Wandering, Not Lost

I start this with hesitation, resistance to writing that is as old as my ability to tell a story and to write. I notice this acutely every time I write or say anything. I worry about doing it right, about whether I will meet the standards necessary to get it published, whether anyone else will find it interesting, whether I will offend someone, and whether I have anything worth saying. A recent trip to Italy to study narrative therapy reminded me of how this old story was built, and reassures me that it isn’t the only story possible.

Our training group met in San Gimignano, Italy, for five days in October. The twelve of us traveled from far-flung places around the globe to work on becoming better therapists.

I came from Denver, Sharon from Singapore, Carla and Klaus separately from Vienna, Sophie and Nika separately from Geneva, Johan from South Africa, Linda from Louisville, Sue and Rafis separately from South Florida.

Our teachers — Jill Freedman and Gene Combs — traveled from their home in Evanston, Ill. They have conducted these workshops for the past nine years at Ponte A Nappo B&B, a guesthouse with olive groves and vineyards a half-mile down a dirt road from San Gimignano. They first visited the area in 1985, and have become good friends over the years with the families of Carla, Andre and Francesco Rossi, the owners and proprietors of the B&B, and several other properties up the hill in the walled city.

Jill and Gene structured the training by asking each of us to bring some issue or concern we’re having either in our work — all of us identify as narrative therapists — or in our own lives. With 10 trainees and five days to study, each of us would be at the center of focus for one of the 10 sessions, each day divided into two distinct sessions. This process matches one of the key tenets of narrative therapy: keeping the person seeking therapy (or client) as primary, as the expert in knowledge of their own life.

This might sound like how all psychotherapy is conducted. It’s not.

In the more conventional, taken-for-granted practice of modern psychotherapy, the starting point is the pursuit of symptoms and identification of disorders in order to determine a diagnosis and treatment plan. The expert is the therapist who begins by asking for information about problems from the person seeking therapy (or patient) in order to come up with the correct diagnostic code, so that insurance will reimburse either the therapist or the patient. This sets the stage for how the relationship and hierarchical power dynamics unfold — putting the therapist in the dominant position.

In the narrative approach and our training with Jill and Gene, the questions are slow and gentle, focused on hopes, dreams and meaning expressed in the values and stories of the person being interviewed. What they were teaching us was how to slow down the process so that the words and experiences of the person at the center of the interview can unfold and point the way.

########################

I have been training with Jill and Gene since 2000. They are prominent in the international narrative therapy movement, and were proteges of the late Michael White, the Australian social worker who brought these ideas to the United States in the 1990s. I first heard him speak at a family therapy conference in Washington, D.C., in 1995.

At that time, I had been a psychotherapist for just a few years after leaving a career as a newspaper journalist. I had been “successful” in journalism, in that I had moved up the ladder of status conferred by the newspapers for which I worked, starting at a small local paper in Florida, and ending up at The Washington Post.

I left journalism partly out of disillusionment with the herd-like story coverage process I had seen too often. But I also could never adapt to the male-dominated, hierarchical and corporate culture.

I remember once hearing a colleague at USA Today exclaiming across the newsroom, “I got it!” I asked her what she had gotten, and she said she had called about 15 different people before finding one who confirmed the story she was seeking. I thought that maybe there had been some legitimate versions of the story in the first 14 calls, but those weren’t what she had been assigned to find.

I worked on the newsdesk at another newspaper where my supervisor prided herself on choosing the same stories for the front page as the New York Times. But we were a regional paper in the South, not an international paper in New York City. So why was this a good thing?

Later, as a newly trained psychotherapist in the early 1990s, I was hearing colleagues speaking of their clients as their diagnoses: she’s a borderline, he’s a narcissist, that’s what you expect from a bipolar. It became clear to me that these were clients they considered troublesome and problematic, and that their problems were their identity in the eyes of their therapists.

I began to think that the problem I had with journalism was also a problem in psychotherapy, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly what that problem was. I just knew I was troubled by the idea that there was some rule-book in charge of how things were supposed to be done that didn’t seem to have much to do with real lives being lived in specific places, in particular circumstances.

Then, luckily, I heard Michael White at the family therapy conference. He spoke of respectful practice as fundamental to therapy that would be helpful, recognizing that people coming in as clients are often feeling that who they are and what they think, feel and believe is not important, seeing themselves as less than, as deficient. He recognized there’s never just one story in any person’s life, that all of our lives are multi-storied, and that there are social and cultural discourses that make some stories more visible and influential than others. He said our work as therapists is to make visible and felt the stories of experience that give value to preference and possibility, which have been obscured by problem-dominated stories that can take over our sense of identity and agency in our lives.

Eureka! He was talking about exactly what had bothered me in my life and work. These ideas opened up a reason to keep on with this work, and honestly, with this life.

I later heard a story about Michael White from another therapist, Melissa Elliot. She had lived in Mississippi and invited him to help out with a community conversation at her church. She knew he could make a difference, but she was worried that he might not be accepted there because she suspected he was an atheist. After he spent three days facilitating the event, asking questions that were gentle and curious, questions that put them in touch with their own beauty and wisdom, eliciting responses among the group to each others’ stories that moved and connected the group members deeply to each other, one of the women came to Melissa to thank her for bringing him: “He’s the most Christ-like person we’ve ever met,” she said.

################

Back in San Gimignano, our group studied and shared stories, much like the church group in Mississippi. We listened to each other’s worries and concerns, and what we hoped for and valued in our lives. We saw each other’s tenderness, vulnerability and beauty. Some of us were young and just starting our work lives. Others of us were older and experiencing transitions to next careers and phases of our personal lives.

These conversations generated community among this group that started out as strangers.

I’m not going to write here about my colleagues’ issues and concerns because they didn’t give me permission. But I can speak of the issue I brought to share with the group: failure, and how I have faced this way of thinking about myself in my own life, and how often people who come to me for therapy tell me about their sense of it in their lives. I spoke of divorce, of losing a baby to SIDS, of raising a child who struggled in school and suffered mightily for it, of ups and downs in my professional life and affiliations.

As I told my stories to the group and responded to Gene’s questions, my story of failures became stories of clear choices I have made in my life that pointed me in the direction of my values and hopes for self-determination, freedom and a fierce love for my children and clients.

The reflections I got from the group included this one for a young woman. She said my stories brought to mind for her the image of a lone female alpha wolf, who goes off on her own to protect her pack. She spoke of how hearing my stories reassures her that her own mother’s unwillingness to remarry after divorcing her father was a conscious act of courage, rather than an act of resignation. I’m carrying that image with me.

Because of the work we did in our sessions, we became a family. And in that space, our time together outside of study was pretty much pure fun.

Our first few days there were rainy, but on the second night, the sky cleared and we could see the bright twinkling of stars as we gathered in the courtyard to begin our trek up to town for dinner. Feeling at ease and free, I began to sing: “Are the stars out tonight,” then stopped when I saw Sophie smiling at me. “Do you know this song?” I asked. She didn’t, so I continued singing, “I don’t care if it’s cloudy or bright, I only have eyes for you, dear.” She laughed, and later when we got back to the B&B, I played some songs for her on my phone. I felt like a schoolgirl at summer camp.

On another night, six of us paid 20 euros each to attend an opera showcase at a local church. