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PART THREE

Narrative Therapy

and

Art

“Therapists can undermine the idea that they have privileged access to the truth by consistently encouraging persons to assist them in the quest for understanding.” Michael White

“I believe, with Michel Foucault (1980), that a domain of knowledge is a domain of power, and that a domain of power is a domain of knowledge.” Michael White

This third part on narrative therapy is a continuation of the previous two posts, and it focuses on a few more ideas and papers in Michael White’s book, Narrative Therapy Classics.

I’m also posting some new ink drawings from a series with the title Τόποι / Places.

As I mentioned in the previous posts, the book is rich in themes, principles of narrative therapy, political analysis, questions and sample conversations, and is probably a book one needs to read more than once. In today’s piece I will attempt to briefly present some ideas and interventions related to loss and grief, trauma and subordinate storyline development, surface spiritualities, ethics and transparency in therapeutic contexts.

On loss and grief

In relation to experiences of loss and grief White discusses the value of utilizing both the “saying hullo” metaphor and the “saying goodbye” metaphor, when working with loss and grief. He writes that many people that have consulted him over problems related to grief have found the ‘saying hullo’ metaphor, and the questions derived from this metaphor, to be helpful. He claims that he has consistently found that, through the incorporation of the lost relationship, those problems that are often defined by the field, as ‘pathological mourning’ or ‘delayed grief ’are resolved and people arrive at a new relationship with their self.

White clarifies that he’s not taking a position against the utilisation of the saying goodbye metaphor because he believes there is a lot to say goodbye to. People often need to say goodbye to what was, to a material reality and to hopes, dreams and expectations.  However, he believes that the process of grief is both a ‘saying goodbye and a ‘saying hullo’ phenomenon.  He also argues that every experience of loss is unique, as are the requirements for its processing. Therefore, metaphors can be helpful to the extent that they don’t subject people to normative specifications, and to the extent that the expression of, this uniqueness is recognized and facilitated.

White also notes that at times it has been assumed that this work, which is oriented to the ‘saying hullo again’ metaphor, is informed by a notion of a spirituality that is immanent or ascendant, and that it is associated with forces that are of another dimension; however, this is not what he has intended to propose and these notions have not shaped the development of this particular work. He explains that work that is oriented by the ‘saying hullo again’ metaphor assists persons “in the development of skills in the resurrection and expression of significant experiences of their relationships. These are experiences that these persons have lived through – that are part of their stock of lived-experience”.

Additionally, White discusses how this metaphor provides possibilities for action in the form of re-membering practices, which inform a ‘special type of recollection.’ He quotes Myerhoff (1982), who claims that the term ‘Re-membering’ may involve the calling of attention to the re-aggregation of  the figures who belong to one’s life story, one’s  own prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of one’s story. In this sense, “Re-membering is a purposive, significant unification, quite different from the passive, continuous fragmentary flickerings of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness “(Myerhoff cited in White). This notion of re-membering and the club metaphor, suggest possibilities for people to engage in a revision of the membership of their club of life. This process, White suggests, “provides persons with the opportunity to have a greater say about the status of particular memberships of their club of life. Through re-membering practices, persons can suspend or elevate, revoke or privilege, and downgrade or upgrade specific memberships of their lives.”

On children, trauma and subordinate storyline development   

In his paper on children, trauma and subordinate storyline development White emphasizes the importance of subordinate storyline development when working with children, who have been subject to trauma and neglect, because it provides an alternative territory of identity for children to stand in as they begin to give voice to their experiences. He writes that it gives children a significant degree of immunity from the potential for re-traumatisation in response to therapeutic initiatives to assist them to speak of their experiences of trauma and its consequences.

He clarifies that in his own work with people who have been subjected to trauma and to a range of abuses, including political torture, and for people struggling with the consequences of a range of social calamities, including disease epidemics, he has not sought to attenuate their expressions of trauma and its consequences, nor has he been timid “in opening space for people to speak of what they have not had the opportunity to speak of, to put words to what has been unmentionable.” However, he emphasizes safety and notes that he has taken care to do what is within his understandings and skills to establish contexts in which “people can give full voice to their experiences of trauma in ways that enable them to wrest their lives from the prospective longer term consequences of this trauma” without being re-traumatised in the context of assisting them to address what they have been through.

