Narrative Therapy - Paperback

by Stephen Madigan (Author)

A third edition of this classic guide to understanding narrative therapy.

Narrative therapy is founded on the idea that the mental health issues we bring to therapy are not restricted to or located solely within ourselves. We experience ourselves as deeply relational (not individual), and we are shaped by and imbedded within prevailing historical and socio-economic contexts, dominant cultural understandings, and normative expectations of what constitutes a 'healthy' individual.

This third edition of Narrative Therapy introduces psychologists, next generation practitioners, and veteran narrative therapists to a broad range of foundational ideas alongside the latest state-of-the-art narrative theoretical ideas and practices. The book provides a wide range of up-close demonstrations, session transcripts, remarkable therapeutic questions, and numerous updated clinical examples to provide a coherent balance between narrative therapy's theoretical complexities, and the nuts-and-bolts of therapeutic practice. Readers receive step-by-step guidance in:

• Relational responses to trauma, abuse, and the body
• Working with highly conflicted couple relationships
• Narrative practice and psychedelic medicines
• Updated relational practice approaches to grief, loss, and death
• Collective ethics for suicide prevention
• Disordered eating
• New innovations in therapeutic letter writing
• Gender violence and complex trauma
• Narrative therapy with trans youth and families
• Narrative therapy with children and families

Author Biography

Stephen Madigan, PhD, holds an MSW and MSc in couple and family therapy along with his doctorate. He supervises high conflict couple therapy teams and teaches narrative therapy workshops across five continents. Dr. Madigan is an award-winning narrative therapist, best-selling therapy author, Training Director of the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy, content manager of the online learning platform VSNT.live, and long-time supervisor to numerous international high couple conflict teams. He wrote the first ever doctoral dissertation on narrative therapy and his therapy work is studied in graduate university programs across the world through various media forms such as the American Psychological Association's production of a set of six professional learning videos filming his live narrative practice. He wrote the best-selling first and second editions of the book Narrative Therapy, published in 2011 and 2019. Dr. Madigan is the proud father of 29-year-old twin daughters and a 'retired' member of Canada's National Ultimate Frisbee Team.