Therapeutic Conversations

Stephen Madigan was encouraged to open the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy in 1992 after living, working and apprenticing with David Epston, Charles Waldegrave and Kiwi Tamasese in New Zealand, and enjoying two long and hard work-study stints alongside Michael White (while living with he and Cheryl) in Adelaide, Australia (over two years and for a number of months). Stephen really didn’t have a clue about how to actually open a narrative therapy school/clinic however, his down under cousins believed it was possible.

And so the story goes.

Stephen opened the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy (through it’s partnership with Yaletown Family Therapy) in March of 1992, in supernatural Vancouver, BC, Canada. The Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy established itself as the first narrative therapy training site in the northern hemisphere.

Stephen’s brainchild – the Narrative Ideas and Therapeutic Practice conference – was born in March 1993. This was the NT communities first ever International Narrative Therapy Conference (or ‘gatherings’ as they were/are called).

The narrative ideas conference emerged as a response to attending several structural/humanist, apolitical, hierarchical, all white and all guy presentations at systemic family therapy conferences. The Vancouver School’s idea of a new narrative therapy gathering was to promote an inter-dialogic ‘anti-conference’.    

These early narrative gatherings were also the halcyon years of narrative community building – and just about everyone connected to narrative therapy came (partially because there was nowhere else to go in the world!). The Just Therapy team gave the inaugural conference keynote in 1993, Johnella Byrd, Judith Meyers-Avis and Imelda McCarthy co-delivered the feminist keynote address in 1994 and, Michael White gave a wow inspiring lecture in 1995 (the list goes on). In May 2010, Alan Jenkins gave the TC conference keynote on ‘becoming ethical’ and, Dave Nylund and Julie Tilsen queered up the other keynote on ‘homonormativity’ with their humorous and lovely queer ‘selves’.

The Vancouver School designed the Narrative Ideas and Therapeutic Practice conferences (1993-1997) as conversations to be experienced as both painful and liberating at the same time. The conferences took on the tough issues of postcolonial power, gender, race, money privilege, class and queer ideas that were not being addressed in other domains of psychology and social work. Conference participants sometimes got a little bit bruised but to everyone’s credit – most have hung in there through the years and continue to show up and participate. It is through the conference participants that our narrative community of ideas keeps moving forward. Thanks for this.

Stephen’s initial narrative therapy teaching workshops through the Vancouver School began in the summer of 1992 and to his surprise, his work quickly gained international notoriety and momentum on both the theoretical and practice front.

By the winter of 1993, he and a team of therapists, including Heather Elliot PhD and Colin Sanders MA, began seeing clients together every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 4pm to 7pm. Long hours in local bars were spent in follow up theoretical and practice discussions. Heather and Colin joined Stephen as the core narrative teaching faculty of the Vancouver School in late 1993.

Heather came to the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy with her newly minted MFT PhD dissertation on ‘Postmodernism, Feminism and Narrative Therapy’. Colin, following in his friend David Epston’s footsteps, showed up with a Masters degree in Anthropology, a deft practice knowledge from working many years with marginalized street youth, drug use and sex trade issues, and a library of books and readings that was (and still is!) unmatched anywhere.

Radical thinkers and therapists in their own right, these three worked in close quarters with one another – day in and day out – all the while sponsoring in numerous narrative and social justice workshops. Their scheme was to bring people into Vancouver as a way to offer new ideas to the Vancouver School by creating time for extended conversations with these presenters whose work they were studying/admiring/questioning.

By 1996, Vanessa Swan and Ian Law – Michael White’s first narrative teaching assistants at the Dulwich Centre – moved from Adelaide, Australia to Vancouver to work with Stephen and the Vancouver School faculty. By joining the faculty, Ian and Vanessa added a tremendous volume of practice experience and theoretical understandings to this burgeoning narrative theory and practice think tank.

The book ‘PRAXIS – discourse, feminism and politics in narrative therapies’ – emerged from this Vancouver School faculty group in 1998.

Meanwhile, Stephen and his sister Anne Madigan MSW, MSc, MD also opened the Toronto Narrative Therapy Project in 1996. TNTP was the first established narrative training project of it’s kind opened in Toronto and proved to be a practical way for Stephen to visit his family, friends and colleagues there. He also started the Vancouver Anti-anorexia league around this time.

