Gail Simon

The systemic community has cultivated a talent for living with perturbation and a graceful approach to not knowing. In this extremely unsettled era of what I am calling panmorphic crisis so much is in urgent need of our attention. In this paper, I discuss some of the many systems in play creating this panmorphic crisis and discuss the impact of changing temporality. Our existing approaches to therapy and the training of practitioners may not be enough to see us out of one era and meet the needs of a new, emergent world. To create a state of preparedness to change may involve some degree of fundamental overhaul structurally and theoretically. I go on to consider approaches to disruption and consider the homeostatic pull towards restorative positions. Crises create opportunities for not only exploring ideas and practices which we take for granted but also for re-organising the cultural foundations on which we build worlds with each other. I reflect on how the myth of return-to-normal is a dangerous agenda when the culture being restored is infused with historical social injustices. In order for systemic therapy and training programmes to make changes that are culturally relevant, we need to study and alter the impact on our work of colonising and pathologising practices and theory. I discuss systemic liminality, its limits and the impact of disruption to our cultural rhythms. Later, I propose the concept of Stolpersteine, stumbling blocks, to help us encounter hidden histories and our prejudices, and offer some questions for us to consider in our undertaking to decolonise and depathologise our practice and theory to meet the challenges of transmaterial living systems.

Transgression is not only an inevitable part of systemic supervision but also necessary if we are to work towards innovative and inclusive supervisory and therapeutic practice. Defying culturally generated ‘rules’ of systemic practice can allow for across more relevant and productive ways of talking. Systemic practitioners are increasingly finding themselves trying to practice systemic therapy in employing authorities and training courses which are dominated by inflexible professional narratives and manualised procedures. Our profession is committed to ethical inner and outer dialogue, to self- and relational reflexivity as distinct from the rule-bound, surveillance culture in which we live and work. Systemic supervisors and therapists may find themselves at odds with monological institutional discourse and attempts from within our own profession to manualise practice. I introduce examples from supervisory conversations to illustrate how supervisors can develop more culturally sensitive practices through supporting practitioners to hear and have heard their own marginalised and oppressed voices and those of their clients.

This paper examines some political implications of therapies which focus on the individual and their immediate systems. I am suggesting that, as therapists, we need to review what we consider to be an appropriate system in focus within therapeutic conversation and address the ethical relationship between change occurring at a level of the individual and their immediate, smaller systems and change taking place in a wider system, at a level of society, of community. I am proposing that by focusing on smaller systems alone, we are i) setting limits on the resources which a therapist and client may draw on and ii) undermining the potential for change on a larger scale in society through the individual not being invited to locate or identify their personal experiences or accounts within the broader or more public arena of a wider system. As therapists concerned with ideology, I suggest that we need to develop more of a critique of the liberal humanist and postmodernist ideologies, so considering the influence and implications of these ideologies for practice and for the role our practice might play in maintaining or disrupting power relations in society. In particular, attention is paid to the social construction of the individual and the diminishing idea of group membership. With reference to clinical material, the paper goes on to propose some possible ways of expanding the client's and therapist's audiences, so increasing the ideas available through identification of and with a wider system. In particular, I introduce the notion of the hypothetical audience and its use with wider system questions.

ABSTRACT: To work sensitively and effectively with and across difference requires a shift from thinking about people as individuals with an internal world in focus to a view of a person in a social world, as members of families, of social, religious, professional and cultural groups and communities. It is not enough to focus on the history of one life when we are all products of different times, significant episodes in history and affected by what is happening with current inter-personal, employment, political and economic issues. Counselling and psychotherapy training needs to be open to addressing the real world influences on people coming to therapy and to therapeutic training courses. Unless we find ways of doing this and extend the world in-focus of the people we meet, then we are colluding with the mono-culturally produced theories which have not taken into account differences in life experience and the place of power in the world. In addressing anti-oppressive training, this chapter is going to cover three main issues: •• How to encourage trainees and trainers to become critical thinkers and decentre normalising and mono-cultural theory. •• How to approach our learning regarding differences in lived experience and the place of power in training and therapeutic relationships. •• How we approach talking, describing and positioning in therapeutic conversation.