White explains that the generation of subordinate storyline development is found in children’s responses to the trauma they have been subject to, because no child is a passive recipient of trauma, regardless of the nature of this trauma.  Children, he writes, take action to minimise their exposure to trauma and to decrease their vulnerability to it by finding ways to modify the effects of this trauma on their lives; however, often their responses to the traumas are unacknowledged and unnoticed, or they are punished and diminished within the trauma context.

White writes: “These responses to trauma and its consequences are founded upon what children give value to, upon what they hold precious in their lives.”  And these responses reflect knowledge and skills in:

“a. the preservation of life in life-threatening contexts,  b. finding support in hostile environments,  c. establishing domains of safety in unsafe places,  d. holding onto possibilities for life in circumstances that are  discouraging of this,  e. developing nurturing responses to others in situations that are degrading of such responses,  f. finding connection and a sense of affiliation with others in settings  that are isolating,  g. refusing to visit trauma g. refusing to visit trauma on the lives of others in milieus that are  encouraging of this reproduction of trauma,  h. healing from the consequences of trauma under conditions that are unfavourable to this, i. achieving degrees of self-acceptance in atmospheres that are sponsoring of self-rejection,  j. and more.”

White discusses how direct observation of the spontaneous interaction of children who have been subject to trauma often provides clues about points of entry for subordinate storyline development.  He provides various examples of his work with young people that had been through a lot and demonstrates how he assisted them in developing a subordinate storyline, which afforded alternative and relatively secure territories of identity for them to occupy.

In one instance, he initiated his work with three boys [who had migrated from  their countries of origin as refugees and had been referred to him on  account of concerns about their being withdrawn, and about the extent to which they had continued to maintain silence in regard  to the very significant trauma that they had been subject to over an  extended period ahead of their migration] by consulting them about whether they’d like to talk about what they held precious, and what they intended for their lives, along with what capacities, knowledges and skills had helped them get through the trauma they’d experienced.

In another instance, while working with three siblings who had suffered abuse and neglect he witnessed the older brother engaging in the care-taking of his younger sisters in several ways, This observation, he writes, provided a foundation for a therapeutic inquiry in  which, amongst other things, he encouraged all three children to:

“name these care-taking skills; describe the know-how that was expressed in these skills;  define the contribution of these skills to the younger children’s life; speculate about what the possession of these skills might make possible for the older brother  in the future of his own life; reflect on what these skills might say about what is most important  to him; trace the history of the development of these skills in his life,  and finally, identify figures of his history who might have valued and  appreciated these skills, and who might be implicated in his  development of these skills.”

It turned out that his teacher from his third grade was a figure who was implicated in the development of his care-taking skills, and she was invited to some of their meetings, as an outsider witness. His teacher played a significant part in the rich development of a subordinate storyline of the young boy’s life, in the acknowledgement of the trauma that he and his sisters had been subject to, and in the restoration and further development of his sense of personal agency.  Later White began to enquire about whether these skills had had a part to play in providing a foundation for these children to get through the hard times they’d experienced. He writes: At this point, all three children became quite animated in giving accounts of how they had used these skills to survive the abuse and neglect that had been visited upon them.”

Surface spiritualities and transparency

I will continue with a brief references to another topic discussed in the last chapter –interview. When asked about spirituality, White replied that in the histories of the world’s cultures there have been many different notions of spirituality, but spirituality, in this western culture, has mostly been cast as  immanent and ascendant or both. Ascendant forms of spirituality are achieved on planes that are imagined at an altitude above everyday life. Immanent forms of spirituality are achieved not by locating oneself at some altitude above one’s life, but by ‘being truly and wholly who one really is’, ‘by being in touch with one’s true nature’ by being faithful to the god of self.  He comments that “Much of popular psychology is premised on a version of this notion of an immanent spirituality – to worship a self through being at one with one’s ‘nature.’ Both immanent and ascendant forms of spirituality are achieved by being in touch with or having an experience of a soul or the divine that is deep within oneself and that is manifest through one’s relationship with a god who is ascendant.

