How does a narrative understanding of change in families post brain injury help us to humanise our professional practice?

In this paper, we critically explore the discourse of change post brain injury and challenge the dominant discourse of negative change, which alone leaves little room for other perspectives to exist. These negative changes pose a considerable risk to the well-being of families who may benefit from engaging in richer accounts making room for a more coherent and connected sense of self and family post-injury. We explore how narrative approaches provide opportunities for all practitioners to expand their professional scripts and support families to move towards a future which is not dominated by a discourse of loss. While loss and negative change is an important and very real consequence, of brain injury, focusing purely on stories of loss is life limiting for family members and can cause psychological distress. The life thread model is offered as a visible tool for all practitioners to engage with and use while working with families, providing a concrete focus for reflection and discussion of narratives relating to change which otherwise can feel quite abstract in everyday practice. We argue that one way we can humanise our professional practice is to support all practitioners to engage in a narrative understanding of family change following ABI.

Narrativity in Complex Systems

Humans use narrative for making sense of their environment. In this chapter we ask if, and if so how and to what extent, our narrative mind can help us deal scientifically with complexity. In order to answer this question, and to show what this means for education, we discuss fundamental aspects of narrative understanding of dynamical systems by working on a concrete story. These aspects involve perception of complex systems, experientiality of narrative, decomposition of systems into mechanisms, perception of forces of nature in mechanisms, and the relation of story-worlds to modelling-worlds, particularly in so-called ephemeral mechanisms. In parallel to describing fundamental issues, we develop a practical heuristic strategy for dealing with complex systems in five steps. (1) Systems thinking: Identify phenomena and foreground a system associated with these phenomena. (2) Mechanisms: Find and describe mechanisms responsible for these phenomena. (3) Forces of nature: Learn to perceive forces of nature as agents acting in these mechanisms. (4) Story-worlds and models: Learn how to use stories of forces (of nature) to construct story-worlds; translate the story-worlds into dynamical-model-worlds. (5) Ephemeral mechanisms for one-time, short-lived, unpredictable, and historical (natural) events: Learn how to create and accept ephemeral story-worlds and models. Ephemeral mechanisms and ephemeral story-worlds are a means for dealing with unpredictability inherent in complex dynamical systems. We argue that unpredictability does not fundamentally deny storytelling, modelling, explanation, and understanding of natural complex systems.

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative

This chapter examines the phenomenological conditions of the possibility of our experience of narrated process. It begins with Husserl’s account of retention and protention, which are the capacities by which we retain the immediate past and anticipate the immediate future. This allows us to experience processes. The chapter then turns to Heidegger, according to whom the experience of process depends on a sense of what is relevant to the process. Here a different axis of temporal analysis comes into view: temporal aspect. Temporal aspect expresses the internal temporal structure of what we understand. Heidegger analyzes temporal aspects as part of his account of what he calls “originary temporality.” His analysis can be used to shed light on narrative understanding, and so, of how we understand ourselves and what we are up to.