rich descriptions

narrative therapy and the craft of writing



Hello, writers! Since I saw you last I’ve traveled 2,300 miles! I see the great Hudson River from my window as I write at the desk Lorenzo made from a century-old barn in Mora, New Mexico. Same world, different zip code! The ribbon of the Rio Grande still shines in the western quadrant of my heart, but me and the dogs are loving the eastern range, the way it rains, the proximity to a town full of things, mail delivered right to your door, and of course being with my family—the reason we are here! I never thought I would be back in New York, but the older I get, the more I find to love all over the place.

It’s also been quite a five-week season of illness and overreach, deadlines, rooms and miles. Learning to ‘be ok’ with not doing more than I could was a process that took me far from where I started. In February, when I got really sick and was also trying to get ready to move across the country during the first week of March, things were feeling frantic. I had mondo training sessions. I got locked in a public park by the police as a prank (nother story, nother time). My dogs got skunked, then one got sick (she’s ok!). I felt I was underperforming for my clients and had no idea how I was going to get everything done, having lost so much time to the terrible flu and the parade of minor and medium crises. This felt really bad! And because my body was so run down with flu, I couldn’t relax enough to be really real about what was happening and what I needed to make it safely to the next chapter of our lives.

But I was lucky. During this time in the second half of February, in class for my narrative therapy training, I was asked to bring a problem I was experiencing to the group as part of a demonstration with one of our teachers, Dr. Gene Combs. It was easy to identify the problem I’d bring—I’m sick and overwhelmed and feel really guilty about letting people down. Halp!

One thing I had realized was, when you tell people in your life that you do not have the capacity to do something, whether due to illness or event or a change in consent, you are asking something of them. When you say, “I’m sorry, I am too sick to make our meeting today or get that deadline met,” you are really asking, “Please will you give me grace, please will you give me patience, please will you give me understanding?”

In my conversation with Gene, as my fellow students took notes, I articulated that this was difficult for me because I feared that asking for such things was too much of a burden. I feared that needing things, I would be judged incapable. I also feared not being believed, as if saying that I needed time was an excuse for not prioritizing my clients or being too selfish to work harder.

I’m a person who’s long insisted on remaining overly independent. In the last couple of years I’ve been working hard to build a life centered on a value of interdependence. Gene learned about this when I told him that I was moving far away to be with the family I loved, that I valued being needed and being helpful to them. He tracked that I described helping people in my work as an enormous source of purpose and peace. Clearly I understood need others express as the basis for relating, connecting, and collaborating. I also understood that asking for help makes it more possible for others to do so. It is not greedy to ask for help. Need is good.

The conversation helped me see that I could believe that about my own need, too. I clearly did not see other people’s needs as negative, a burden, or a sign of their weakness or selfishness. As Gene learned about some of my life experiences, values, and views of the world and people, he helped me identify a project of interdependence that constituted a preferred reality for me, over the current dominant story that asking for help burdens others, is selfish, and reveals some innate lack of capacity. I wasn’t unworthy of needing, while everyone else was. Being in need of others’ grace, patience, and understanding was a good thing in that it led me to take further steps toward building that interdependent reality, rather than continuing to contribute to a reality of isolation based on a scary story about my own worth and place in the world. I also connected the project of interdependence to another value, of honesty, placing openness about my needs above hiding behind a facade of strength—only one can bring people closer together. This clarity allowed me to take new action on how I communicate with others, how I see myself in relationship to them, and how I can make plans that involve or include them.

So, I ended up being able to cancel a few meetings, push a couple deadlines, and say no for now to new work—of course every single person I had to let down understood, and there were no major consequences (gasp!). …Except the consequence of this new freedom for me from an old, dominant story about myself, and a clear project that guides my choices now.

Part of the purpose of narrative therapy is to help us identify what we are working toward, and the reality we are working with others to create. Narrative therapy is not a prescribed set of techniques and strategies to be employed toward specific desired outcomes. It’s a worldview, based in values and beliefs that I share at the deepest level and which are exceedingly present in my work with writers and my writing here. If you’re one of our ready readers, you might share them too.

What is narrative therapy?

Narrative therapy is about decoupling problems people experience from who they understand themselves to be.

