STORIES WE’VE HEARD, STORIES WE’VE TOLD Stories We’ve Heard, Stories We’ve Told LIFE-CHANGING NARRATIVES IN THERAPY AND EVERYDAY LIFE Jeffrey A. Kottler Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. A copy of this book’s Catalog-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–932825–3 eISBN: 978–0–19–932827–7 Contents Preface and Personal Introduction Acknowledgments About the Author 1. Storytelling in Therapy—and Everyday Life 2. The Power and Influence of Stories 3. The Storied Brain 4. Cultural Visions and Variations of Storytelling 5. Stories of Change in Media, Entertainment, and Everyday Life 6. Personal Narratives and Storied Identities 7. Disordered Stories in Trauma and Emotional Struggles 8. Therapeutic Value of Stories in Creating Change 9. Types of Stories in Therapeutic Relationships 10. Between Truth and Lies in the Stories That People Share 11. Creating More Powerful Stories 12. Beyond Stories REFERENCES INDEX Preface and Personal Introduction I’D LIKE TO tell you a story. The action begins at a point in my life, and my career, when I felt empty. I had nothing left to give. I was bored with my work, feeling that after so many decades I was just reliving the same experiences over and over again. I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new. I was tired of being assailed with supposedly new improvements in therapeutic technique, admonished to abandon whatever I thought was working to try the next best thing. I was frustrated with the way the field had been evolving over the years, moving on from those aspects of therapeutic work that I cherished the most in favor of supposedly new, groundbreaking, evidence-based, empirically validated treatments. Sure, I was grateful for advances in diagnostic accuracy and precision in matching best practices, but it felt like therapy had lost its soul. I originally got into this field, like so many others, because I most value relational factors in helping and healing. As a teenager, my life was floundering and I was frequently depressed and anxious. It was my school counselor who “saved” me, largely as a result of her mentoring relationship. In college, it was more of the same: I felt lost and discouraged, wondering whether I would ever climb out of my despair. Again it was through a relationship with a therapist on campus that helped me through this difficult time. As I look back on my experiences as a student, a supervisee, and a client in therapy, what I remember about the professionals who influenced me the most were the stories they told. I can’t remember what my school counselor looked like, but I vividly recall her talking about her own struggles with taking tests (at the time I was in jeopardy of flunking out of school). I think about the half dozen different therapists I’ve consulted during my life, and although I can’t remember much about their offices, their appearances, their advice, or their admonishments, I do remember a few of their seminal stories. In fact, I still tell some of them to others. After writing dozens of books about therapy during the past 35 years, covering almost every nuance of the craft, including a focus on ethical issues, group settings, relational factors, difficult clients, interpersonal conflicts, emotional overload, secrets and paradoxes, serendipitous change, unfulfilled desire, passion and commitment, social justice and advocacy, failures and negative outcomes, successes and triumphs, unusual cases, self-supervision, indigenous healing, reciprocal influence, creative breakthroughs, deception and lies, burnout and self-care, expertise and mastery, I justifiably wondered what could possibly be left to cover. I felt particularly stumped because as much investigation, research, and writing that I’d done about therapy, I still hadn’t found the essential element of what we do as therapists that appears to make the most difference. I was thinking about all of this, and my frustration with the Holy Grail still eluding me, when I decided to get back to my reading. Even with my busy schedule and compulsive productivity, I still manage to read a novel each week, most of them in the genre of escape fiction. I am totally transported into different worlds, forgetting about whatever else that is going on in my life. The particular book resting on my lap had been skeptically borrowed from a friend; it was a best-selling thriller about a zombie apocalypse, but with a subtext of political commentary (I suppose I’m being a little defensive). I completely and totally entered this imagined future in which a virus had wiped out most of the human race, changing them into voracious, brainless monsters whose only goal was to feed on the few living survivors. It was a world so vividly created and described that I found myself living there during idle moments and dreams, imagining how I would function with all the challenges and obstacles I would