Narrative Counselling: Social and Linguistic Processes of Change

What actually happens in counselling interactions?
How does counselling bring about change?
How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?
By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.
This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.