Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

6.3.3.Exhortations to self 
The participants seem to tell themselves very clearly what they want to do or must do as if they 
exhort themselves to give themselves confidence. In week fifteen of her journal Alice seems to 
do this several times: 
Extract 24. From a journal to show an exhortation to the self. 
Line 1.
Concentrate on blankness
Line 2.
Split in half
Line 3.
How much do I want to find me?
Line 4.
Jealous of energy 
Line 5.
Want it for me 
Line 6.
Came in in fragments, went out 
Line 7.
more whole.
Line 8.
Don‟t share T‟s burdens.
Line 9.
Say how I feel. Tell him how
Line 10.
he‟s made me feel. Be it. 
Alice makes four exhortations to herself during this entry and they appear to enable her to shift 
internally. These exhortations may be seen by the way she tells herself to do things like 
„concentrate on blankness‟, „want it for me‟, ‟say how I feel‟, and „be it‟. Four extracts from the 
analysis are included to demonstrate this movement: 
Extract 24a. From the analysis to show internal movement. 
She appears to start the session by concentrating on her own blankness (line 1). She exhorts 
herself to do this as if there is a determination to cut off and be defensive. She sees that she is 
split in half (line 2), a strong image, that seems to help her see, with the exhortation, that there is 
a part of herself that she cuts off from, as well as naming her present split condition. 

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157 
Extract 24b. From the analysis to show internal movement. 
She is jealous of another‟s energy (line 4.) and wants it for herself (line 5) as if she can see in 
others the potential she has in herself. It is as if she is telling herself to have this energy.
Extract 24c. From the analysis to show internal movement. 
She exhorts herself to tell him how she feels (line 9.) as if she needs to demonstrate that she is 
different. She perhaps wants to give him back his projections. 
Extract 24d. From the analysis to show internal movement. 
She exhorts herself to „Be it‟ (line10), as if she is telling herself that she needs to be her feelings. 
But it also seems possible that a part of her still does not want to share her internal world, her 
burdens, with the counsellor, and is perhaps angry with her. If this story about „T‟ symbolizes 
something of the client‟s relationship with the counsellor perhaps she is also wanting to „be it‟, 
that is be her feelings in this setting. And perhaps part of that being is the anger she may feel 
with the counsellor for enabling her to be more aware of her feelings, and more aware of her way 
of looking at the external world from her defended spy hole. 
Such exhortations to the self also help to demonstrate how the journals became part of the 
participant‟s journey through counselling, for they are writing to and for themselves as opposed 
to only writing to comply with my requests as the researcher. The length of the journals and the 
personal way they are written seems to confirm that they wrote as much, if not more for 

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158 
themselves, than they did for me. This is confirmed by one of the participants. In a letter written 
to me by Wriggling Fish before she had the opportunity to feedback on the analysis, she wrote: 
“I was reminded as I listened, of my participation in your research and I remembered 
how very helpful and insightful that was for me as a client - to write a few lines of 
lasting impressions of the session and of how helpful it was to read back through all 
the sessions to see the movement and to remember the moments of excitement and 
enlightenment and also the deep darkness at times” (WF).