Through the 1990’s and early part of the new millennium, the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy continued to move hard towards the politic and practice of narrative therapy through the philosophical underpinnings offered by post-structuralism. The faculty team were hell bent on inventing new ways of working more congruently within their practice of narrative therapy and the tenets of post-structural theory.

The Vancouver School faculty (as a whole) reached a point of fully separating themselves from the more ‘liberal’ minded approaches to narrative therapy occurring throughout North America and Europe. They felt that without a well sharpened theoretical and political analysis, narrative therapy practice only provided a simple therapeutic technique. And – the Vancouver School has never been about technique.

In 1998, the Vancouver School, through YFT, decided to change things up a bit and renamed their narrative conferences ‘Therapeutic Conversations’. The conference name change reflected a need to include the many ‘other’ presenters who did not consider themselves ‘narrative therapists’, but whose work the faculty admired through a shared and common bond within the politic and practice of narrative ideas, justice and anti-oppression.

People like America Bracho, Ken Hardy, Makungu Akinyela, Esther Perel, Phillip Cushman, Imelda McCarthy, Nollaig Byrne, Jack Saul, Scott Miller, Allan Wade, Barry Duncan, Eduardo Villar and numerous others were invited to speak – and all became part of the Vancouver Schools larger extended family.

The Vancouver School’s conferences are renowned for their hard work ethic and yet their parties are equally quite legendary! The surprising number of intimate and long term partnerships born out of these gatherings are testament to – well we’ll leave that to your imaginations. The parties continue to rage on.

In 2004, Vikki Reynolds PhD joined the Vancouver School’s teaching team. Vikki added a rich source of knowledge based in her dedicated activist life and her profound commitment to social justice. We were a good fit.

David Nylund PhD had been presenting regularly at all of the Vancouver School’s conferences since 1993. He joined the faculty in 2009, bringing with him his enormous abilities in narrative therapy practice, writing, and teaching through his adroit knowledge and doctoral work in cultural studies.

The Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy history keeps evolving. In August 2009, Stephen gave an advanced narrative therapy workshop on locating therapeutic questions in the politics of post-structural theory. There where three generations of narrative therapists in attendance and all felt freed up to jump in on the discussion. Younger, older, black, white, red, yellow, queer, straight, wealthy, poor – yup all the binary descriptors were there and accounted for!

Collectively, the narrative community has stretched past the two-year anniversary marking the death of our beloved friend and colleague Michael White. On the day he died, our narrative therapy landscape was changed and shaken forever. The Vancouver School imagines itself as part of an intimate patchwork of global others wanting to continue on with Michael’s gorgeous work.

The Vancouver School believes that novel and fresh minded ideas from across our many narrative therapy generations (veteran and newly arrived), situated and intertwined within the intersectionalities of where we are each so located – are needed. And hopefully, together, we can offer each other a loving place to belong and – explore.

In October of 2009, David Epston popped into Vancouver and stayed at Stephen’s home. They began a week of marathon discussions (he returns for another such session in February 2011).  Colin Sanders joined them for a few nights to imagine up future narrative practice possibilities. During the week David and Stephen also spent an informal day with about 40 invited narrative therapists/friends to listen in on David’s recent work with ‘unsuffering’. Stephen and David also brought critical ethnography forward and the importance of privileging a a separate and unique ‘insider’ discourse. It seems to be what many of the faculty are reading about these days – wondering on how this work could be best used to inform upcoming narrative training workshops and the work we do.

A new project is emerging that is almost too exciting to speak about. The Vancouver School is just about to launch a website highlighting an audio and DVD archive of their narrative conferences from 1993-2010. Participants will soon be able to access a full video history of narrative therapy workshops, keynotes, interviews and – be afforded CE’s to boot (November 2010). 

Stephen Madigan’s new book on narrative therapy theory and practice (published by the American Psychological Association – APA) entitled – Narrative Therapy – theory and practice (or Who has the story telling rights to the story being told?) – along with a six part DVD set of his live therapy called ‘Narrative therapy through time’, arrives out in March 2010 (DVD) and the book in December 2010. Projects like these represent  the Vancouver School’s commitment to narrative ideas and therapeutic practices over the last eighteen years.

The VSNT faculty invite all of you to come visit our Therapeutic Conversations 10 (!) conference during May, 2011 at the Landmark Hotel (site of the first conference) in – where else – supernatural Vancouver. Fall 2010 training schedules are now available.