Gail Simon

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.