Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

 
Construct: fighting containment - freedom 
The fight to avoid containment and freedom seems more obvious in this entry as she struggles 
with her tiredness and the pain in her neck. Perhaps the anger that subsided is suppressed so that 
rather than owning it she puts it into her body and feels tired and in pain. This may be a passive 
fight against allowing herself to have the freedom of her anger but it is aggressive in that she 
hurts herself. Being really angry, owning and expressing that anger may be an unknown way of 
being which the client fights against as she may not wish to contain, to own her own anger. 
 
Week 12. 
Line 1.
Affirmation + validation of
Line 2.
what I feel I need to be
Line 3.
doing + who I am. 
Line 4.
„The load feels lighter‟. 
Line 5.
Different way of looking at
Line 6.
things. 
Line 7.
My expectations „shoulds‟ + not my 
Line 8.
sons. 
Line 9.
Adolescence - difficult for all! 
Line 10.
Struggle of freedom + responsibility
Line 11. 
+ for me / us. 
There seems to be an affirmation (line 1) felt from this session as if the client feels validated (line 
1) by the counselling. What she feels and needs to be doing and even who she is (lines 2,3) 
seems to have been affirmed. This appears to make the load (line 4) she carries feel lighter as if 
there is a sense that she is no longer doing this alone. She seems to have found a way of looking 
at things differently (lines 5,6) as if she is able to consider more perceptions. Her expectations 
that she calls „shoulds‟ (line 7) seem to have been examined against the expectations of her sons 

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(line 7,8). It seems her sons are adolescents (line 9) and she recognizes this as a difficult time 
„for all‟ (line 9) as she seems to recognize that the difficulty is not just hers but theirs as well. 
There is a sense that her sons are struggling with freedom and responsibility (line10) but she 
sees this struggle as hers as well. Perhaps her sons represent the adolescent part of her which 
struggles to take her own freedom from the abuse she suffered and the responsibility to work 
through, and own these feelings in the present. Perhaps she also projects some of her anger that 
she does not want to contain, into her sons. There is visible movement in the way this entry has 
been written with inverted comas and the arrow between lines nine and ten.