Narrative Therapy, EXA And The Postmodern Paradigm
“I have expertise and you are an expert in your life. How do we collaborate?” – Danielle Drake
Postmodernism and Narrative Therapy
Our very selves, our agency, our institutions, our law, our order, our very civilization are nothing more than a fictional expression of our language use, our vocabularies, our fictions (Epstein, 1995, p. 2)… In the postmodern narrative all that is known can only be known from a perspective (Epstein, 1995, p. 6).
25 years after Epstein wrote this, we are now living in the “age of coronavirus,” a chapter of our lives co-constructed by narratives about disease, death, control, power, health, risk, safety, well-being and privilege. As I write this, my narrative is that I am situated in Northern California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains as a white-presenting, expressive arts therapist in training with many privileges including working with clients and finishing graduate school from home.
In this post-modern age, research has shown that the stories we tell ourselves affect our health and well-being (Bertera, 2014). Therefore, I believe it is our sacred challenge to not only bring awareness to our client’s stories, but also to help them re-author their stories to bring them into alignment with their life purpose and goals. One postmodern approach therapists can suggest to clients in order to facilitate this realignment is narrative therapy practices.
Narrative Therapy Practices
Narrative Therapy practices have been organized by author Michael White into the following categories: externalizing conversations, re-authoring conversations, re-membering conversations, definitional ceremonies, highlighting unique outcomes and scaffolding conversations (White, 2007). This list is by no means exclusive and in fact the nature of narrative therapy itself is to be inclusive of many different and varied perspectives and methods (Madigan, 2011).
Additional narrative practices outlined by author Alice Morgan include: therapeutic documentation and letters, rituals and celebrations and outsider-witness groups (Morgan, 2000). In Playful Approaches to Serious Problems, the authors outline narrative practices for working with children and families such as: writing a handbook for others dealing with the same challenges, publishing the news and drawing images (Freeman, J., Epston, D. & Lobovits, D., 1997).
All of these narrative practices serve to co-create new and better stories for our clients in opposition to default, pathologizing stories. As mental health service workers, we must also make sure not to create narratives of dependencies on the therapeutic relationships we co-create and the potential perpetuation of dis-ease for our clients.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Mind creates the Movie
Because we may not always be aware of the stories that are running through our minds, in my opinion, it may be beneficial to begin narrative practices with mindfulness. Before we can transform a story, we need to discover and listen to that story then ask where it came from. Mindfulness and guided imagery techniques bring awareness to the workings of our minds and shine light on the shadow stories that we may be repressing for various reasons.
Of course when considering using mindfulness techniques with clients we must evaluate the client for their level of trauma and stress responses first. For someone who is recovering from severe or complex trauma, meditation or guided imagery may re-stimulate the trauma experience/s and actually be more disturbing than helpful.
Personal Understandings of Narrative Practices
In the narrative approach, problems are simply stories that people have agreed to tell themselves. The goal in narrative therapy is to help clients thicken the descriptions that are subordinate to their dominant, problem-saturated stories. My personal understanding of these narrative therapy practices holds that we as therapists can bring awareness to and co-transform others’ stories to re-connect them to their own sources of power, strength, resilience and transcendence that exist within and outside of themselves.
Within my personal healing journey, I have written, performed and recorded my songs to cultivate and strengthen my sense of agency. Because I have re-authored my own stories through songwriting, I feel comfortable inviting people to engage with songwriting in what could also be considered a narrative practice. For example, I wrote and recorded a song called “Garden Gate.” It begins:
“Two, three four… I’m gonna walk right through that open door and find some peace of mind… Six, seven, eight… I’m gonna open up that garden gate and sow some seeds inside… (lyrics to Garden Gate by Catherine Scholz, 2014)”
When I listen to the recording of my own song, it helps me remember and access my personal power to find inner peace and generate new growth in my life. Clients could also co-craft their own songs which could serve as “mantras” for when they are feeling weak or needing reminders of their own strengths and abilities.
Around 20 years ago when I was working in a practicum setting as a music therapist, I co-wrote songs with a man who was recovering from a head injury. After we wrote songs about his life goals such as getting his own place to live, I recorded them for him and gave them to him on cassette so he could listen to them in his own time. These are examples of using songwriting, a music therapy practice, as a narrative expressive arts therapy practice.
Personal Examples
During the 2020 Spring Intensive at CIIS, Dr. Shoshana Simons invited me to participate in a demonstration of externalizing a problem I had named “codependency.” She invited me to select a puppet to represent my problem and to begin a dialogue with it. She asked me questions about when it began in my life and I wasn’t sure when exactly the problem entered my life (probably when I was very young). I named the problem “Blubber” and in my mind, though I did not verbalize this, I associated Blubber with my father. Shoshana invited me to give Blubber a “vacation.” So we moved Blubber about 20 feet away from us in the room.
After getting some distance from “Blubber,” Shoshana invited me to select some puppets that represented my strengths. I chose Butterfly, Frog, Turtle and Owl. I held these characters close to my heart for the rest of the afternoon to fully integrate their “healing powers.” I did not want to return them! We continued on with our learning for the class as I held them close to my heart. Eventually, I released them back into the puppet pile with gratitude.
The next day I felt noticeably different. I felt lighter, freer and more powerful. It was hard to explain, but was also very enjoyable to witness in myself. The work we did together felt like magic to me, as if a spell that had been cast on me in my childhood or in my ancestral past had been broken. I’m grateful to have experienced the power of narrative therapy and I will carry this experience into my professional work.
In conclusion, I am looking forward to more opportunities to practice narrative therapy in my work and in my personal life. I will end with my notes from what the chair of the Expressive Arts Therapy Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco said in response to one of our student discussion forums on narrative therapy:
“Narrative approaches take practice and repetition to counteract the default, negative, pathologizing system. Dive deep into the questions, understand them. Listen and ask for exceptions, no matter how small. Understand that moment deeply – what were the conditions? What happened before? Open up and expand that moment to find a rich, creative, unique outcome with texture, depth and rick, poignant detail so that it can become an alternative story. Even if the outcome was the same, what allowed the possibility of a different outcome?”
– Dr. Danielle Drake, Response to EXA Narrative Therapy Class Discussion, 2020
References:
Epstein, Eugene. (1995). The Narrative Turn: Postmodern Theory and Systemic Therapy. Gestalt Theory. 17. 171-183.
Elizabeth M. Bertera (2014) Storytelling Slide Shows to Improve Diabetes and High Blood Pressure Knowledge and Self-Efficacy: Three-Year Results Among Community Dwelling Older African Americans, Educational Gerontology, 40:11, 785-800, DOI: 10.1080/03601277.2014.894381
White, David. (2007). Maps of Narrative Practice. W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London.
Madigan, S. (2011). Narrative therapy. American Psychological Association.
Morgan, A. (2000). What is Narrative Therapy? Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.
Freeman, J., Epston, D. & Lobovits, D. (1997). Playful Approaches to Serious Problems. London: Norton.
Scholz, C. (2014). Lyrics to Garden Gate. Retrieved from: https://www.catherinesmusic.com/lyrics-to-garden-gate/