Rather than using therapy to seek evidence of a diagnosis and treat its symptoms, or to discover truths assumed to exist at the core of who someone is or what happened to them, in narrative therapy we co-create meaning of a person’s experiences. That co-creation happens between the therapist and the person seeking therapy, and between that person and their community and most valued relationships (narrative therapy is a family therapy).

The dominant story a person usually brings to therapy is something along the lines of, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” The beginning of the work is about externalizing the problem by examining its influences on the person’s life and choices, rather than framing the person as perpetuating the problem or the source of their problem. While the person seeking therapy responds to the therapist’s questions about the problem, the therapist listens for stories that fall outside of the dominant, problem story. Narrative therapy believes—and my practice with writers bears this out 100%—that there are always experiences a person has had that fall outside the dominant story and are sources of great knowledge about what matters to them and what they are capable of. The work is to elevate these stories above the dominant, problem story, making them more meaningful and that meaning more present in people’s lives.

How? The therapist asks questions that help the person get in to the story through richly describing the experience and its effects. From here, they can identify values, positive beliefs, skills and resources, important relationships, and hopes and dreams—the meaning that can be made from these previously undermined experiences. These rich new stories about ones capabilities and impact equip them to create preferred realities where the dominant, problem story previously occupied their identity and how they moved in the world. This empowers people to become authors of their own lives, and to tell the story of who they are by the decisions they make in writing their future.

Narrative therapy (or ‘narrative’) emerged out of the University of Melbourne in the 1980s, through the pioneering work of psychologists Michael White and David Epston. These truly radical dudes were influenced by the work of French philosopher Michél Foucault in developing a therapy of liberation rather than one of normalization. Mainstream therapy, then and now, has been about diagnosing people based on the problems that make them abnormal, and prescribing medication and behavioral modification to help them fit in—that is, more like the norm that interests the powerful. As I’ll get into later this season, Foucault provided the philosophical groundwork of the narrative worldview, key to which is understanding how people oppress themselves and each other under the conditions of “modern power,” which prioritizes greed, docility, fear, and consumption.

One of the ways modern power achieves these outcomes is by locating problems inside people—the way things are is the natural order of things, so if you don’t fit in or can’t succeed in this system, you will be made to change, whether into a prison jumpsuit, a heterosexual, a medicated state, a new body, or a straightjacket. You’re incomplete, you’re broken, and this brokenness lies at the center of who you are.

Therapy, in this worldview, seeks to dig deep to find evidence of dysfunction or abnormality so that it can be treated, a process led by a person with expert knowledge and ideal outcomes for the patient in mind. This ‘scientific’ approach (we might call it ‘scientism,’ but more on that in a future rant), sees the patient as unresourced, unskilled, and unknowledgeable, and the therapist as having the resources, skills, and knowledge that will help them. It’s the therapist’s role to use these to ‘uncover the truth’ and figure out what the patient’s experiences ‘mean.’ This might sound dramatic, or like I’m describing a kind of psychology that is out of fashion now, but this diagnostic tendency (things, events, histories, and people can be answers to a question in a book—figured out, categorized, and their parts made discrete), and binary thinking (right / wrong, good / bad, strong / weak) has been deeply influential on our culture and remains strikingly present, as you can tell if you think about literally anything for just a sec.

The narrative worldview is different. To reiterate, narrative therapists believe that there are many stories to tell, many more than the problem story that has come to dominate our lives, our identity, and how we see the world—stories like I am broken, people hurt you, nothing can be done. Core to the practice of narrative is the belief that there are always, 100% of the time, experiences the person has had that fall outside of their dominant story, and that by enriching these stories descriptively along two ‘landscapes’—the landscape of action and landscape of identity—these preferred stories take on greater resonance with the person, helping them to see themselves in completely new ways. By asking questions that will enrich these landscapes, the therapist’s role is only to draw out the person’s knowledge about their own lives and experiences, and to assist them in identifying and articulating values, resources, capacities, hopes, skills, dreams for the future, and new plans. The narrative therapist helps the person to richly describe these other stories, to bring them to life and connect them to values, resources, skills, and identity—not to uncover isolated truths and find true meaning, but to build truth and create meaning alongside others.

Where does writing come in?

