Home page for Johnella Bird and 'The Heart's Narrative'

The Heart's Narrative is an original contribution by an original thinker. The book has been eagerly awaited in New Zealand, where Johnella Bird has a substantial reputation as an innovative therapist and teacher. Johnella has succeeded in doing what many other practitioners have attempted to do. She has provided a way of thinking about therapy and people orientated work which allows for its complexity, fluidity and dignity. She offers insights and tools which do not impose upon people (clients) a predetermined one-size-fits-all model. Instead, she continually opens up the discussion and shows us new ways to explore people's (clients') lived experience.

This book will help us:

think more clearly and deeply about a style of talking that facilitates both therapeutic and social change within an environment of connection;
engage with contradictions and complexities in ways that support us
rather than overwhelm us;
ask questions that orientate us as explorers of people's lives;
reflect and expand our practice through creative teaching exercises.

The Heart's Narrative is multi-leveled: It provides us with new ways to work with people. It also offers a critique of existing power arrangements, including how radical ideas may be captured by conservative institutions. Johnella Bird shows us how seemingly elegant and inclusive models can actually act to oppress people (clients). She exposes how language can be used in quite subtle ways to undermine, render invisible, pathologise and oppress. She shows us how we can inadvertently use our power to impose our understandings upon our clients but she also offers questions and strategies to help us reflect upon how we use power and language. So while most of us will find her critique challenging, the book also supports our efforts toward power-sharing and equity.

The following list of chapter headings shows the range of topics discussed in The Heart's Narrative:

Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten

Just Talk
Therapeutic Narratives in Action
The Therapeutic Relationship
Building The Therapeutic Relationship
Working with Contradictions
Working with Time
Where There Is A Relationship There Is Gender
Trust and Fear
Disconnection and Desperation
Endings

In its tone and feel, The Heart's Narrative challenges the remote 'objective' analytical style by reflecting Bird's passion for real human experience. To read it is to enjoy a rare combination of intellectual rigour and accessible, personal talk. Her many examples, in the form of people's own stories, are powerful, moving and occasionally wrenching.

The Heart's Narrative will be of interest to:

Counsellors, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and social workers who are interested in facilitating individual and social change;
Anybody who primarily uses talk as a medium for negotiating and promoting understanding;
Anybody who works with talk as a means to benefit others;
Anybody concerned with negotiating and understanding existing power arrangements;
Anybody interested in language and how it can be used to either embed oppression or promote liberation;
Anybody wishing they had a better 'tool box' of questioning skills in order to open up discussion and deal with complexity;
Narrative therapy practitioners who are committed to both innovation and the critique of existing models.

"I hope that reading this book will encourage you to appreciate how you will uniquely relate to the ideas and practises presented here. I believe that while it is important that we acknowledge the sources of our ideas and practises, we are also obliged to reinvent these ideas and practises in our work."

Johnella Bird

The title of this book, represents an exploration that I have been engaged with for twenty years. Over this time, I have been drawn to the mysteries and vagaries of language, the creation and maintenance of change within the unique context provided by the therapeutic relationship and the enactment of justice and compassion within the therapeutic relationship.

Each one of these passions has its roots firmly planted in the whisperings of generations past and the louder memories and stories of childhood. The community I lived in as a child was geographically isolated by horizon defining folds of mountain ranges that plateaued briefly before the sea. It was here that fortunes were often hard won and loosely lost. People moved easily within the knowledge of fortunes lost and found, thus inhibiting the building of status walls. This was however no utopian place; Irish bitterness continued to play itself out among immigrants, and those who belonged to the land, the indigenous Maori people, disappeared from Pakeha consciousness. (Note 1) Differences were often subsumed and invisiblized, however, under the title "coaster" which covered all locals and was produced proudly for any outsider. I mention my childhood because the resources and values that have enabled my pursuit of therapeutic ideas and practices developed within my extended family living in this unique environment; a place of laughter, appreciation of language, conversations on justice and compassion, demonstrations of the importance of love and connection, and a steady relationship with the possibility of injury or death.

I have often been asked, "Why do you feel so strongly about things?" to which I reply, "Why do you feel so lukewarm for this?" To feel strongly, passionately, in a field that has saturated itself with detached explanations and representations of people's lives is tantamount to declaring oneself pathologically inclined.

My first experience of such pathological sense making was the correspondence between an assessor and myself, following my proposal that a presentation I gave the year before at the annual Child Psychotherapist Association should suffice as assessable for membership. The assessor's response was to declare that I obviously had a problem with authority and that I should investigate my relationship with my father in my personal supervision. The certainty of this declaration interested me as it turned a procedural point into a psychological deficit. I didn't accept this analysis, mostly because the tone of the letter betrayed irritation with my enquiry. The texts I was absorbing at this time were psychodynamically orientated. Within these texts I also experienced intellectual rationalisations that were not representative of either my clinical experiences or life experiences (Note 2)

Note 1 - Pakeha denotes the predominately anglo-saxon immigrants of the 19th Century. Maori are the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand
Note 2 - I had these realisations within a professional environment that encouraged experimentation; in this regard, I am particularly grateful to June Scott, my first clinical supervisor. Although June used a psychodynamic explanation, her practice of therapy was a departure from the rigid dictates usually associated with that style of therapy. June"s engagement with the work encouraged my clinical experimentation, which in turn directed me towards the burgeoning Family Therapy field.

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