The role of mutual in-feeding in maintaining problematic self-narratives: exploring one path to therapeutic failure

• Autor(a) principal: Gonçalves, Miguel M.
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Ribeiro, António P., Conde, Tatiana, Matos, Marlene, Santos, Anita, Martins, Carla, Stiles, William B.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/13392
• topic: Process research; Narrative; Mutual in-feeding; Innovative moments; Social Sciences

According to the author’s narrative model of change, clients may maintain a problematic self-stability across therapy, leading to therapeutic failure, by a mutual in-feeding process, which involves a cyclical movement between two opposing parts of the self. During innovative moments (IMs) in the therapy dialogue, clients’ dominant self-narrative is interrupted by exceptions to that self-narrative, but subsequently the dominant self-narrative returns. The authors identified return-to-the-problem markers (RPMs), which are empirical indicators of the mutual in-feeding process, in passages containing IMs in 10 cases of narrative therapy (five good-outcome cases and five poor-outcome cases) with females who were victims of intimate violence. The poor-outcome group had a significantly higher percentage of IMs with RPMs than the good-outcome group. The results suggest that therapeutic failures may reflect a systematic return to a dominant self-narrative after the emergence of novelties (IMs)