Therapists Have a lot to Add to the Field of Research, but Many Don’t Make it There: A Narrative Thematic Inquiry into Counsellors’ and Psychotherapists’ Embodied Engagement with Research

Research frequently addresses a gap between practice and research in the field of psychotherapy. Castonguay et al (2010) suggest that the practice of many full-time psychotherapists is rarely or nonsubstantially influenced by research. Boisvert and Faust (2005) ask ‘why do psychotherapists not rely on the research to consistently inform their practice?’ and suggest that concerns ‘have echoed through the decades’ about psychotherapists’ failings to integrate of research and practice. This study focuses on therapists’ (counsellors and psychotherapists) reasoning about their engagement with ‘research’ as described in dissertations and in personal, anonymously presented documents, research journals and interviews included. The study focuses on the stages which generally are referred to as ‘data analysis’, which in this study refers research stages where interpretation typically is required with synthesising and analysing in mind. Turning our attention to the therapists’ ‘narrative knowing’ about research during these stages where generating own new knowledge is put to the forefront, have highlighted a complex relationship involving epistemological discrepancies, real or imagined, between practice and research. It also highlighted gender issues, culture and commonly held constructs about what constitutes a ‘counsellor’, which we believe influence therapists’ presence in research. We decided to include the citation “Therapists have a lot to add to the field of research, but many don’t make it there” in the title to illustrate some of the complexity. The study is based on a Professional Doctorate programme, which engages with psychologists, counsellors and psychotherapists in practice-based research. In addition to drawing from dissertations already in the public domain students and graduates from the doctoral programme were invited to contribute their own embodied experiences from ‘doing’ a data analysis. The paper suggests a hybrid for narrative analysis, discussing the options to (re-)present narratives guided by a combined interest into the unique, personal whilst also looking for ‘themes’ within and across these narratives.

Theoretical reflections on narrative in action research

Narrative is an important tool for developing and writing up action research experiences. Its power lies in the fact that narrative construction and narrative recounting are fundamental human communication practices. Narratives are also knowledge producing devices, since they make sense of personal experiences and share that sense-giving with others. However, the twinned duality of narrative knowing (sense-making) and narrative telling (communicating that sense) has often caused narrative as a methodological approach to be disregarded or misunderstood. Our objective is to reflect on how we can best use the narrative method in action research by paying due attention to these issues. In doing so, we consider ontologies, epistemologies and key characteristics. We argue that what has been seen as a weakness in the narrative method, its deep subjectivity, can actually be employed as an analytical strength in action research. We show how examining explanations of context, inherent in narrative processes, can provide rich insights into the meanings of phenomena.

Conceptualizing a Theoretical Framework: Embodied Narrative Knowing

The dominant Western epistemological and ontological perspective marginalizes “other ways of knowing” (Taylor, 1997) that adult learners use to make meaning of their experiences (Crossley, 2007; and Michelson, 1998). Other ways of knowing have also been called non-Western perspectives and are defined as having their “roots in cultures and...traditions that pre-date Western colonization, modernization, and Western-driven globalization (Merriam, 2007, p. 173). The aim of this work is to explore a theoretical framework, informed by three established paradigms, to conceptualize non-Western and other ways of knowing. This work outlines the three paradigms that are utilized: Social Constructivism, Embodied Knowing, and Narrative Knowing, to provide the values and guiding principles that this framework is based on. This work proposes the exploration of the experiences of adult learners who practice the martial arts (a traditionally non-Western practice) in order to offer preliminary validation of embodied narrative knowing as a theoretical framework for understanding non-Western ways of knowing.