Ultimately, the narratives and stories we form from our experiences shape our lives and attitudes.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
– Jalaluddin Rumi
We all form stories. Human beings are, above all, narrative. Story therapy is powerful because narrative is in our DNA.
And the kinds of stories our clients tell themselves about their own lives can make all the difference to their happiness or lack thereof. Here’s a case in point.
The selfish failure
Many years ago in Ireland, a psychologist friend of mine saw a client just once.
This was long before Zoom and suchlike, and this man had travelled a long way across the Emerald Isle to visit my friend. The man was deeply depressed and felt he was a failure, a hopeless specimen of humanity.
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His story went like this:
As a young man he had been primed to join the priesthood but had experienced a crisis of faith and felt he was meant for other things. “Selfishly”, as he put it, he went against his family’s wishes and started a business.
Rather than go ahead with the standard arranged marriage, he married young to a woman from a different religion that his family and community didn’t approve of. She already had a child from a former marriage.
He and his new wife had a son, who ended up being bullied at school. He took his son out of that school and put him in an expensive private school. Because he wanted to be fair, he also paid for his stepson to attend drama school. All this further alienated his family, as the son’s new school was not religious.
The business he’d started instead of joining the priesthood was successful, and soon he employed many people. This continued for many years before the financial crash came and his business failed. He kept people employed for as long as possible, even taking out a personal loan to do so, but eventually had to let them go.
As a result he and his family were now much poorer. He was working three jobs, yet still he could barely afford to keep sending his son and stepson to their respective schools.
“I’ve messed up!” he told my friend. “I’ve ruined everything for everyone, and am rightly being punished for it. Basically, I’m a selfish failure!”
My friend tried to do what he could for this man in this one session. But after the man had left his office, the psychologist mused on his story and decided to write a letter to him.
Now, he could have written something like this…
Letter one
Dear ——————–,
Thank you for coming along the other day. It must have been quite a journey. I do have to say that you really have messed everything up! You selfishly went your own way, just thinking of yourself. You married a woman totally unsuitable, causing great distress to your family.
Not only that, but you started a business instead of training to be a priest! Again you disappoint your family by just thinking about yourself!
And you couldn’t even sustain this business! You put other people in a position of relying on you, then made them unemployed! What a pathetic loser you are!
On top of all this you’ve totally messed things up for your family. You might not be able to continue sending your sons to their schools! (Schools which, I might add, went against your wider family’s wishes to begin with!)
I think you are right that you are now getting your just deserts for having been selfish and shallow.
I really don’t think you can be helped until such time as you stop being so self-centred and inconsiderate.
Yours sincerely,
——————–
Now that would have been a pretty accurate reflection of the client’s story. However, and thank goodness, this is the (paraphrased) letter he did actually send to the client:
Letter two (the real one)
Dear ——————–,
Thank you for coming along the other day. It must have been quite a journey. I’ve thought long and hard about you since our meeting. I was deeply impressed by a number of things.
I was struck by how you had the strength of mind to be true to yourself rather than just following the expectations of your family by going into the priesthood. This showed to me that you are, above all, true to yourself and fundamentally a strong person with integrity.
Your family had picked out what they assumed was the perfect woman for you to marry but you followed your heart and married the woman you loved! You had the decency to treat her son as your own. And you paid for him to follow his dreams, and protected your other son from bullying. What a dad!
You had the ingenuity and determination to start a very successful business and for many years employed many people. Yet even when things got rough you ensured to the very last everyone was paid on time and even took out a personal loan to continue paying them after the business was no longer making money!
Even now your priority is to provide for everyone as you work so many hours in the jobs you have.
Because of your integrity, honesty, resourcefulness, hard work ethic, and strength of character and decency, I have absolutely no doubt that you will again build something worthwhile and provide a good life for your family and yourself.
Yours sincerely,
——————–
“He’s got me right!”
Some months later, my friend was visiting another part of Ireland. After giving a lecture, who should approach him but this very client!
He told my friend how he was turning his life around and was slowly building up a business again. He was, as he put it, “getting back on track”. He was no longer depressed and feeling better every day.
He said, “You know, when I read your letter it was like everything changed for me! I could at last see that I wasn’t just a loser – that I do have good qualities. In fact, any time I started to feel down again, I’d take out your letter and re-read it, and then say to myself, ‘Yes, that man’s got me right!'”
The stories we tell ourselves
We are the protagonists in our own dramas. Sometimes we cast ourselves as the ‘good guy’, sometimes the victim, or sometimes even the villain. The frame of the story and the role we cast ourselves in can be instrumental in how mentally healthy we are or become.
Client self-stories can trap them, as in the case above. They can make people feel helpless and hopeless through self-labelling, and they thereby become limiting.
Because human beings are, above all, narrative or story-making creatures, the stories we create about our own lives matter deeply. A story is a frame of reality.
So how might we help reframe our clients’ limiting self-stories?
Step one: Identify and explore their stories
When we start out in narrative therapy, we are simply asking and listening. We want to encourage clients to tell their stories, focusing on specific events and experiences.
We need to listen, of course, but we may also need to prompt discussion. We can ask open-ended questions such as:
- “Can you tell me about a time when you felt particularly overwhelmed by anxiety?”
- “Can you tell me everything in order of events?”
