Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.
«Praxis gives meaning to words.»
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Michael White – Narrative Therapy
(February 5, 2021)
We continue with Michael White, social worker and family therapist. (29 December 1948, Adelaide, South Australia. 4 April 2008, San Diego, California).
• I work with stories of hope, love, and collaboration. I start from the premise that after each meeting with a consultant, I am becoming more than I was in the beginning.
• Priority is given to stories, narratives, as well as relational processes that influence the creation of meaning.
• “Every time we ask a question, we are generating a possible version of a life.” (David Epston)
• The fundamental: always maintain an attitude of permanent curiosity and always ask questions whose answers are genuinely unknown.
• People give meaning to their lives and relationships by recounting their experiences, and by interacting with others in the representation of these stories, they shape their own lives and relationships.
• My premise: what do I need to stay within the relationship so they can speak in terms of “me”?
• Understand narrative therapy as a respectful and non-blaming approach that places people as experts in their own lives. This entails a change of conceptualization regarding who seeks help. He is not called a patient, nor is he called a client but is called a “co-author” of the therapy process.
• It is not the person or the relationship that constitutes the problem. It is the problem that is the problem and therefore the person’s relationship with it becomes the problem.
• What attitude is necessary for the therapist? Curiosity that transcends the totalizing versions that people have of their lives and that transcend those dominant practices of the self and its relationships.
• My role as a therapist is not to impose knowledge or teach skills or strategies. My role is to establish a therapeutic conversation to make visible knowledge and skills so that people become familiar with their qualities that are in their life history.
• In fact, people have multiple knowledge and skills, and multiple stories. There is no single story. My task as a therapist is to create a therapeutic context where other stories about life and identity can be taken out of the shadows and cease to be invisible.
• Therapy as a context where it is possible to enter some territories of their life in which they have not entered or do not remember. My task is to create a scaffold for you to enter these stories and territories of your life. My questions are scaffoldings. Questions that mean mobilizing possibilities of hope. We are responsible for the results of our questions.
• People live by the stories told of their lives. I am interested in a therapeutic conversation to give the person the authority over his own life. As a therapist, I can’t know the way, or where I want to go before the conversation; I know we will come to an unimaginable path: this is exhilarating and fascinating.
• Narrative therapy is a zigzagging conversation that gets richer and richer. A question to ask is: how does the therapist’s language expands the consultant’s language; and gives you confidence and security for your own new questions, conclusions, and rewrites?
• It is about putting yourself as a therapist in a position to be able to explore with the consultants the history and the multiple stories of your life, which gives and realizes the right you have to a good life.
• A person’s actions are descriptions that exclude the interpretations of those who are participating in their actions… lean descriptions are typically those arrived at through the “observations” of people considered outsiders, who are studying other people’s lives and the communities in which they live… conversely, dense descriptions of people’s actions are descriptions informed by the interpretations of those who are participating in those actions…
• A dense story is full of details, connects with others and, above all, comes from the people for whom that story is relevant. A “thin” story usually comes from outside observers, not from the people who are living it, and hardly takes place for the complexity and contradictions of their experience. The more “dense-complex” a story is, the more possibilities it will open up for the person who lives it.
• From the narrative approach, it is considered that the consultants come to therapy because their stories “broke down” and their lives seem to have little or no meaning. These “broken” stories are rooted in dominant cultural discourses, they are stories that disqualify, limit or deny significant aspects of their experience and their sense of identity.
• Narrative therapy aims to enrich the story by introducing those details that have been left out by the predominance of the problem, that is, the co-creation with the consultant of an alternative narrative.
• When someone goes to therapy, an acceptable result for the consultant could be the identification or generation of alternative stories that allow him to represent new meanings, providing with them more desirable possibilities, which people will experience as more useful, satisfactory and with an open end.
