1. Creating Intentional Witnessing and Living Documents

2. Intentional Witnessing
Reflecting Teamwork
Outsider witness practices
Definitional ceremonies
Reclaiming Community

3. Folk Psychology Traditions
Experience knowledge is privileged over expert vocabularies;
Care is taken to ensure language conveys people’s actual experiences rather than others’ interpretations of experiences;
Rituals are often highlighted as central to family and community life.

4. Ethic of Collaboration
A respectful commitment to working together collaboratively
Paying attention to power relations
Aligning with an influential yet decentered therapeutic posture;
Fostering ways to move from novice to veteran, from client to consultant (Epston & White, 1992).

5. Re-membering Practices
Draws from conversations that invite people to purposefully engage with significant figures that have contributed to their lives;
Invites reflection on how these connections shape their sense of who they are and what their life is about, and to imagine what they may have contributed to the life of these significant figures.

6. Definitional Ceremonies
Based on the work of Barbara Myerhoff (1986);
Incorporate audiences that build community and circulate wisdom;
“Number Our Days” by Barbara Myerhoff is well worth reading- also watch the documentary by same name.

7. Public Practices
Public practices draw from “an ethic of confidentiality” (Lobovits, Maisel & Freeman, 1995)’
Public practices challenge our traditional assumptions about the need for absolute privacy in psychotherapy while simultaneously honoring professional ethics;
With care, we can continue to protect confidentiality, avoid exploitation and safeguard the unique value of the professional relationship.

8. Many Possibilities Letter-writing campaigns
Therapeutic Documents and certificates
Tree of Life community gatherings
“Public Practices”
Reclaiming community rituals
What else?

9. An illustration There are so many possibilities!
I chose “Spreading our wings” because it shows what we can do together.
Some of us participated in this project started by Martha Lopez.
We collected reflections in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese.
These reflections were in text and in voice.

10. Spreading her wings
Martha told us a story about her work with Rosa - a 20 year old woman - for two years. During the course of their work together, Rosa made her way through a very painful situation, through which she called herself “a butterfly without wings.”

11. In Martha’s words
"Often at the beginning of our conversations, Rosa would metaphorically say she couldn’t fly, meaning that she wasn’t succeeding in life as a consequence of what happened in her childhood (physical, sexual and emotional abuse, rape, rejection and abandonment at the hands of her own parents and family). Using and invoking 'butterfly' as a metaphor has helped put her life in perspective, and played a significant role in understanding the construction of her identity through our therapeutic conversations.”

12. Martha’s words (cont.)
“In our work together I usually gave priority to the reclamation of this metaphor to invite her to build a new identity upon these invocations and initiatives. One way for her to resolve her fears was to concentrate on this butterfly and to start learning to fly.”

13. Martha’s words (cont.)
In our conversation, when the focus began to turn to the sort of action that she might initiate to revise her strong belief of “they cut my wings” we refocused instead on what could enable her to fly (to have wings) - based in what was precious to her and sustained her and gave her strength to manage her difficulties through the years."

14. Closing Document
At the completion of their sessions, Martha made a closing document for Rosa to take with her. Martha gives testimony to Rosa's skills and invokes the butterfly metaphor. The document is in the two languages that Rosa speaks (English and Spanish), signed by Martha as a witness and "as a reminder that even though she went through all these difficulties, she has now learned to spread her wings as a butterfly and fly."

18. Instructions for Gathering Reflections
We asked Study Group members to help us collect written and audio reflections for Martha and Rosa. We also experimented with loosely following Michael White's Guidelines for Outsider Witness Practices.

19. Four Categories of Response
Guidelines for Outsider Witness Practices
“Definitional Ceremony”
Some similarities to reflecting teamwork

21. 1. Identifying the expression:
Which expressions in Martha and Rosa's story caught your attention or captured your imagination. Is there something that particularly struck a cord for you?

22. 2. Describing the image
What image of people's lives, of their identities and/or of the world more generally did this expression evoke for you? Does something come to mind about what these expressions might suggest to you about their purposes, values, beliefs, hopes, dreams and commitments?

23. 3. Embodying Responses
What is it about your own work and life that might account for why these expressions caught your attention and struck a cord for you? Do you have a sense of which aspects of your own life experiences resonated with these expressions, and with the images evoked by these expressions?

24. 4. Acknowledging Transport
How have you been moved on account of witnessing these expressions of life? Where has this experience taken you to, that you would not otherwise have arrived at, if you hadn't been an audience to this story?

25. Record or write a reflection
We asked everyone to use these four categories of response as a guide. Recordings could take up to three minutes (most less). It was also possible to post a written reflection.

26. Responses Collected
Recordings in four languages: English, Spanish, French & Portuguese
Written reflections as well
Martha could then share these with Rosa.
What do you imagine the ripple effects might be?

27. Reflection in English

28. Translated into Spanish

29. Reflection - in Spanish

30. Reflection in French

31. What about in your work?
What kind of experiences come to mind in your work setting?
Can you share some illustrations of how you bring together audiences for the people who consult with you?

32. Reclaiming Community