ABSTRACT
Narrative practice is spreading to many practice fields and areas of society, including psychotherapy, psychiatry, nursing, medicine, social work, teaching and organizational development. This chapter discusses how the dialogue participants’ narrative-collaborative practice contributes to new understandings and insights, which lead to greater awareness, mutual respect and a sense of shared humanity. Narrative medicine also involves doctors’ and other healthcare professionals’ own stories to help them deal with the sadness they experience in connection with patient cases or ethical challenges they face. In a transformative and fruitful dialogue inspired by narrative collaborative practice, the dialogue guide actively uses narratives to establish a co-creative partnership with the dialogue partners. The narrative collaborative and co-creative dialogue guide works from the basic assumption that narratives can be reframed and developed. An important concept in narrative co-creative practice is outsider witnessing, something that does not always occur in a systematic way in everyday dialogues.
