Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

 
Construct: towards containment - freedom 
As the client lets go of her defended overcontainment she is able to see herself from a more 
objective place stance. Here she understands what she terms as the bereavement process that she 
has experienced through her life, as if she is making sense for and of herself. The excitement she 
feels suggest her shift towards freedom as she owns her own experience while her uncertainty
appears to show that she is willing to step into an unknown future. 
 
Week 28. 
Line 1.
Tired, exhausted, virus. 
Line 2.
Irritable bowel playing up, 
Line 3.
tension + stress 
shoulder, neck 
Line 4.
pain. 
Line 5.
Feel want to be left alone to 
Line 6.
do nothing. 
Line 7.
Husband back to work - feelings of 
Line 8.
abandonment (after 8 months) 
Line 9.
Rejection - new job “I‟m not important” 
Line 10.
Tired, Self-doubt. Not Good. 
Line 11.
Good Session felt valued + HEARD! 
In this entry she returns to a place where she feels ill (lines 1,2) and is aware of stress and tension 
which appear to lead to shoulder and neck pain (lines 3,4). On the one hand she wants to be left 
alone to do nothing (lines 5,6) so perhaps she does not even want to work with the counsellor. 
Yet on the other hand she feels abandoned by her husband who has a new job. Yet only a few 
weeks previously she felt him to be intruding into her space but now he is back to work she feels 
abandoned. She seems to have lost her sense of being important as if she has also lost her sense 
of being separate. The situation seems to have taken her back to a place where she felt 
abandoned, perhaps in childhood, and she appears to have retreated into illness (lines 1,2). And 

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in this place she also seems to be full of self doubt (line 10) as if she cannot hold onto the 
previous learning. Yet she does seem to hold onto something for she summarises the session as 
good and feels valued and heard by the counsellor. The heard is in higher case letters as if she 
really wants this to be seen by the reader and perhaps by herself. Perhaps one of the most 
poignant feelings of childhood is that she was never heard so to be heard in the present enables 
her to gain a sense of herself.