Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

Construct: desire for containment - freedom 
The client appears to feel heard and valued by the counsellor suggesting her desire for 
containment. There are also painful memories of a previous „bad‟ counsellor suggesting her 
desire for freedom in that she may fear that she is bad herself or that this new counsellor may be 
bad, which makes sense of her checking her out. 
Week 2. 
Line 1.
Felt good, valued, 
Line 2.
embarrassed to be me. 
Line 3.
Working on „stuckness‟. 
Line 4.
Adult self - taking care of 
Line 5.
child - pain, vulnerability 
Line 6.
“frozen child” - pain + trauma. 
Line 7.
Re-experiencing above - 
Line 8.
need to find way of making it 
Line 9.
OK, appropriate / liveable. 
Line 10.
Recognition of loss in childhood 
Line 11.
Co. feels good, real, not a book -
human 
There appears to be some opposition in the first two lines as the client felt good and valued (line 
1) but then embarrassed to be herself (line 2) which seems to hark back to the previous week 
where she questioned what was wrong with her. From the way she writes this it is as if she is 
embarrassed just in being who she is. She confirms the feeling of being stuck from the previous 
week stating that she was working on „stuckness‟. She suggests that her adult self (line 4) takes 
care of her child (line 5) self and describes her child self as a „frozen child‟. This is a powerful 
image and surrounded by the words of pain, vulnerability, pain and trauma suggesting the image 
of a child who is unable to move as well being filled with emotive experiences. She is also 
frozen, which is perhaps her present condition, cold as if she is unloved and possibly may 
struggle to feel the warmth of love. Part of her is perhaps still this frozen child. She appears to 
re-experience (line 7) some of her childhood feelings in the session and says that she needs to 

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find a way of making the past okay, appropriate and liveable (lines 8,9). It feels as if the past was 
none of these things and perhaps the agony is that she cannot change the past and make it better. 
However she does recognize some kind of loss (line 10) in childhood as if she gains some 
understanding of what she did not have. She ends by commenting on the counsellor and it feels 
important that the counsellor is „not a book‟ but human (line11). This perhaps refers back to the 
„bad‟ counsellor and suggests that she may have felt like a book and possibly therefore inhuman.