Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

 

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Construct: overcontained - overfree 
Although the content of this entry is positive the tone feels dead or unalive so it seems possible 
that the client has slipped into a compliant state where she is trying to please others by saying, 
thinking or writing what she imagines others want to hear. It feels as if she wants the reader and 
herself to see this progress in the words while her feeling self may be detached. 
 
Week 26. 
Line 1.
Feeling awful. 
Line 2.
Low. Grieving. Pain. Anger 
Line 3.
Isolation, Alone, Abandonment 
Line 4.
Rape, let down, fragmented, 
Line 5.
Frustration, Stuck!!! 
Line 6.
The stuckness, pain + anger 
Line 7.
are most worrying. 
Line 8.
Perhaps finally he will get a job + 
Line 9.
stop invading my space 100% 
Line 10.
night and day. 
Line 11.
left feeling validated, valuable + Okish 
She starts by feeling awful (line 1) as if she is full of things that upset her. Lines two, three and 
four seem to be the experiences that are making her feel awful as if she is suddenly more aware 
of everything that has happened to her. (Perhaps this is what „emotionally cripples‟ her in the 
previous week.) The feeling in these lines seems enormous and she follows this with another 
feeling, „frustration‟ (line 5) as if there is just too much to feel and she does not know how to do 
it all so she is stuck (line 5). But perhaps she is also stuck because she is „fragmented‟ (line 4) 
and unable to bring together all these aspects of herself. She seems to run away from all this in 
line eight as she moves to writing about her husband still not having a job and invading her space 
(line 9) by being around all the time. But maybe his invasion of her space takes her back to a 
place in the past where she is powerless and cannot move. In this way it does fit with the rest of 
the entry for with him around so much of the time perhaps it is hard for her to feel separate and 
find an internal space where she can work on herself. Although this feels like a difficult session 

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she ends the entry saying that she felt validated, valuable and okay as if she felt heard by the 
counsellor. And perhaps more importantly she was also able to hear herself.