likely face. While I imagined myself as a protagonist in the story, I wondered whether I would have the fortitude and resilience, not to mention the skills, to survive in such a dangerous world. When I finished the last of the pages, delighted with the whole rollercoaster ride, I decided to go for a run outside to get some exercise. As I was just finding my stride, reliving one of the more memorable scenes from the tense finale of the book, I noticed another runner coming toward me. As the guy approached me with a huge grin, the runner offered his hand as a high five, one runner to another, as if to say, “Way to go.” Runners are notorious for their introspective, pained faces, so it was especially surprising to find someone gregarious and overtly friendly. “Beautiful day!” I answered as I slapped hands while we passed one another. I thought to myself that such interactions on a run almost never happen, and I wondered why people couldn’t be friendlier to one another. But then I started thinking to myself, “What if...?” “No,” I interrupted the thought. “That’s just crazy.” And so I continued along my way. “But what if...?” Against my will I found myself thinking, “I know this is really weird and all, but what if this guy has some kind of virus and he is deliberately passing it on to people? What if when I touched his hand he gave me some kind of disease?” As I considered the idea, I realized how ridiculous it sounded. Here was one of those rare times when someone was being nice and all I could do was imagine the worst. I castigated myself for such paranoid suspicions, but as I did so I noticed that I was rubbing my hand on my shirt, as if to wipe away the imaginary germs. I couldn’t help giggling to myself about how silly I was acting. I tried to put the whole incident behind me, but during the past weeks I had been so absorbed in the zombie novel that I couldn’t seem to escape back into so-called reality. I just kept shaking my head in wonderment at how stupidly I was behaving. “But what if I really do have some kind of a virus on my hand?” I asked myself. “I know that isn’t likely, but if that was the case, would wiping my hand on my shirt take care of the problem?” Against all rational argument, I stopped by the side of the road and started rubbing my hand in the dirt and then continued toward home to complete my run. All along the way I kept saying to myself, “Don’t touch your face,” “Don’t touch your face,” reminding myself not to do so until I could properly scrub my hands. As ludicrous as the incident sounds, this illustrates the power of stories to penetrate our lives in such a way that they become as real to us as anything we ever encounter through more direct experience. In fact, there is compelling evidence that fiction, whether novels, movies, or television shows, can be even more powerful to impact or influence people’s behavior than self-help or nonfiction books such as this one (Appel, 2008; Appel & Richter, 2007; Djikic, Oatlety, Loeterman, & Peterson, 2009; Meek, 2014). In addition, the lingering effects of listening, watching, or reading stories may permanently alter the architecture and neuronal connections in the brain (Berns, Blaine, Prietula, & Pye, 2013). It turns out that the brain doesn’t necessarily distinguish between direct experience and those events that we live vicariously through the protagonists in stories. However contrived they might be, stories tap into our imagination for which we have developed “specialized cognitive machinery” to process them (Tooby & Cosmides, 2001). They are perfectly capable of creating neural representations of visual, auditory, or motor experiences that feel just as real as anything else we experience in daily life (Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, & Zacks, 2009). They invite, if not require, a level of active involvement in the “consumption” of the story that produces all kinds of possibilities for vicarious learning, intense engagement, and personal application that nonfiction can’t touch (Gottschall, 2012a; Levitt, Rattanasampan, Chaidaroon, Stanley, & Robinson, 2009; Solomon, 2001). Even if a story is fabricated, it may still contain insights and truths that are powerfully transformative, especially when it is vividly told. Children frequently remark after listening to a great story that it feels like they just watched a movie, or just as likely, that they were right there inside the action. Just as games of chess, backgammon, or video games teach logic, strategy, and problem solving, fictional stories instruct about adaptive behavior. We may never meet a werewolf, zombie, or vampire in a spooky forest, but seeing or reading about how characters survive these monsters may very well prepare us to deal with any aggressor. In fact, in the zombie book that I mentioned earlier, the subtext of the story is that the only people who manage to survive are those who