The we-dentity daisy approach for creating antidotes to life diminishing stories of identity; a CMM informed systemic narrative approach

We share our personal and professional journeys through different identity discourses that have shaped our practice as clinical psychologists and systemic psychotherapists working with children, adults and older people within public physical and mental health services. Through examples of our work with children affected by illness and disability, we track the development of our understandings of identity from ‘internal states of self’ to understandings that are relational, distributed, performed, and fluid. Integrating the practical theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), Michael White’s Narrative approach, in particular the reauthoring map and Outsider Witnessing with a systemic constructionist approach to identity, we offer a therapeutic approach, the We-dentity Daisy Method, to provide an antidote to some of the more individualised and potentially pathologizing ways of describing young people’s experiences.