White comments that these and other contemporary notions of spirituality are of a non material nature and intangible, and are split apart from the material world, and manifest themselves on planes that are imagined above or below the surface of  life as it is lived.  He adds that even though he finds some of these notions beautiful and is interested in exploring the proposals for life or the ethics that are associated with these notions of spirituality, in his work he is more interested in what might be called the material versions of  spirituality, what he calls the spiritualities of the surface.

He claims that this notion of spirituality, which has to do with material existence and the tangible, makes it possible for us to see and to appreciate the visible in people’s lives. This notion of spirituality, he explains, can be read in the shape of people’s identity projects, in the steps that people take in the knowing formation of the self. It is a spirituality that has to do with relating to one’s material options in a way that one becomes more conscious of one’s own knowing, and it concerns one’s personal ethics. He believes it is a transformative spirituality in that it assists us to explore options for living one’s life in ways that are other in regard to the received modes of being. It has to do with the questioning of the taken-for-granted, and it is about prioritising the struggle with the moral and ethical questions relating to all of this.

When asked how people decide which of the available options or possibilities to privilege because to become one who one has not yet been could go in an infinite number of directions, White among other things says this is to be an exploration with people about the real effects of specific ways of being in their relationships with others and on the shape of their lives generally. It raises options for people to explore the possibilities for disengaging from modern “practices of self evaluation that have them locating their lives on the continuums of growth and development, of health and normality, of dependence and independence, and so on. These options can also constitute a refusal to engage in those modern acts of self-government that have us living out our lives under the canopy of the bell-shaped curve. “

I would’ve liked to make some reference to other topics discussed in the book like power dynamics and biases in therapeutic [and other] contexts, ethics and transparency, but this article is already quite lengthy. Therefore, I will end here with a short relevant extract from the book:

“The therapist can call into question the idea that s/he possesses an objective and unbiased account of reality, and undermine the possibility that persons will be subject to the imposition of ideas, by encouraging persons to interview her/him about the interview. In response to this, the therapist is able to deconstruct and thus embody her/his responses (including questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions) by situating these in the context of his/her personal experiences, imagination, and intentional states. This can be described as a condition of “transparency” in the therapeutic system, and it contributes to a context in which persons are more able to decide, for themselves, how they might take these therapist responses.“

Τόποι – Places

“Oh the places you’ll go.”  Dr. Seuss

 “We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise? How could we fail to recognize this primal fact?” From The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History by Edward S. Casey

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” Anthony Bourdain

“So much of who we are, is where we have been.” William Langewiesche

Human figures and portraits play a central role in most of the artwork I make, so, for a change, and while preparing to do some painting again I’ve been making images of places I’ve lived or been to. The images are inspired by photos, my own and others’, and rough sketches of places from past trips, which I found among the pages of old travel diaries and guides.

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PART TWO                                                      The artwork has been uploaded

Narrative Therapy

“What’s your story about? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice… We tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown… Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us… We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories straddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning, The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them and then to become the storyteller” Rebecca Solnit

“In the layers and substrata of the past, there are not only personal moments, but also hidden truths. Facing the past takes courage. It is a conversation with yourself, with the environment and the relationships that have formed around you. This ongoing conversation reveals not only your path, but also how you influence and reshape the world around you. The continuous discovery and reconstruction of the past deepens the dialogue with the world and with oneself.” Alexis Stamatis

As I mentioned in the previous post I will be writing about Narrative Therapy in relation to two books, one by Michael White and one by David Denborough. White was the co-founder of narrative therapy and Dulwich Centre. With David Epston he developed narrative therapy, a non-pathologising,  respectful, empowering, and collaborative approach to counseling and community work , which recognizes that people do not only have problems, but they also have skills and expertise that can support change in their lives. It centres people as the experts in their own lives and views problems as separate from people, assuming that people have skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that can assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives. In today’s piece I will draw on Narrative Therapy Classics, a compilation of papers and interviews through which we become acquainted with Michael White’s work, political analysis and various principles of narrative therapy, as well as, samples of his work with people, and a variety of questions one might use to facilitate the process of change and re-authoring of a person’s story and life.