are intimately familiar with the movie genre because they are the only ones who are sufficiently prepared to know what to do if you see a zombie! ALL THERAPY IS ABOUT TELLING STORIES Client problems, complaints, symptoms, and issues are really just stories about their condition, compressed into a narrative that is both limiting and revealing in what they include—and what they leave out. Initially we accept the stories at face value when clients tell us that they are depressed, anxious, or suffering all manner of difficulties, crises, or traumas. With time, patience, and dialogue, these stories continue to evolve, deepen, and often become utterly transformed into new versions based on our input. All of our conceptions and diagnoses regarding what we believe has gone wrong are also just abbreviated stories. “The reason your car won’t start,” the mechanic explains, “is that you have a faulty fuel pump, often the result of improper maintenance.” So it is the same with our own assessments of the presenting problem: “The main reason you are depressed is because...(fill in the blank). We might offer a story that is reassuring: “Don’t worry. It’s just a side effect of the meds you are taking for high blood pressure.” We could present a story that is genetically based: “Your bipolar disorder is largely inherited and responds well to a certain class of medications.” Or we might introduce other stories that refer to past trauma, underlying illness, unresolved grief, interpersonal conflict, substance use, developmental or adjustment reactions, and so on. We conceptualize our cases in terms of stories that include both descriptive and explanatory features. Almost everything we think and do is thus translated into narrative sequences that help to make sense of experiences and observations. THE STORIES CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK—THE STORIES THAT ARE THIS BOOK This is a book written primarily for psychotherapists, counselors, and other helping professionals, even if many others might find the ideas useful, if not inspiring. In one sense it is about the presence and role of stories in therapy, but it also looks at the subject of storytelling from a much broader perspective, one that examines the power and influence of all kinds of stories in people’s lives. Thus, the first several chapters establish a foundation for understanding how stories affect and influence people in a multitude of ways in daily life. Our earliest memories are stories; in fact, all memories are storied experiences. From the youngest age we are exposed to stories through fairy tales, books, television, films, songs, and family legends. Almost all of our conversations involve telling stories about ourselves and others. The rest of our waking time is spent imagining stories, reliving stories, and planning new scenarios in our minds. Even when we are unconscious, the brain continues to link images, fragments, and daily experiences into stories in the form of remembered dreams. Our whole lives are ruled by stories. So it is hardly surprising that the process of doing therapy, regardless of approach and theoretical preferences, is essentially a storytelling activity in which each of the participants takes turns telling tales. We owe a tremendous debt and gratitude to the contributions of narrative therapy, as a distinct style of practice, one that gives primary attention to the power of stories not only to “represent” episodes in in our lives but actually to completely shape, influence, and constitute our lives and the meanings we assign to those experiences (White, 2007; White & Epston, 1990), as well as the ways that people make sense of what happened in the past (McKeough, 2013). This is particularly the case with regard to how stories are so integrally connected to larger social, racial, political, and gender contexts in our culture (Brown & Augusta-Scott, 2007; Hare-Mustin, 1994; Madigan & Law, 1998; White, 1994). Yet some therapists take issue with the burgeoning popularity of “narrative therapy” as a particular model since all therapies are essentially narrative and all presenting problems are contained in stories. Of course, narrative therapy, as a particular theoretical model, offers its own unique philosophical and procedural style, not to mention a battery of signature techniques. Nevertheless, most clinicians recognize the storied nature of the therapeutic process on multiple levels: (1) clients tell stories about their problems and condition; (2) they share background stories about the perceived origin of the problems and contextual aspects of their life experience; (3) therapists form these often fragmented narratives into their own story formulation that includes a diagnosis; (4) another version of this story is transformed into a “case history” that is shared with colleagues, supervisors, and written into treatment plans; (5) therapists construct