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I am already lucky to be doing research in such an interesting subject area bringing a variety of disciplines together. The real bonus are the nice folk you come across who are equally passionate about storytelling too.   I am extremely grateful to the Society for Storytelling for providing me with a letter of support to aid my fundraising (see copy below). Youngminds for expressing an interest in my work. And the Adam Smith Institute for donating £250 towards my PhD. I had a meeting today with Professor Mike Wilson , University College Falmouth. His current research focuses on digital storytelling. He did some previous work on oral narrative and adolescents. More information to follow in a future blog! That's all for now. If you would like to support my work, or have any questions, please get in touch.   Society for Storytelling The Morgan Library Aston Street Wem SY4 5AU   09 Au...

‘It is a false question whether to repress or not to repress aggression. Since aggression is an indispensable ingredient of human makeup, we have to use it, to develop it into a valuable instrument for the management of our lives.’ (Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary , p43) Although the quote above focuses on aggression another emotion could be substituted in its place. Our current frame of mind works on the forces of motivation behind our actions (suppressed or not). Perls’ chapter on ‘How to Educate Children for Peace’ raises some interesting ideas. I don’t agree with all of them. For example Perls discusses how the suppression of aggression could lead to intellectual inhibition with negative effects on critical thinking. She argues that by supressing children we are teaching them to surrender their insight and will to others. Her arguement is centered on extreme situations. I believe that there is a danger of suppression in an environment where home, school, society all act ...

‘We may ask what is truth in the face of centuries of retelling? The answer lies with experience: as long as a tale is told, it has meaning (truth), will evoke response and can be understood.’ (Alida Gersie and Nancy King. Storymakingin Education and Therapy , p29) I’ve had to change methods a few times this week as NVivo is not as user friendly, or flexible, as I’d hoped. Coding is complicated. And have you ever noticed how highly complicated emotions are? I have become emersed in lines of text, gone in the wrong direction, realised things weren’t working, and reined myself in to ask, what am I looking for exactly? How can I make this project more specific and manageable? I’ve also been reading up on emotional intelligence (EI). EI has been defined by D. Goleman as ‘Being able to motivate one-self and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empath...

I can now confirm my guest blog for Youngminds is active via the following link: http://www.youngminds.org.uk/news/blog/979_mental_health_and_story_telling They asked me to write about the inspiration that got me interested in a PhD linked to mental health.

After months of waiting I read Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends , by White and Epston, and discovered that it wasn’t particularly relevant to my research. Mainly because it focuses on individual therapy sessions and I am working with groups. However I liked how White and Epston discussed the importance of imagination. It is through communication of their “story” that individuals are able to externalise thoughts. This begins the process of reforming the meaning around certain events in order to ‘revise their relationship with the problem’ (p63). Verbalising allows recognition that what is causing distress quite often is a miss-match of our story with how things are, or how we would like them to be. A letting go of the need to control others, of expecting others to act in a certain way; an understanding of what we feel, why, and how to process it. These things take time to reshape in the brain. While my study hopes to examine the changes that occur in adolescent’s emotions as a r...

‘People’s access to narrative resources depends on their social location: what stories are told where they live and work, which stories do they take seriously or not, and especially what stories they exchange’ (Frank, 3). I had been looking at socio-psychology as a form of analysis when Jack Zipes suggested a book that he had just reviewed himself. ‘This is a splendid book, and anyone who takes storytelling seriously should find the time to explore’ (Jack Zipes, Living Through Stories, Review by email, April 2012). I had already heard a few people mention Arthur W. Frank’s book The Wounded Storyteller , but this one seemed more relevant for my research. I didn’t know anything about dialogical narrative analysis prior to reading this book. Like socio-narratology, dialogical analysis includes what a story does, how it connects and disconnects people, and that there are numerous possibilities when it comes to interpretation. Socio-narratology is practiced via dialogical analy...