I have also included three pieces of this more recent series of drawing-collages.

Apart from the themes that I will touch upon today, the book contains a chapter on loss and grief, which presents the incorporation of the lost relationship in the resolution of grief and the process of re-membering. It also includes a discussion about children, trauma and subordinate storyline development, where subordinate storyline development provides an alternative territory of identity for children (and adults) to stand in as they begin to give voice to their experiences of trauma. There is also a paper on the importance of fostering collaboration between parents and children, and also, between child protection services and families. There’s also a very interesting chapter on narrative practices that facilitate the unpacking of identity conclusions. Finally, there’s an interview where White discusses ethics, personal accountability and spiritualities of the surface. He makes references to feminist ethics, bottom-up accountability, and ways of honouring the ‘sacraments of daily existence.’

As the book is so rich in material, I will inevitably refer to a few themes and basic principles in today’s piece. A lot of stories are also included that help us comprehend principles and practices. White writes that the stories [in the book] about therapy portray a number of interventions and practices, which he believes relate to what could be referred to as a deconstructive method. He suggests that “according to his rather loose definition” deconstruction has to do with procedures that “subvert taken-for-granted realities and practices; those so-called “truths” that are split off from the conditions and the context of their production, those disembodied ways of speaking that hide their biases and prejudices, and those familiar practices of self and of relationship that are subjugating of persons’ lives. Many of the methods of deconstruction render strange these familiar and everyday taken-for granted realities and practices by objectifying them.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is proposed that our lives are also shaped by the meaning that we ascribe to our experience, by our situation in social structures, and by the language and cultural practices of self and of relationship that these lives are recruited into. White explains that this constitutionalist perspective disagrees with the dominant structuralist perspective that supports that behaviour reflects the structure of the mind and the functionalist perspective that suggests that behaviour serves a purpose.

It is through the narratives / stories that we have about our own lives and the lives of others that we are able to make sense of our experience. White claims that these stories determine both the meaning that persons give to their experience, and which aspects of experience people select out for expression. And to the extent that our actions are prefigured on meaning-making, these stories also determine real effects in terms of the shaping of persons’ lives. This narrative metaphor proposes that “persons live their lives by stories – that these stories are shaping of life, and that they have real, not imagined, effects – and that these stories provide the structure of life.”

He explains that through the objectification of our familiar world, we can become more aware of the extent to which certain “modes of life and thought” shape our existence and we might then be able to choose to live by other “modes of life and thought.”  White also considers deconstruction in other senses. For instance, the deconstruction of : practices of self and self-narrative, and relationship that are dominantly cultural; the dominant cultural knowledges that people live by; and the deconstruction of modern practices of power and discourse.

For the deconstruction of the narratives and stories that persons live by, he and Epston have suggested the objectification of the problems for which persons seek help. This objectification engages persons in externalizing conversations in relation to what they find problematic, rather than internalizing conversations. Externalisation is the process of separating people from the problem, allowing them to get some distance from their issue and to see how it might be hindering, helping or protecting them. These externalizing conversations assist persons to unravel, across time, the constitution of their self and of their relationships, and they encourage people to identify the private stories and the cultural knowledges that they live by, that guide their lives and that speak to them of their identity.

Externalizing conversations are initiated by encouraging persons to provide an account of the effects of the problem on their emotional states, familial and peer relationships, social and work spheres, and lives in general, “with a special emphasis on how it has affected their “view” of themselves and of their relationships.” People are then invited to map the influence that these views have on their lives and interactions with others. This is often followed by some investigation of how people have been recruited into these views.  White writes and demonstrates in vignettes that as persons become engaged in these externalizing conversations, they experience a separation from these stories, and in the space established by this separation, they are free to explore alternative and preferred knowledges of who they might be and into which they might enter their lives.