Practitioners undertaking research into their professional practice and those involved in evaluating it often struggle to identify distinctions between the professional practice under investigation and the research practice used to study it. This paper identifies ten areas of distinction between professional practice and research practice. It provides some example questions under each of the ten categories. These questions can be adapted for practitioner researchers as both a preparation exercise and to develop documentation to submit with research proposals or research ethics applications. The paper starts with a definition of practitioner research and then gives a brief history of practitioner research followed by reflections on the relationship between academic and professional knowledge and decolonising practitioner research.

This paper describes the rationale and context for eight key markers of quality in qualitative systemic practitioner research. The criteria are designed for systemic practitioner researchers who are researching from the position of practitioner-at-work. The criteria include Systemic Practice, Methodology, Situatedness, Relational Ethics, Relational Aesthetics, Reflexivity, Coherence, and Contributions. They build on existing criteria for quality developed within the fields of post-positivist qualitative research and professional practice research by embedding them in systemic practice theory, activity and values. Distinctions are made between practitioner research and research about practice, and between positivist and post-positivist research. This eight-point framework brings together existing systemic methods of inquiry which recognise the importance of understanding context, movement and relational know-how. The paper proposes that systemic or relationally reflexive practice is already a form of collaborative inquiry or action research in which any action, research included, inevitably contains intention and acts as an intervention. While working with people in small and immediate systems, systemic practitioner researchers are critically reflexive in understanding how local issues are connected to wider socio-political systems and discourses.

This chapter from Systemic Therapy as Transformative Practice reframes systemic practice as research and offers several ideas and examples of research methodologies which are a close fit with what systemic practitioners are already doing! In effect, the chapters unravels and challenges the idea that reflexive, siutated practice is not already a collaborative form of inquiry.

Simon, Gail (2016). Systemic Therapy as Systemic Inquiry as Transformative Research. In McCarthy, Imelda & Simon, Gail (Eds.), Systemic Therapy as Transformative Practice. Farnhill: Everything is Connected Press.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Systemic-Therapy-as-Transformative-Practice/dp/0993072321/

There are some striking ‘family resemblances’ between Systemic Inquiry and research methodologies gathering under the umbrella of Qualitative Inquiry (Denzin & Lincoln 2005, 2011). In this chapter I draw out areas of commonality in qualitative and systemic inquiry in practice research and propose Systemic Inquiry as a form of Qualitative Inquiry.
Common interests include:
• a reflexive and emergent shaping of methodology, focus and participation
• a relational emphasis
• a critique of power in the social world
• a social justice agenda
• ethics-led practice
• fluidity
• asking what counts as ‘knowledge’, with whose authority and with what consequences for others
• a concern with the politics of description and with the creation of narratives
• relationships in inner dialogue and outer talk
• social accountability: speaking from within the first person, transparency, showing context
• reflexivity
• a critical approach to ‘professionalism’ and ‘methods’
• collaborative participation
• irreverence and respect
• practice as an art

This article introduces relational ethnography as a form of inquiry which emphasizes reflexive dialogical aspects of research relationships. I have found the use of autoethnography inspiring in speaking from within my practice as a therapist and teacher however it has limited my focus on areas of relationality in research relationships. In developing a relational ethnography, I have been able to show how all areas of ethnographic research involve relationality. I draw on systemic and social constructionist theory in understanding relational activities. I offer illustrations of reflexive, dialogical relationships between the voices of inner dialogue, the voices of outer dialogue—and between the two. By making available description of reflexive inner dialogue to readers and participants in research relationships, we increase opportunities for transparent communication and collaboration in those relationships.
First, I write about the relationships between researcher and texts reframing reading as dialogical activity. Afterwards, I explore the emergent relationship between writers and readers as they enter into an anticipatory-responsive dialogue with each other. Finally, I discuss how reflexivity is always relational and informs a relational ethics, and offer some ideas for an ethics of care and for an aesthetics of care as guiding principles for relational ethnography. I have found that teaching relational ethnography has improved students' reflexivity in their research and has enhanced the relational and aesthetic quality of their research writing.

Available at: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130147

Research methodologies are products of time, place and culture. Research methodologies are not items on a shelf which one takes down and uses as ready-made products. It can be more useful and in keeping with a systemic approach to think about research as a process of mutual shaping in which researchers and co-researchers are changed by each other and by the activities; in turn, the research methods and activities also evolve through the influence of researchers and co-researchers. By accepting the inevitable mutual shaping in practice and research relationships, by fostering space for new and unanticipated stories to emerge, we privilege the ethics of methodological openness and move away from a notion of choosing a research method to engaging with and shaping a research process.

After training with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy to teach research, I led the introduction of research teaching for relationship therapists on two postgraduate programmes. This involved designing and leading curricula for a ten day research module in a Masters qualifying course and a two year research degree. The process of developing and running the programmes became a reflexive action research project incorporating the feedback from students and colleagues. This paper describes and discusses some of the challenges and successes in designing and delivering the teaching and mentoring my co-workers in the teaching, supervising and assessment of research. We found that research learning and teaching was a transformative practice strengthening student confidence, critical thinking, clinical awareness and overall academic performance. Playfulness and irreverence in teaching methods help to rehabilitate the poor reputation of research as a relevant and interesting subject for counsellors.

I’ve noticed a funny thing. More of a strange contextual influence. When systemic practitioners apply to the Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice at the University of Bedfordshire, they say they are attracted to the creative permissions of practitioner research writing. They want
to tell moving stories and write creatively through first person narratives of I and we. And yet, within five minutes of starting the programme, they find themselves feeling compelled to placate a loud imagined academy which apparently expects only third-person modernist writing.

Citation Link " Now don't start to write until you know what you are going to say. " For those of us who learned to write on paper – in pencil – with erasers – we were taught to avoid messy presentation by planning what we were going to say before putting pencil to paper. Later, when allowed to write in ink, we learned we must avoid the scars of crossing out. Then there was the era of using strips of Tippex in typewriters to hide our mistakes. We went on to buy small bottles of corrector fluid to use on our hand written papers to paint over errors and present clean texts. But writing is a messy business. And actually, so is speaking. Mess is part of our everyday lives. It's unavoidable. And perhaps most importantly, navigating mess is part of our everyday relational skill set. Our self-correcting – and being corrected by others – is what we expect to happen as part of our everyday practice. And it takes place on a moment by moment basis, in the busy and moving space between people, between in-breaths and out-breaths. We are fast movers, swervers and always improvising in response to inner and outer noticings. This is orientational activity. It is ethical activity. We are guided by what feels right or " right enough " in each interaction rather than using a one-size-must-fit-all method. Reflexivity is our ethical guiding light. Our commitment to reflexivity means that we hear ourselves and we notice others in order to re-calibrate and find mutually accommodating ways of going forward. Interestingly, most people don't speak in " clean " , whole or finished sentences. You see that from transcripts of conversations. We often change what we are saying and how we are saying it half way though a sentence. We re-visit and re-phrase what we have just said because we orientate ourselves to the people with whom we are talking. We check if what we are trying to communicate is heard in the way we hope it will be received. We check if what we have heard has arrived in the shape it was sent. We add or ask for more context. We want to use a different word, or we turn the statement into a question and shift to speak to another person than the one we started to address. We realise our tone is too accusatory, we sound presumptive, we try to side-step professional jargon and switch, mid-sentence, to a more appreciative or neutral wording or tone, or use the terminology of our conversational partners. In fact, on paper, people appear to speak quite incomprehensively much of the time. How fascinating is it that listeners know how to follow what the other is saying despite such messy conversation with so many crossings out? We have learned, it seems, to listen to each other across changes in direction, in unfinalised sentences, and stay in the pause with patient ears sensitised to context and body language.

Background: People coming to therapy as part of their recovery from torture may choose not to speak or write about their experiences, yet the process of seeking asylum requires that they must hand over their life stories for a true–false adjudication with potentially life and death consequences. When people have been silenced and speaking has become dangerous, there are major ethical challenges for the activist practitioner who, along with the person who has experienced torture, sees the importance of stories not only being understood and shared in ways which are factual but which contain truth. Methods: I share my experiments with writing as a form of inquiry, specifically ghostwriting and ventriloquation. Findings: These have the effects of (1) moving the therapeutic process into a collaborative inquiry between the client, an asylum seeker, and me as both counsellor and expert witness; (2) letting fictionalised tellings of 'real life' reveal the hidden and complex life stories of clients and counsellors and (3) sharing stories which would otherwise remain hidden and risk perpetuating oppressive practices. Implications for practice: Ghostwriting and ventriloquation offer the practitioner-researcher ways of speaking from a first-person position, from 'within' experience rather than a distanced 'about-ness' position. In this dialogical writing, I use actual and imagined inner and outer voices to enable the sound of talk and thought to be reflexively and empathically heard and felt by readers. Relational ethics are considered in how to imagine the other and manage ownership of stories without reproducing oppressive practices.

Historically, the psychotherapies have subscribed to an idea that the spoken word is the first language of psychotherapy. This idea has influenced my practice but work with Susan challenged this prejudice. We have worked together to find ways of using writing to communicate things which were not finding their way into spoken language. This paper shares some stories from our written and spoken conversations. Susan and I reflect on the place of writing in our work and talk about the experience of reading each other’s writing. In this paper, I propose that writing and reading are relational practices. I suggest the reflexive movement in these activities both anticipates and shapes the responses between self and other when while reading the writings to the writer-as-listener. In preparing and presenting these writings and reflections  from within and about our conversations, I hope to create some coherence with a dialogical collaborative style of working and propose writing as a form of systemic practice and systemic inquiry.

This is an account of ‘real’ conversations with ‘real’ people who have agreed for me to write about our experiences and who have added to the telling of the story. It is an excerpt from a book I am writing for therapists, supervisors and trainers on writing about practice. My doctoral research1 experimented with ways of writing about practice which reflected the conversational, collaborative and reflexive aspects of systemic practice relationships. In this paper, I am writing from within my teaching practice with counselling research students. This contrasts with positivist about-ness writing (Shotter 2011) which has dominated the field of academic research and, to a large degree, therapeutic practice.
This style of autoethnographic writing allows for some stories to be told and heard which might not otherwise find a place in the literature. It allows for greater transparency in speaking about a range of responses for trainers and trainees (concerns and celebrations, for example) and so invites the reader to identify with or reflect on their own experiences of teaching and learning. By including responses from trainees, the writing also becomes a vehicle through which trainer and trainee can extend their conversation and understanding.

This paper troubles the concept of single autism spectrum. We discuss how the ideology from early medical theory has influenced the conceptualisation of autistic people, professional diagnostic practice and an aspiration to “cure” people of their autistic selves. We critique the idea of a single spectrum and propose alternative appreciations of autistic people as having diverse identities and community memberships, as people who are living fluid, intersectional lives over many axes and different contexts. Multi-Spectra Living problematises the story of autistic people as primarily or only autistic and proposes autistic people are fluid, contextually influenced and contextually responsive.
We offer an elaboration on intersectionality by explaining how the practice of splintersectionality foregrounds one characteristic over another to reinforce existing professional and everyday prejudice resulting in social and statutory failures to autistic people. We extend the work of Pillow (2019) to discuss how lenticularity, decolonial attitude and epistemic witnessing can support the development of decolonial practice of Multi-Spectra Living.

In this chapter, I propose how as professionals, we need to shift our skills from diagnostic activities to relational curiosity and so develop collaborative ways of conversing with people who have Asperger Syndrome and others in their networks. Through immersing ourselves in dialogue with people and their social and professional networks, we can bring forth evidence of people with Asperger Syndrome having unique and useful expertise which can play a part in resolving concerns and improving communication between those in their networks. Not only is it socially productive but it is also ethical for professionals to shift their focus from an exploration of ‘mind’ as commonly believed to exist solely within an individual person and to the relational contexts so influential on what we are constructing with each other through talk and how that shapes what is able to be recognised and developed.