• From the perspective of narrative therapy, we want to infect families with a spirit of exploration and an increased sense of possibility. Families can reach a point where they can rely on alternative and special knowledge, more liberating, that they have recovered or generated throughout the therapeutic process.
• Therapy as a work of personal and cultural liberation. Perhaps when therapy works it is due to a change in attitudes surrounding the problem. Relieving pain is part of the therapist’s task, the other is to join the consultants to help them break free of the straitjackets of clinical discourse.
• Instead of promoting stories linked to despair and failure, it is necessary to promote those linked to strength and heroism. Thus, endorsing a policy of hope.
• The family therapist seeks to deconstruct the “truths” that are separated from their conditions and contexts of production. The deconstruction is based on the ideas of Derrida, who wonders when analyzing the rhetorical works: what was not said, or the opposite of the saying? Our way of seeing is determined by the meaning we give to our experience, by our situation in the social structure, and by our linguistic practice. Narrative therapy substantially values the construction of another story.
• The symptoms are linked to certain evocative narratives of the social discourse of power and will disappear when externalized, their place is taken by new narratives not related to the problem.
• From therapy authenticity is stimulated, that people manage to free themselves, and become really who they are: that is, authentic.
• A re-writing therapy aims to help people solve problems by the following means: 1) Allowing them to separate their lives and relationships from knowledge/stories that are impoverishing; 2) Helping them to question the practices of the self and relationships that are oppressive; 3) Encouraging people to re-write their lives according to knowledge/stories and practices of the self and alternative relationships, which have better outcomes.
• The nature of re-writing: The ideology of such therapy emphasizes the freedom of the individual to build his or her own life.
• One of the ideological principles of such therapy is that the individual must be given the freedom to construct the story of his life.
• The basic thing is to show sensitivity to understand what it means for a person to “change”. This therapy not only tells a story but also listens to the audience.
• Outsourcing discourses are extremely useful: therapy allows them to see their problem (depression, anorexia, etc.) as something that is outside of them and that can be resisted rather than as an essential characteristic of themselves. This frees the consultants from certain familiar notions about the problems that no one doubts and the dominant internalizing (and blaming) discourses that guide their lives.
• Externalizing the problem allows people to separate themselves from the dominant stories that have been shaping their lives and relationships. In doing so, people can identify certain vital but previously denied aspects of lived experiences, aspects that could not be foreseen from the reading of the dominant history… By identifying singular outcomes, people can be encouraged to make meaningful updates about them. To be successful it is necessary to frame the singular outcome in the plot of an alternate story about the life of the person.
• It is accentuated and highlighted in the therapeutic conversation that there are other options. This makes consultants feel that they have more space and more freedom to explore new forms of perception, thought, and action.
• When consultants do not enter that new space or want to explore it, it is assumed that there are additional aspects of the problem that are restricting it and, therefore, it is necessary to make new outsourcing, more differentiated.
• Another important aspect of the “method” is that the problem “comes out” of the person, but is not projected onto any other. So liberating protest and rebellion do not manifest against other people. Consequently, there is less chance that other significant people in the consultant’s social network will adopt a defensive attitude and respond through censorship, a new labeling, and a new pathologization of the consultant.
• The most important thing is the direction in which the consultant evolves as a person, that is, the direction towards a healthier life and not the dimensions or frequency of the steps he takes.
• When the consultant takes these constructive steps, it is necessary to recognize and respond to them, so that they are part of that healing identity. And constructive changes must persist. What did you do to make this (the constructive event) happen? How did you manage to take this step? It is necessary to recognize and give value to these new constructive behaviors, to give them meaning so that they are incorporated as part of the new emerging identity. Do you realize that by doing that you have won one vote for yourself and one against the problem? Do you realize how significant your initiative was? If the answer is no, a twist can be attempted: Do you realize that I believe that, by having performed that action, you made a decision in your favor and have taught your old habit a good lesson by refusing to let it dominate it?