He writes: “As persons separate from the dominant or “totalizing” stories  that are constitutive of their lives, it becomes more possible for them  to orient themselves to aspects of their experience that contradict these  knowledges. Such contradictions are ever present, and, as well, they are many and varied……” To facilitate this process which White  called “re-authoring”, the therapist can ask a variety of questions, including those that might be referred to as a) landscape of action questions, which encourage persons to situate unique outcomes in sequences of events that unfold across time according to particular plots, and b) landscape of consciousness questions, which encourage persons to reflect on and to determine the meaning of those developments that occur in the landscape of action.

The therapist can also encourage the participation of other people, like members of the community and family members, who have participated historically in the negotiation and distribution of the dominant story of the person’s life, in the generation or resurrection of alternative and preferred stories and landscapes of action.

This work requires some understanding of various forms and instruments of power. In his analysis White refers to Michel Foucault, as well as others. .He writes that a good part of Foucault’s work is devoted to the analysis of the “practices of power” through which the modern “subject” is constituted (Foucault, 1978, 1979).  He also points out that Foucault traced the history of the “art of the government of persons” from the seventeenth century, and detailed many of the practices of self and practices of relationship that people are incited to enter their lives into. These practices that persons shape their lives, according to dominant specifications for being, can be considered techniques of social control.  This form of constitutive power permeates and fabricates persons’ lives at the deepest levels, “including their gestures, desires, bodies, habits etc. – and he likened these practices to a form of “dressage” (Foucault, 1979).

White refers to the importance of understanding the operations of power at the micro-level and at the periphery of society [e.g. in schools, clinics, prisons, families etc.]. He refers to Foucault, who supported that it was at these local sites that the practices of power were perfected and that the workings of power were most evident.  It is because of this that power can have its global effects. Foucault believed that this modern system of power was decentred and “taken up”, rather than centralized and exercised from the top down.  Therefore, efforts to change power relations in a society must address these practices of power at the local level, “at the level of the every-day, taken-for-granted social practices.”

The mechanisms and structures of this system of power recruit individuals into collaborating in the subjugation of their own lives and in the objectification of their own bodies. They become “willing” participants in the disciplining or policing of their own lives. This collaboration is often not a conscious phenomenon, since the workings of this power are disguised or masked because it operates in relation to certain norms that are assigned a “truth” status. White writes that this power is exercised in relation to certain knowledges that construct  particular truths, “and is designed to bring about particular and “correct” outcomes, like a life considered to be “fulfilled”, “liberated “, “rational”,  “differentiated”, “individuated”, “self-possessed”, “self-contained,”,and  so on. The descriptions for these “desired” ways of being are in fact illusionary.” He points out that this analysis of power suggests that many of the aspects of our individual modes of behaviour that are assumed to be an expression of free will or are assumed to be transgressive are not what they might at first appear, and thus, many people find it difficult to entertain these ideas.

In therapy, the objectification of these familiar and taken-for-granted practices of power contributes significantly to their deconstruction.  As mentioned above, this is achieved by engaging persons in externalizing conversations about these practices, which allows for the unmasking of practices of power and the countering of their influence in their lives and relationships.  White writes that in these conversations special emphasis is given to what these practices have dictated to people about theft relationship with their own self and others. Through these externalizing conversations persons are among other things able to acknowledge the extent to which they have been recruited into the policing of their own lives, as well as, the nature of their participation in the policing of the lives of others.  He adds that as he has worked with people in the deconstruction of particular modes of life and thought by reviewing with them the effects of the situation of their lives in those fields of power that take the form of social structures, they are able to challenge these effects, as well as those structures that are considered to be inequitable.

What I have discussed and referred to so far can be understood more easily through briefly presenting some of the vignettes in the book. White provides the stories of Amy and Robert to clarify the processes of deconstruction of practices of self and of relationship that are dominantly cultural; of self-narrative and dominant cultural knowledges that people live by; and of modern practices of power.

Amy, for instance, had embraced certain “technologies of the self ” as a form of self-control, and as essential to the transformation of her life into “an acceptable shape – one which spoke to  her of fulfillment.” She had construed her activities of the subjugation of her own life as liberating activities. White writes that upon engaging Amy in an externalizing conversation about anorexia nervosa through the exploration of its real effects in her life, she began to see “the various practices of self-government – of  the disciplines of the body – and the specifications for self that were embodied in anorexia nervosa. Anorexia was no longer her saviour. The ruse was exposed, and the practices of power were unmasked. Instead of continuing to embrace these practices of the self, Amy experienced alienation in relation to them. Anorexia nervosa no longer spoke to her of her identity.”