There are many crossovers and influences from the writing world on the narrative world. Michael White and others have written about the influence of literary theory on the narrative metaphor and story structure on the maps of narrative questioning, and I won’t get into that right here. Let me speak generally about the major connections I’m seeing, based on my work with writers and my understanding of narrative therapy, and then about the questions I’m taking up in my work and in my research now.

Basically, I see the transformative power of narrative therapy and the transformative potential of writing as aligned, and I believe writing can help many people in engaging with narrative ideas, in the therapy room, on their own, and in community. I have seen these powers emerge in narrative practice, in my own work with writers, and in my life since experiencing narrative therapy ideas and writing practice for myself, so here I go naming them: Liberation, Agency, Collaboration, and Self Love (or, as I prefer to call it, Having a Better Relationship With Yourself, but I haven’t made that a small word yet—“thoughts subject to change!”). These are the topics I’ll be taking up next—how I think narrative therapy and writing both work toward these projects, how they might change how you think about writing, and how you can engage with these projects in your writing practice. (It is annoying that I am literally just stating those terms and not explaining how they connect, but I wrote all of that for this one piece and it was… very long. More to come!)

In my work and career, I’m excited to be learning about these ideas and seeing how I can contribute. Writing as an embodied practice that can assist in the therapy process and in projects of community resilience has been explored in some important ways, and I hope to add new approaches and ideas about how to engage people and therapists in this practice. I’m deeply influenced to this end by the work of Robert P. Yagelski, whose book on writing as an ‘expression of the self’ and a tool of community building, Writing as a Way of Being, completely changed my life. (Though a professor of rhetoric and not a narrative therapist, Yagelski’s scholarship was the beginning of my interest in writing as more than… writing. I even got to interview him for a podcast a few years ago and he’s really nice!) There’s also the work of James Pennebaker, who has studied and written extensively about the effects of writing on trauma recovery, grief, and healing, who / which I have written about but that’s paywalled, so expect more on his work here. Many connections have been made between the act of writing as a tool in narrative therapy and in other therapies, and has important connections with art therapy and other modalities. I’m also excited about how I might contribute with my specific creative writing, editorial, and coaching perspective!

There is also so much to learn. The narrative therapy community inspires me, as so many within it are working in complex positions as social workers, community organizers, counselors, teachers, aid workers, and psychologists, with incarcerated people, grieving families and communities, people experiencing addiction, eating disorders, and other painful life events. There is a rich history within narrative therapy of diverse stories and philosophers, practitioners from many fields and life experiences, all over the world, that influence the warm and committed community it is today. One that I am genuinely so lucky to get to learn about, hear about, serve about, and participate in.

This year, I’m working on a research project that I hope will become part of my master’s thesis, on identity and the writing voice. Identity formation is a big part of narrative, based in the belief that all identity is relational and that identity is co-created over time as we name and prioritize values, have experiences, and create meaning out of those experiences with others. My ideas about the writing voice are aligned, and my thesis is that writing to ‘free the voice’ can be a helpful part of narrative identity work—as I’ve seen it help people change their understanding of themselves and how they become who they hope to be. There is so much written about ‘finding the voice’ and ‘writing as a soul’s journey,’ and I have some different thoughts I guess I’d like to add! I’ll be exploring this more in this newsletter as my ‘research’ develops!

What’s next?

To that end, we’re definitely not letting go of the practice, process, and craft of writing, too! The whole point is I believe these things can move us forward in the journey of becoming who we are, and authoring our own lives. Engaging with the craft of writing can be a process of becoming, and that is why I am here. Haven’t you been reading this newsletter??

Specifically along the PPC route, I have multiple drafts about editing on the docket, the different ways of building trust with readers, whether I think writing is a ‘spiritual practice’ (“The answer my surprise you, at ten!”), and I have more to say about the tool of transformation that is handwriting. Lol! Who’s writing this thing?

Please send me questions and if this was interesting or helpful to you, I really want to hear from you. Like, please let me know! And, if you know anyone who might benefit from learning about narrative therapy and how writing can help change their lives and communities, please share this newsletter :) We’ll be here for awhile.

Happy Spring, my fellows and friends 🪻 The world makes such amazing things!