ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of coercive confinement practices at the core of the custodial model of care while demonstrating the possibilities inherent in competence-focused conversations with persons subjected to institutional control and containment. The authors employ the analysis of a transcribed therapeutic conversation between the late narrative therapist Michael White and a woman with an intellectual disability to demonstrate how social justice plays out utterance by utterance in the conversations therapists have with those consulting them. In this therapeutic exchange, White, the co-founder of narrative therapy, offers what is in effect an exposé of the way in which deeply entrenched institutional discourses construct limiting and totalizing beliefs about people, constraining them from knowledge of options available to them in their situations. As the conversation unfolds, a new view of this woman emerges, which highlights her continued resistance to indignities visited upon her. The exchange includes input from the professionals who have worked with her and who are moved to new insights into the real effects of deficit-focused assumptions about people and change.
