Publications
NEW Trauma-Informed Practice: A collaborative narrative Approach
Author: Susan Dale
Publisher: PCCS Books
Date of Publication February 2024
‘Trauma-informed’ has become a buzzword in the health and social care arena. But what does it mean in relation to counsellors’ day-to-day work with clients? Susan Dale describes how she shapes her collaborative narrative approach to work with people who have experienced trauma, whether from childhood abuse and neglect, violence, combat or other circumstances. Weaving together current research and theory with the first-hand accounts of her trauma-experienced co-researchers, Dale creates a vivid narrative of trauma-informed practice in the real-life therapy dyad. She explains and demonstrates the effectiveness of recognised trauma-focused techniques such as TF-CBT and EMDR, as well as counselling models that are not formally badged as ‘trauma therapies’. The book demonstrates how such an approach, applied collaboratively and with acute sensitivity to the needs of the individual client, can make a lasting difference to people striving to rebuild shattered lives.
Available to pre-order https://bit.ly/traumainformedtherapy
Where Angels Fear to Tread: An Exploration of having Conversations about Suicide in a Counselling Context
Author: Susan Dale
Date Of Publication: Jun 2010
Where Angels Fear to Tread highlights some of the ethical and emotional challenges which arise for counsellors when their clients? thoughts and behaviours become suicidal. It gives insight into how people can, and do, use suicide as a way of coping with overwhelming emotional pain, and the tension this creates in the balance between the ethical guidelines the counselling profession has adopted to protect clients against malpractice (and protect counsellors against litigation) and the needs and viewpoint of the client.
Songs at Twilight: A narrative explortion of the experience of living with a visual impairment
Author: Susan Dale
Date Of Publication: Jun 2011
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars
The majority of research and writing about visual impairment is influenced by medical models of understanding, and is usually undertaken by sighted experts about those who are visually impaired. Songs at Twilight takes a different stance and uses a collaborative narrative methodology to enable the author, who is visually impaired, and thirty contributors, who are also visually impaired, to explore their experiences of living with a visual impairment and the effect this has had on their claims to identity. The dynamic research process is shown as a social construction of lived experience where questions of identity are addressed through conversation and narrative. Sighted assumptions about blindness are challenged as the author and contributors discuss aspects of diagnosis and treatment, education, employment, societal attitudes towards blindness, relationships, treatment possibilities, emotional support (including counselling) and emancipatory research practices.
Different Horizons: Counselling People with sight loss
Author: Susan Dale
Date of Publication 2008
RNIB Publishing
A free copy of this publication in a variety of formats is available from :
http://www.rnib.org.uk/Shop/Pages/Searchresults.aspx?k=different horizons&s=Shop
The Secret Keepers: Using narrative practices to explore the inter and transgenerational effects of childhood sexual abuse and violence
Author: Susan Dale
Date of Publication: 2013
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars
Keeping the stories relating to childhood sexual abuse and violence secret seems core to the traumatic effect this abuse has on the lives of, not just of the personwho has been abused, but also on their children; and even their children's children. This book demonstrates the uses of narrative practices both as a means to explore, through a collaborative research process, the effect of this traumatic legacy within families, and also the use of narrative practices as a dynamic therapeutic process which finds creative ways for people to break through the silence and live beyond being defined by abuse and violence. The contributors range in age, background and experience, but are linked through the common theme of inter and transgenerational trauma.
Threads of Hope: Counselling and emotional support services for communities in crisis.
A narrative inquiry reflecting on the Listening Point project in Machynlleth following the murder of April Jones.
Author: Susan Dale with Anne Marie, Ceri, Hope, Lisa Maria and other volunteers at Machynlleth Listening Point
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars
"On 1st October 2012 April Jones, aged 5, was abducted from outside her home in the small Welsh market town of Machynlleth. This led to the largest police search operation of its kind ever conducted in the UK, and a subsequent murder investigation and trial which was scrutinised by the international media.
This book uses a collaborative narrative research process to explore the lived experiences of one specific group of community members who responded to this event by setting up, and running a therapeutic project to support the community between 2012-2014.
The author weaves together threads of story taken from her own ethnographic journal, and co-researcher accounts, together with community updates (taken from press releases) and academic theory, to create an evocative narrative account that will hopefully enable readers to understand what it may be like to be involved in a therapeutic project of this kind. She highlights some of the challenges and offers suggestions for community leaders, therapeutic practitioners and critical incident planners who may be considering setting up support in response to community trauma."
