Reconstructing life journeys : Group work with survivors who experience stroke in Hong Kong context

Abstract

Stroke brings dramatic impacts and crisis for both stroke survivors and family members. Usually, stroke survivors and caregivers are regarded as personal failure of their illness. They are categorized as chronic illness persons and being marginalized as persons with personal failures in the dominant Chinese culture. Illness narratives, specifically, are stories told by patients about their experiences of illness rather than about the disease process and its treatment. They express the truth of personal experience in the patient’s own voice in contrast to the medical account of the experience. Through narrative therapy group intervention, it can help patients to restore personhood, coherence, and connectedness. It can facilitate healing by helping the patient to enhance awareness of their illness experience by giving them language, to bring fragmented illness experiences together, to discover patterns in experience, to construct explanation and meaning, and to facilitate a sense of connectedness between self and other. Through collective re-authoring by the metaphor “Railway of Train of Life”, therapist link group members’ stories and histories to a collective share theme and a shared purpose. It becomes possible for further preferred values or actions to be identified. In addition, it also enables individual storylines to be linked to a broader collective theme, open up possibilities to alternative life stories and preferred identity.