‘some methods are more useful for the questions they offer’(Arthur W. Frank, LettingStories Breathe , p72) My question is how can traditional storytelling be used to support emotional health? It’s a tough one. The term narrative therapy was coined as a result of the work of two men, Michael White and David Epston (see Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends ). Though they didn’t want to be associated with any formal definitions. What exactly they did, I don’t know yet, because I am waiting for their book to come into the library. However in my search, of what felt like every periodic journal in an electronic maze, I found Pennebaker. In the United States, Pennebaker took the idea of narrative and health further by attempting to test it empirically. He and his colleagues did experiments on writing therapy and discovered that writing had a positive effect on not just mental but also physical health! Which brings me to another question, how do we test this? Pennebaker used qualitative dat...
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