This helps in understanding the narrative structure and identifying key themes and patterns.
Once the story is clear, we can go onto the next step.
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Step two: Have them author their own story through externalization
It was once thought that writing’s primary benefits were just psychological, and certainly there is myriad evidence suggesting that writing helps organize complex emotional experiences.1,2
However, new evidence suggests that shaping coherent narratives from the chaotic aspects of personal history has physical health benefits, too.3
These results indicate that crafting a narrative is a crucial part of how we make sense of our world, helping us maintain both mental and physical health.
So how can we support our clients to do this?
We might ask:
“If what you have been telling me about could be shaped into a story with a beginning, middle, and end, how would you write that?”
We can suggest they write it as though they were someone other than themselves, so that they externalize their character, talking about he or she rather than I.
We can suggest to a client why this can help, in that it gives them a chance to:
- Put a fence around the situation or life period
- Reflect on it objectively by engaging analytical centres of the brain, seeing those times ‘from the outside’
- Help them see the wider context in which the events occurred.
We can also help them deconstruct the narrative by looking at any overarching themes, patterns, and assumptions and exploring those together.
Next, we can get metaphorical.
Step three: Engage the power of metaphor
Leo, a client, told me how depressed he felt at the way his last relationship had ended. He was finding it hard to get past it and felt he had done “all the wrong things”.
Listening to him, there certainly seemed to be extenuating circumstances. In other words, it wasn’t all his fault. Leo enjoyed reading fiction and gaming, so I suggested to him that he could write a “metaphorical version” of those events.
The next week he came back with a beautifully written metaphorical account of that time. His narrative involved a stolen crown, a clever fox, a good farmer, and many other elements besides. I could (sort of!) see how it paralleled his painful experiences.
He said, “The weird thing was, Mark, it made me feel different about the whole thing! It doesn’t seem to bother me anymore!”
With some clients I’ve asked them to write their story down, pen on paper, and then either give me the story in a sealed envelope to ‘look after’ for them, bury it in the garden, or even burn it in a fire.
Why?
Because research has found that physically “enclosing an emotionally laden stimulus” can greatly decrease distress around the memories.4 In creating a physical barrier between ourselves and a painful stimulus, we also create a psychological one.
Next, we can help our client reauthor their narrative.
Step four: Rewrite the future
I helped Leo reauthor his own future story. HIs current future story (what he envisaged the ‘plot’ of his future life would be) was one of loneliness and failure, fear and hopelessness.
First, we explored his strengths and values. Then we used those to construct a new, more empowering story.
I asked Leo to describe the next few weeks as a story in which his strengths were to be brought to the fore. He was to describe himself in the third person. It could be literal or metaphorical or a bit of both. And if he wanted to, he could write that story down.
Leo’s new story consisted of the central character (himself) travelling through a land in which he still wears the chains of his past enslavement. Through his own resourcefulness and determination, and with the aid of friends he meets along the way, he finds an ingenious way to remove those chains and focus on building a wonderful structure for the local inhabitants to live and flourish in.
Now Leo was comfortable using metaphor, but your client might simply want to reauthor in a literal way. And if they do, ask them to:
- Use the third-person pronoun when referring to themselves as the protagonist
- Include as many of their strengths and resources as possible
- Introduce positive conclusions.
On top of all this I may introduce what is so often the magic ingredient. I hypnotized Leo so he could enjoy this new narrative inwardly in ‘full surround’ as he put it.
Remember: You are the captain of your soul
In a sense, when we write or hear a story we also live it. The long-forgotten souls of prehistory would enter trance as the storyteller transported them to other times and places around the campfire. They weren’t just hearing the narratives, they were living them.
Ultimately, the narratives and stories we form from our experiences shape our lives and attitudes. We have to be very careful about what stories we expose ourselves to, and what narratives we form from our experiences.
Once we cast ourselves as a ‘loser’ or ‘victim’, we may so easily come to play that part.
I think a perfect example of determining one’s own narrative despite external circumstances is contained within the short poem ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henly:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Get My eBook of My Favourite Therapeutic Stories
One of our delegates’ favourite parts of my online course Conversational Reframing is an eBook I created containing the therapeutic stories I’ve found myself returning to again and again over the years. Stories should be fitted to clients of course, but some seem to have that ‘special sauce’, and it’s these I’ve put in the book. You can read more about Conversational Reframing here.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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Notes:
- Gortner, E.-M., Rude, S. S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Benefits of expressive writing in lowering rumination and depressive symptoms. Behavior Therapy, 37(3):292–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2006.01.004
- Niederhoffer, K. G., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2009). Sharing one’s story: On the benefits of writing or talking about emotional experience. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2nd edn, pp. 621–632). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195187243.013.0059
- Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999). Forming a story: the health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55(10):1243–1254. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4679(199910)55:10<1243::AID-JCLP6>3.0.CO;2-N. This study found that writing for just 15 minutes a day for three days about important personal experiences was enough to improve mental and physical health markers. This finding was consistently replicated across various age groups, genders, cultures, social classes, and personality types.
- See: Li, X., Wei, L., & Soman, D. (2010). Sealing the emotions genie: The effects of physical enclosure on psychological closure. Psychological Science, 21(8):1047–1050. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610376653