• Adding a broader time frame and some contrasting differences also contributes to improving the internalization process: To what extent do you think this contributes to giving your life a new direction, to developing a new lifestyle? If you continue to walk this new path of acting against the problem, what differences do you imagine there would be between your new future and the old one (in which you submitted to the problem)?
• One way to contribute to the persistence of constructive changes is to broaden the conversation and include the consultant’s social network so that it becomes the audience that attends these changes. What would your family members (or friends) think or what would they feel if they heard about those new steps you’ve taken? How will you let them know what has happened? Through these questions, the consultant is encouraged to become a selective observer of himself, to involve the people he considers significant (by communicating his constructive actions), and to recognize his position as an agent (for having made healing decisions for their lives).
• It is important to encourage people to identify certain beliefs about themselves, others, and their relationships, which are continuously reinforced and confirmed due to the presence of the problem. Usually, these beliefs are linked to a sense of failure to achieve certain expectations, meet certain specifications, and meet certain standards.
• Through a process of externalization, people take a thoughtful perspective on their lives and may consider new options for questioning the “truths” they experience as defining and specifying themselves and their relationships. This will help them to refuse the “objectification” of their people and their bodies through knowledge. It’s about identifying, and exploring how the problem seems to force people to treat others and themselves.
• It will then be possible to locate extraordinary events through an investigation of those occasions when the person might have undergone these techniques but refused to do so. Then the person can be invited to generate meanings around these extraordinary events.
• By identifying these extraordinary events, it will be possible to effectively question submission to the techniques of “normalizing judgment”, that is, to the evaluation and classification of people and their relationships according to the dominant “truths”.
• To the extent that the desired outcome of therapy is the generation of alternative histories that incorporate vital and previously denied aspects of lived experience, and to the extent that these stories incorporate alternative knowledge, it can be said that the identification and provision of space for the representation of this knowledge is a central aspect of the therapeutic effort.
• When people arrive at the consultation, they do so with a dominant history saturated with problems with feelings of hopelessness, frustration, and anguish. From this dominant story, they recount all the others.
• Much of the therapeutic work is to find gateways to alternative histories, try to enrich them, and that they become the main role in people’s lives; for this, the therapist co-creates a context, generates questions that invite people to connect with experiences that they had not taken into account and attribute meaning to them. The consultant is invited to be the main author to give meaning to these experiences.
• Narrative Therapy is interested in discovering and recognizing (deconstructing) the ideas, beliefs, and practices of the culture in which the person lives and that serve to assist the problem and its history, in this way it is possible to question and challenge them. Generally, the ideas that assist the problem are taken for granted as “truths”. And, these “truths” are only part of the dominant ideology that oppresses people’s lives.
• Deconstruction: these are procedures that subvert realities and practices that are taken for granted, those so-called ‘truths’ divorced from the conditions and context of their production, those disembodied ways of speaking that hide their prejudices, and those familiar practices of the self and its relationship to which people’s lives are subject. Many of the methods of deconstruction make these familiar realities and practices strange, taken for granted by objectifying them. In this sense, deconstruction methods are methods that ‘make the domestic exotic’.
• People who come to therapy often feel unable to intervene in a life that appears to them as immutable; they are blocked in their search for new possibilities and alternative meanings. It is important for the therapist to imagine what might be meaningful to the person seeking help, and not to be blinded by their own criteria for what new developments should be in their own lives and relationships. What counts is not the size of the step the person takes, but their direction.
• It is about fostering a new sense of personal agency, of personal action and, with it, people can assume their responsibility in the investigation of new options in their life and the follow-up of new possibilities. In this process, people experience a new ability to intervene in their world.
• The narrative mode does not generate certainties, but changing perspectives. It places the person as the protagonist or as a participant in his world. It is a world of interpretive acts, a world in which to retell a story is to tell a new story, a world in which people participate with their peers in the “re-writing”, and therefore in the molding, of their life and relationships.