As a result she was able to explore alternative and preferred practices of self and of relationship.  She was then encouraged  to identify people who might provide an appropriate audience to this different version of who  she might be, persons who might be willing to participate in the acknowledgement of  and the authentication of this version of identity. At this point, I should mention that White also discusses that there might be pushback in one’s environment when they decide to show up differently. For instance, in another sample he writes: “I was quick to share my prediction that it was unlikely that Elizabeth’s efforts to “reclaim her life” would be greeted at first with great enthusiasm by her children.”

Robert, on the other hand, had entered therapy for his abusive behaviour towards his family.  The unexamined and unquestioned knowledges, practices  or “technologies of power,” structures and conditions that provided  the context for his abusive behaviour were all part of a taken-for-granted  mode of life and thought that he had considered to be reflective of  the natural order of things. We observe  in the vignette how through engaging in externalizing conversations  about these knowledges, practices, structures and conditions, and through  mapping the real effects of these upon his own life and upon the  lives of his family, he experienced a separation from this mode of life and thought . White writes: “…this no longer spoke to him of the “nature” of men’s ways of being with women and children.   He writes that over time, Robert traded a neglectful and strategic life for one that he, and others, considered to be caring, open and direct.

In brief, White writes that during our early contact, discussion centred on Robert’s responsibility for perpetrating the abuse, the identification of the real short-term and possible long-term traumatic effects of this on the life of his family, and on determining what he might do to take responsibility to mend what  might be mended.  Following this work, Robert was asked whether he would be prepared to speculate about the conditions and the character of men’s abusive behaviour. They focused on questions like:

If a man desired to dominate or make someone their captive, particularly a woman or a child, what sort of attitudes would be necessary in order to justify this, and what sort of strategies and techniques of power would make this feasible?

During this speculation, particular knowledges about men’s ways of being that are subjugating of others were articulated, techniques and strategies that men might rely upon to institute this subjugation were identified, and various social structures and conditions that support abusive behaviour were discussed. Robert was then asked to consider which of the above were relevant to his life. They then discussed the historical processes through which Robert had been recruited into the life space that was fabricated of these attitudes, techniques and structures and he was invited to take a position on these attitudes, strategies and structures.

White writes: “As our work progressed, the identification of these unique  outcomes provided a point of entry for an “archeology” of alternative  and preferred knowledges of men’s ways of being, knowledges that Robert began to enter his life into….. Robert recalled an uncle who was quite unlike other men in his family; this was a man who was certainly compassionate and non-abusive.”

I will end this piece by mentioning how the therapeutic practices briefly described above, and which White refers to as “deconstructive” assist in establishing a sense of agency. This sense of agency, he writes, is derived from the experience of escaping “passengerhood” in life, and from the sense of being able to play an active role in the shaping of one’s own life.  It is derived through being able to influence developments in one’s life according to one’s purposes.  This sense of personal agency is established through the development of some awareness of the degree to which certain modes of life and thought shape our existence, and also, through the experience of some choice in relation to the modes of life and thought that we might live by.  He explains that the practices that he refers to as deconstructive “assist persons to separate from those modes of life and thought that they judge to be impoverishing their own lives and of the lives of others. And they provoke in therapists, and in the persons who seek therapy, a curiosity in regard to those alternative versions of who these persons might be.  This is not just any curiosity. It is a curiosity about how things might  be otherwise, a curiosity about that which falls outside of the totalizing  stories that persons have about their lives, and outside of those dominant  practices of self and of relationship.”

Finally, I’d like to mention that I will return to the book in the next post because there are some more ideas that I think are of value and interest.