By foregrounding dialogue over diagnosis, we see how experimenting with user friendly talk can provide opportunities for symptoms and features of High Functioning Autism / Asperger Syndrome (Wing 1981; Gillberg 1991) to be understood as meaningful communications in which the ‘disabled’ person is experienced as able and enabling. The individualised account of the person having been diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome is exchanged for descriptions of an interactive social system. I will show how ‘mind’ is relocated from the cognitive brain to the social opportunistic space created between people.

Draft
Simon, Gail (2016). Thinking Systems. 'Mind' as relational activity. opportunities for communicating within relationships. In Re-thinking Autism: critical approaches in a global context by Runswick-Cole, K., Mallett, R. & Timimi, S. (Eds.). London: Jessica Kingsley Publications.

This article describes systemic work with families who have a child diagnosed as having Asperger
Syndrome. The approach assumes that people diagnosed as having Asperger Syndrome and their families can
be communicated with and understood as living in meaning generating systems. Instead of following common
lines of systemic enquiry, the therapist-client system immerses itself in the area of special interest of the young
person who is diagnosed as having Asperger Syndrome. Case examples towards the end of the paper illustrate
how the area of special interest is treated as a meaningful system and can be used metaphorically with the
family. The supporting theory uses ideas from second order cybernetics to hypothesise ‘system’ in the area
of special interest but uses a social constructionist approach to explore the stories generated by the linguistic,
meaning making systems in the family, in the child’s area of special interest and in the therapy.

This is a trilogy of papers about land and people and the ecology they create together. Leah lives on the coast in South Wales. Lisen lives on the island of Gotland in Sweden. Gail lives in Yorkshire in the north of England. What connects us and our writings is the land, its history, its place in industry and what we do and don’t see. The cuts in the land reflect the cuts in our minds, unnegotiated edits in our stories, and disconnects in political discourses. This trilogy of papers documents some of these cuts and joins. We speak about the land we walk on and the stories told about it. We point to scars in the landscape and ask how they connect with those in the lungs and on the wrist. The landscape of the present holds clues about its past and its future. And the timescapes in the writings evoke a necessity to connect time and place, human and non-human colonising and liberatory methods and live with a maddening, flickering lenticularity (Pillow, 2019).

Recently, I heard a well-known actor saying something on tv that chilled me. “Let’s be truthful,” she said, “the holocaust isn’t about race. These were two white groups of people attacking each other.” As the child of a Jewish WW2 holocaust refugee and descendent of relatives murdered by the Nazi project, I felt winded. The speaker didn’t understand that the 1939-45 holocaust was an ethnic cleansing strategy based on fascist philosophy of white Aryan racial purity, that Jewish, autistic, disabled, Romany, lesbian, gay and Black people were eradicated on that basis.

That night I have a dream.

Systemic therapy needs to review its understanding of what it does and how it is situated in a methodological landscape. Sometimes it feels as if we journeyed away from method led practices to the relational ethics of postmodernism and then, like tired settlers, established communities of practice on this uncertain land. Meanwhile, the neoliberal agenda has run ahead inviting, no, telling us to concretise our practices in a lineal fashion, to perform prescribed method, measure our collaborative adventures and delineate our knowledge so it can be packaged to satisfy particular stories of science and the apparently open market. This has distracted us from engaging in new theorising. I am suggesting that it is not enough to rely on terms like postmodern as if it carves out a permanent terrain in which we dwell. This leaves us isolated; our discursive tools lose their potency when we cannot realign ourselves ideologically. In this presentation, I suggest how methodological developments from across other disciplines can offer us a new paradigm for reconstituting how we understand and describe our practice, how we can carry lightly our ancestral spirits and expand the dichotomy of imagination and rigour to include ethics and aesthetics. In particular, I explore how the new metaphysics arising out of feminist and indigenous ways of knowing, can offer some pointers for framing systemic practice.

