ABSTRACT
The first conversations are crucial to our future collaboration with families who are heavily burdened with problems. We seek to get to know people as they are, apart from their problems, before we hear about the problems. We use wonderfulness interviews to find the magical wonderfulness in their intentions and actions to awaken our own curiosity. One story describes the introduction to the child: We want to start by getting to know you outside of the influences of the problems, this knowledge will help us find ways to “outsmart” the problems. Another story describes adjusting the interview when autism is the presenting problem. Two small stories describe the post-it method that creates wonderful family narratives to sustain a heavily burdened family. Health professionals can step into decentred yet influential positions and use the children's imagination, their metaphors, and stories, to provide alternative plots to the dominant stories. When professionals focus on the children as creative members of wonderful families with loving magical powers, they can create healing moments in their conversations.
