David Newman – Building storylines of health and well-being out of the smallest of actions
As Michael White, one of the originators of Narrative Therapy said; ‘people are never passive recipients to trauma, people are always responding to what they have been put through’.
Yet there are many ways action and responses people make to address difficulties in their lives gets categorised or dismissed.
This workshop will explore ways to honour, not dismiss or categorise such action. In considering the part that Narrative Practice can play in such an honouring, the workshop will cover three themes: a. Some of the discourses and practices that can take us away from an honouring of response b. An exploration of some of the delicate work of locating the small steps and responses people make in the face of hardship c. How to build stories of health and well-being from such small actions and responses
About David Newman:
David is a member of the Dulwich Centre faculty, one of the ‘homes’ of ‘Narrative Therapy’, and an Honorary Clinical Fellow at Melbourne University’s School of Social Work. Recent teaching assignments have included Rwanda, Brazil, Nepal, Greece, Turkey, Hong Kong and Palestine and he is a teacher on the Masters of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. He works in Sydney in independent practice at Sydney Narrative Therapy as well as in ‘Uspace’, a psychiatric unit for young people. David is the author of many papers about Narrative Therapy including ‘Rescuing the Said from the Saying of it: Living Documentation in Narrative Therapy’ and is working on a book with a draft title ‘Narrative Practice with young people and their families in a psychiatric setting’.
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