Characteristics for the practice of a therapy located in a narrative mode of thought:
It gives the utmost importance to the experiences of the person;
It favors the perception of a changing world by placing lived experiences in the temporal dimension;
Invokes the subjunctive mode by triggering presuppositions, establishing implicit meanings, and generating multiple perspectives;
It stimulates polysemy and the use of colloquial, poetic, and picturesque language in the description of experiences and in the attempt to build new stories;
Invites to adopt a reflective stance and to appreciate the participation of each one in the interpretative acts
It fosters a sense of authorship and re-authorship of each person’s own life and relationships by telling and retelling one’s story;
It recognizes that stories are co-produced and tries to establish conditions in which the ‘object’ becomes a privileged author;
Consistently introduce the pronouns “I” and “you” in the description of events.
• Narrative therapy is an instrument of freedom, providing hope to many people, who would have felt lost in the “darkness of the night.”
• From the perspective of narrative therapy, we want to infect the consultant with a spirit of exploration and an increased sense of possibility. That the consultants can reach a point where they can rely on alternative and special knowledge, more liberating, that they have recovered or generated throughout the therapeutic work process.
• The ability to narrate is one of the strengths of the human capacity for transformation, so all transformation goes through narration and, therefore, all that conversation that is capable of questioning-disturbing a person changes the narrative he makes of himself.
• The therapist who implements Narrative Therapy is guided by two main precepts: 1. Stay in a state of curiosity. 2. Ask questions that the answer to is not known.
• Thus, the role of the co-author is to generate the story of his life, while the therapist acts as a facilitating agent by posing the appropriate questions and bringing up certain topics. In this way, the problem is dissolved into an alternative narrative.
Other guidelines are:
Facilitate the establishment of a therapeutic relationship in which their point of view is not imposed on the consultant.
Actively work to recognize the narrative style that the consultant makes their story unfold.
Ensure that your contributions are designed to be collected and reformulated by the consultant, not to be accepted by him.
Accept the consultant’s complaints about the sessions and not take them as a sign of ignorance or incomprehension.
Recognize those alternative narratives in which the problem is losing weight.
The non-blaming of the consultant.
• In Narrative Therapy, the possibility of narrating an experience in many different ways is assumed (necessarily generating several experiences where before there seemed to be only one), giving the consultant the maximum power to generate his narration about what happens to him and not blaming him on the difficulties that arise.
• From this approach, closed or exclusive discourses about what happens are rejected, and the need to create narratives open to change is underlined, flexibility that will allow the person to introduce changes, give importance to some facts and take it away from others. It is understood that where there is a feeling of guilt originating in therapy, there is a perception of not knowing how to adapt to a narrative thread that is given from outside, which means that the consultant has not been involved in his generation.
• Narrative therapy allows locating people’s experiences in a temporal dimension, by building a panorama of those essential events to define identity and how it can change when other perspectives are provided. In addition, it underpins the incorporation of different visions on the facts without this implying a devaluation of what has been said, but the possibility of analyzing the bases of these differences.
• We should strive to establish conditions that will help us to criticize our practices formed in this area. We should work to identify the context of the ideas in which our practices are situated, and explore the history of those ideas. This would allow us to identify the effects, dangers, and limitations of these ideas and our practices more quickly. And instead of thinking that therapy has nothing to do with social control, we would assume that this possibility is always very present. Therefore, we would try to identify and criticize those aspects of our work that could be linked to the techniques of social control… And, on the other hand, we should also recognize that, if we do not unite with other people to question these techniques of power, we are also engaging in political activity. It does not mean a political activity that involves the proposal of an alternative ideology, but a political activity that questions the techniques by which people are subjected to a dominant ideology.
• Our lives are constantly intertwined with the narrative, with the stories we tell and hear told, dreamed or imagined, or would like to tell.
• The most powerful therapeutic process I know of is to contribute to enriching people’s stories.