In this paper, we share reflections from our research into spontaneous coordinations through the creation of pop-up dialogical installations. We offer a collage of anecdotes from our professional practice, from our personal lives and from dialogical installations. These episodes highlight themes from our everyday practice and show us what we do and what we value, but through new doorways. From our work on the streets, we see how i) making something with, and for, people requires daring; ii) we are always involved in reconfiguring dialogical space as we go; iii) we exchange planning for preparation; iv) dialogue is always influenced by, and influencing of, context; v) collage in writing and mixed media allows us to experiment with new configurations of words and share some mo(ve)ments from the installations.

Abstrakt (Swedish)
I denna artikel, reflekterar vi över tankar från vår forskning inifrån spontana dialogiska förlopp, studerade genom dialogiska pop-up installationer där vi själva deltar. Vi erbjuder ett kollage av anekdoter från våra yrkesverksamheter, från våra personliga liv och från de dialogiska installationerna. Dessa episoder ger nya infallsvinklar och kastar nytt ljus på teman och värderingar i vår dagliga praktik. Genom vårt arbete på gatorna ser vi: i) att det kräver mod att göra något för och med människor; ii) att vi alltid är involverade i att skapa dialogiska rum; iii) hur vi byter ut planering mot förberedelse; iv) att dialoger alltid påverkas av och i sin tur påverkar kontexten; v) att skrivande i collageform och mixed media, gör det möjligt att experimentera med nya former och dela lite av mo(ve)ments från installationerna.

It's late at night and I'm sitting at my desk, scrolling up and down on two large monitors, checking the final proof of John's latest book, "Speaking, Actually: Towards a New 'Fluid' Common-Sense Understanding of Relational Becomings." John's drafts are always highly finished. He considers the structure and sound of every sentence, of every paragraph, of every page and chapter. His many careful italics are not simply intended to emphasise content but are his way of vocalising so as to show the reader something particular in the hope that we will see it too. The italics are part of John's dialogical vocabulary in that he uses them to show the reader how another writer or speaker can be understood. This linguistic punctuation is a relational act, which I think of as dialogical acoustics. People often don't realise that John is speaking (to us) when he is writing. His works need to be heard when read. This means readers can afford to pace themselves and not burden themselves with the expectation that his writing must be read at a steady pace, as if each phrase should be simultaneously understood. This style of writing is not simply a "John" thing. It is inspired by the intricate intimacies he is attempting to show us. John's writing troubles our expectations of what it means to read (and relate) in time. His re-tellings of complex relational episodes are stretched out in time. These italics, his new wordings, his reflections on relational responsivities, his chosen quotations to take us a little further, may be read in real time and experienced in a slower, unfolding of shifting comprehension. This is John's own form of philosophical inquiry. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293). And it is the quotations in Speaking, Actually that I am re-visiting right now. The screens are bright, I am tired, but the words are awake. I want to re-format the quotes so they are seen and, therefore, heard differently than simply blending in with the main body of the text. Mary Gergen has called them John's textual friends. I think of these writers as John's conversational partners. In the main, they are friends he cites in so much as he builds on their ideas, finds something of value on which he can elaborate, often offering examples from dialogue. But as I am reading up and down through the chapters, it feels as if John has convened an extraordinary party. He is the host and he is introducing us one by one to some of the gifts of these party goers, and like all good hosts, he is aesthetically turning to someone else, bringing them into the conversation by connecting with their interests. I want to describe this as weaving together of ideas but that feels too dehumanising, too conceptual. This writing with friends and colleagues feels more of a social activity-as well as being a master wordsmith. I feel I have been invited, through this reading and formatting, to a party where the colours and shapes in the room are startling in their richness and at the same time make complete sense to me. But the engagement invites an inevitable sensual reorienting to those around me, a gentle invitation to reflexivity about how I coordinate in the talks I have with others at home, at work and in my dreams. This

Ann Margrete Flåm’s paper on the transnational history of Norwegian family therapy reminded me of a conversation from a few years ago in which I learned something important about different ways of telling the history of family therapy.
One evening in the warmth of Anne Hedvig Vedeler’s cabin in the white winter mountains, she asked, “I have to teach the history of family therapy this month to a group of new students. How would you do this, Gail?” I felt excited as I spoke of the development of ideas and practice through the timing of published papers, their writers, their geography, and the significance of those conceptual shifts for systemic practice.