New Zealand Journal of Counselling
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Bereavement, re-membering and speaking after the loss of a family member to suicide
Get PDFDisjunctions may arise after the loss of a friend or family member, especially after death through suicide. The first author (Rachael) calls on the words from bereaved people struggling to speak about such a loss. Their words resonate with her own lived experience of struggling to speak after the early ending of her father’s life through suicide.
Autoethnographies of three events (self-data) written in the first and third person opened up spaces for Rachael to trouble and break the silence that prevailed in the discursive context of her experience of loss. The authors draw on poststructuralist theory and practices of narrative therapy to reflect on and theorise the transformation that occurred as ways were found for Rachael to speak.
The autoethnographic narratives show how, by participating in a family “re-membering” conversation, Rachael and her siblings were able to honour their father in a way that sustained their hopes to speak together about their loss for the first time and story the subsequent reconnection of family members. This article potentially opens up spaces for further conversations about the possibilities and challenges of speaking about suicide loss
Meeting God in “thin places”: Subjective experiences of spirituality accompanying clients through difficult life events
Get PDFThis research highlights the complexities of counselling clients’ subjective experiences of spirituality that accompany difficult life events. Two spiritual and cultural metaphors are employed: “Te Kore Kore”, a place in the Māori creation story of nothingness and potential for life (Marsden, 2003); and the Celtic concept of “thin places”, describing moments of feeling especially close to God (O’Donohue, 1999). In this small-scale qualitative research study, six counselling clients shared their experience of these domains through semi- structured interviews employing an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) double hermeneutic approach, which revealed rich metaphorical landscapes of lived experience, common themes and hidden gems. Personal processes of surrender, acceptance, and trust in God were described, leading to longer lasting improvements in physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Spiritual practices such as mindfulness, contemplation, and connection to sacred spaces in nature were found to cultivate awareness of God’s closeness during difficult times, which led to deepened relationships with God. As participants were working with a counsellor, spiritual director, or medical support person during their difficult life experiences, this article has implications for raising spiritual awareness in counselling practice and suggests the importance of future research into the shared spiritual truths and experiences of Te Tiriti partners
Recommendations for Improving NZAC’s Continuing Professional Development Process
Get PDFNZAC’s Continuing Professional Development Record and Plan (CPDR+P) is a member’s annual listing of continuing professional development (CPD) activities and self-reflection on those activities, and a yearly plan that targets areas for further development. The focus of the process is a self-reflective practice of reviewing and reflecting on new learning. Surprisingly, demonstrating one’s effectiveness with clients does not feature. Since research has shown that traditional CPD activities are not consistently related to improved client outcomes, a more meaningful process of CPDR+P should have as one of its major aims the counsellor’s “…steady improvement over time to achieve superior performance on some meaningful [outcome] measure” (Goodyear et al., p. 54). This article suggests a rebalancing of the current self-reflection focus in NZAC’s CPDR+P to include counsellors’ collecting and analysing information about their client caseload and progress in counselling in order to answer three questions: (1) Who am I dealing with? (2) How well am I dealing with them? and (3) How effectively am I dealing with them? Recommended changes to the CPDR+P process are discussed
Schools, Signification, and Subjectification: Enlisting the “Wonderfulness Interview” in School Counselling to Respond to Deficit Discourses within High School Communities
Get PDFAs a school counsellor working with young people between the ages of 11 and 18, I am conscious that the technologies of measurement, assessment, and evaluation developed in educational and developmental traditions construct a gaze of normalising judgment (Foucault, 1977). This gaze invites teachers to describe young people in relation to their deviation from the “norm”, creating a language of individual deficit that seeks to police students’ identities in specific ways. I am also mindful that these descriptions are often granted a certain authority as an effect of their professionalised nature, the cultural status of teachers, and the power relations between adults and adolescents that invite adolescents into a position of passivity. As such, we can understand that young people in schools are vulnerable to internalising stories told about them by adults and authority figures, many of which pathologise them.
This article thus documents the use of narrative therapy’s “wonderfulness interview” (Marsten et al., 2016) as a way to de-stabilise pathologising stories of students’ learning and behaviour whilst drawing out rich descriptions of storylines that are meaningful to their lives and identities. At the centre of this text is a story archiving the journey of three young women as they subvert the power relations of the classroom and reclaim authorship over their identities
RE:SOLVE – A Problem Solving Pathway: An Open Trial With Young People at Risk of Self-Harm
Get PDFThis article presents the results of a mixed methods open trial of “RE:SOLVE – A Problem Solving Pathway” for young people at risk of self-harm. The aims of the study were to: test the acceptability and feasibility of RE:SOLVE for the clients who took part; gather efficacy data using quantitative measures of mood, problem solving capacity, hopelessness, suicidal thinking, and overall functioning; and understand the experiences of the participants through semi-structured interviews.
Two thirds of participants completed the problem-solving therapy sessions and took part in the questionnaires and interviews. For those who completed all assessments, the results showed statistically and clinically significant reductions in levels of depression and suicidal orientation from pre- to post-intervention tests.
All other measures showed consistent improvements, although they did not reach statistically significant levels. The intervention shows promise but needs to be tested in a randomised control trial
“Why Am I The Only One?”: The Experience of Non-death Loss and Grief for Chinese International High School Students in Auckland, New Zealand During COVID-19
Get PDFThis qualitative research explored the non-death loss and grief experiences of Chinese international high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic in Auckland, New Zealand. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six Chinese international high school students. The data were analysed using a thematic analysis approach. This study demonstrates the complexity of non-death loss and grief experienced by international high school students during the pandemic. This study proposes that socio-cultural factors and the developmental characteristics of adolescence, rather than individual characteristics, played significant roles in contributing to, and complicating, these loss and grief experiences in the context of the global crisis. Implications for practice, research, and education are discussed
A critical investigation of school guidance counselling in Aotearoa New Zealand
Get PDFThis article invites guidance counsellors to examine their role as wellbeing experts in Aotearoa New Zealand schools. By drawing on critical scholars like McLeod and Wright (2016), Rose (1999), and Foucault (1995), it examines how the dominant discourse of wellbeing inspires young people to focus on managing their emotions to become self-optimising, happy, individualised, responsible, and productive citizens. While this may appear beneficial, concerns are raised for how wellbeing guides school counsellors to exercise contested and problematic psy-knowledge that encourages young people to overlook important societal issues and govern themselves towards ideal neoliberal values and character. This article concludes by calling for more critical research and professional development within the guidance counselling profession to ensure our work is informed by ethical, evidence-based, and socially just theories and practices
Being and becoming Pākehā: Unfolding the places of colonisation behind my pepeha
Get PDFIn her recent book, “This Pākehā life: An unsettled memoir”, New Zealand Professor Alison Jones (2020) wrote about how she is continuing to become Pākehā in her own way. In a similar vein, this article is a personal reflection on my story of how I am becoming Pākehā. Here I depict Pākehā identity as having many “folds” that I can grow in over time. I focus on two folds that I have grown in recently: knowing my coloniser ancestry more keenly through engaging in critical family history, and continuing in my decolonisation journey through retelling family history in a way that makes colonisation visible. A focal point for this growth in Pākehā identity was the discovery of layers of colonisation in the places that feature in my pepeha (Connor, 2019). I retell my pepeha in a poem, which highlights these layers, and conclude with implications for other counsellors to consider when noticing recent growth in their own becoming as Pākehā
