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

2010; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10503307.2010.507789

1468-4381

Miguel M. Gonçalves, António P. Ribeiro, William B. Stiles, Tatiana Conde, Marlene Matos, Carla Martins, Anita Santos,

Attachment and Relationship Dynamics

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).