• What steps can we take to avoid being fully complicit in the reproduction of the dominant social order?
• What are some of the necessary conditions for a therapy that is sensitive to gender politics, heterosexual domination or race and culture, class and sexual orientation?
• How do you interact with people to help them identify, embrace, and honor their resistance to those acts of individualism in which the dominant modern culture encourages them to engage through their knowledge and practices of power?
• How to subvert the hierarchies of knowledge that privilege professional knowledge and open new possibilities to dissent?
• My commitment to narrative metaphor came from my decision to pursue practices that are not normative. I am referring to practices that do not reinforce or reproduce the ways of life valued by the dominant culture without questioning them – those ways of being in the world, considered ‘real’, ‘appropriate’, ‘healthy’, and so on.
• I think the narrative metaphor opens up a very fertile ground for this project, infinite.
• The important thing in a respectful therapeutic process, which does not want to tame or produce social conformism or complicity with an oppressive political order, is to be able to dialogue without prejudice, without pathologizing differences, so that people are the authors of their history; that they decide to act consciously, to be the builders of a new history, with liberating meanings, actions and discourses.
• Therapy is a process of social and relational transformation whose purpose is the political and cultural liberation of all those who are oppressed, exploited, and humiliated.
• David Epston: … “the spirit of narrative therapy” – “the loving eye” I referred to, with which Michael White looked at those he met, through his work and his life.
SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
White, Michael and Epston, David (1993) Narrative Media for Therapeutic Purposes. Buenos Aires. Paidós.
White, M. (1997) Narrative Therapy and Poststructuralism. Translation by Marta de Rivera de Torreón.
White, M. (1997a) The process of interrogating. A therapy of literary merit? In Guidelines for Systemic Family Therapy. Ed. Gedisa, Barcelona, p. 69-83
White, M. (1997b) Deconstruction and therapy. In Guidelines for Systemic Family Therapy. Ed. Gedisa, Barcelona, p. 19-56
White, M., (1998), Guías para una terapia familiar sistémica, Barcelona, Editorial Gedisa.
White, M. (2000). Reflections on narrative practice. Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications. Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Publishing Centre.
White, M. (2002). The narrative approach in the experience of therapists. Barcelona: Gedisa.
White, M., (2002), Reescribir la vida, Barcelona, Editorial Gedisa.
White, M. (2002) Workshop Notes.
White, M., (2016), Mapas de la práctica narrativa, Editor: Pranas Chile Ediciones.
White, M., (2017), Narrative Practice: The Continuous Conversation, Editor: Pranas Chile Ediciones.
Crespo, M. (2020). The culture of peace in dialogue with diversity. Digital magazine Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión. Quito, Ecuador.
David Epston, SAYING HELLO AGAIN: REMEMBERING MICHAEL WHITE
Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Thesis (2018) for the Ph.D. with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the TAOS INSTITUTE.
Tapia, D. (2020). Transformative social dialogues. Digital magazine Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión. Quito, Ecuador.
Tapia Figueroa, D. (2000) «The role of the therapist as a facilitator for the integral growth of the family in Ecuador». (Narrative Therapy, Constructivism and Social Constructionism as alternatives of the therapeutic process, with poor families of Quito). Thesis of the Master’s Degree in Intervention, Counseling and Systemic Family Therapy-UPS.
Tarragona, M. (2006) Postmodern Therapies: A Brief Introduction to Collaborative Therapy, Narrative Therapy and Solution-Centered Therapy. Behavioral Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3, 511-532. Michael White Trauma ITSP – narrative therapy
Michael White TRAUMA ITSP – narrative therapy-
Epston, David, y Walter Bera. 2013. “Living Narrative History and Practice: Histories of the Future”. Kenwood Therapy Center. Kenwood Center’s Annual Spring Narrative Therapy
Intensive in Minneapolis.
https://vimeo.com/channels/1338775/83843237 (August 8, 2019)
English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.
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