, enlivened clinical practice with cultural, gendered and political acuity and reintroduced scepticism to tendencies towards systemization (Freedman and Combs, 1996;Neimeyer and Mahoney, 1995;White and Epston, 1989). In the early work of White, for example, we see an emphasis upon unusual usefulness as opposed to classification in his cognitive-behavioural treatment of encopresis (White, 1994).…”

Limits and lessons of constructivism some critical reflections

“…Likewise, constructivist therapists encourage active experimentation with alternative roles and performances, often using narrative strategies to mitigate the threat of change (G. J. Neimeyer, 1995), to solicit social validation for germinal new identities, and to historicize or chronicle them in ways that stabilize emergent self structures (Epston & White, 1995;White & Epston, 1990). Thus, particularly in the context of family therapy, constructivists adhere to Mahrer's principle that "the person and the external world [especially the world of other people] work together to construct something new.…”

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“…Some authors (e.g., Freedman & Combs, 1996, Guidano, 1995a; White & Epston, 1990) seem to emphasize particular procedures and styles of questioning in working with clients that might be seen as suggesting that it is the interventions rather than the relationship that is the primary contributor to the process of change. Others (e.g., Mahoney, 1991; G. Neimeyer, 1995) clearly emphasize the centrality of the interpersonal relationship between client and therapist to the change process.…”