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PART ONE                                                       Edited 21/07/2024

A brief introduction to Narrative Therapy and some artwork

“During the buildup to the recent war on Iraq, whose two great central rivers come as close as anything on earth to the biblical paradise with four rivers flowing out of it, one of the vultures making the case for bombing Baghdad’s civilians said, “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” This third category would prove crucial in the spasms and catastrophes of the war. And the philosopher Slavoj Zizek added that he had left out a fourth term, “the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge that doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan used to say,” and he went on to say that “the real dangers are in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about.” The terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge too is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown, but whether we are on land or water is another story.” From A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

“A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person.” From Solaris by Stanisław Lem

Today’s post is an introduction to the topic of the next few posts.

Two books I am currently reading are: Narrative Therapy Classics (Dulwich Centre Publications) by Michael White and. Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience (W. W. Norton & Company) by David Denborough. This is a topic I have been wishing to write about for a long time. Buying these two books recently brought the intention to the foreground.

My first encounter with Narrative Therapy was about fourteen years ago, as part of a Masters’ programme. I think it was during an introductory course on the different therapy schools and approaches. What is known as “narrative therapy” was introduced to us briefly through an old YouTube video of a therapeutic session with Michael White and a family. [White was the co-founder of narrative therapy and Dulwich Centre. With David Epston he developed narrative therapy, a non-pathologising, empowering, and collaborative approach, which recognizes that people do not only have problems, but they also have skills and expertise that can support change in their lives.] The quality of the video was so poor that we could hardly understand what was going on.  Subsequently, there were jokes in class and this was kind of it. I don’t think there was ever any reference to Michael White’s work again. In retrospect, I understood that this indirect discouragement of our getting interested in this work  was due to his socio-political analyses, ideas and approach to therapy and counseling, which to some extent challenge the establishment of the world of psychology and psychiatry.

Returning to this material currently I realized that it could be of great benefit to anyone studying or working in the fields of mental health or social and community work, as well as, education and other areas. I know for certain that in that specific educational context, it could have complemented and broadened the discussion and understanding of human experience, of the process of diagnosis and what we call psychopathology, and also, it could have enriched students’ experience of ways of being in the helping professions. It could have opened new ways of being in relation with another, the client, in this case, and it would have brought compassion and the importance of fostering personal agency to the foreground.  But this would have required space for critical evaluation of theories and practices, and course material. It would also have required an emphasis on contextualization and the psychosociobiological nature of every experience.

So to begin with, Narrative Therapy (from the Dulwich Center website) “seeks to be a respectful, non-blaming approach to counseling and community work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives. It views problems as separate from people and assumes people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives” (Alice Morgan / from the Dulwich Center website). It utilises the concept of externalisation as one of its key components. Externalisation is the process of separating the person from the problem, allowing them to get some distance from their issue and to see how it might be hindering, helping or protecting them.

In her introduction, – What is Narrative Therapy? – Alice Morgan, explains that there are many different themes that make up what has come to be known as ‘narrative therapy,’ and that every therapist or counselor might engage with these ideas somewhat differently. She writes: “When you hear someone refer to ‘narrative therapy’ they might be referring to particular ways of understanding people’s identities. Alternatively, they might be referring to certain ways of understanding problems and their effects on people’s lives. They might also be speaking about particular ways of talking with people about their lives and problems they may be experiencing, or particular ways of understanding therapeutic relationships and the ethics or politics of therapy.” Morgan adds that in her opinion, even though there are various principles that inform narrative ways of working, the two most significant ones are: always maintaining a stance of curiosity, and always asking questions to which you genuinely do not know the answers.

The book, I will be referring to in the next post, includes a series of papers and interviews by Michael White, which the people that have put this volume together believe “have transformed conventional notions of therapy, reshaped understandings of psychosis, provided new ways of responding to grief, and that continue to profoundly challenge the hegemony of psychiatric knowledges. Simultaneously moving and inspiring, these chapters convey a rare combination of political analysis and compassion.” The book includes vignettes from White’s own experience of a great variety of presenting problems, which contribute to the better understanding of the princples and practices. Because the book is so rich in ideas and material, since each chapter  / paper introduces something different, I will inevitably focus only on some themes or chapters.

I’ve also included six more recent drawing-collages.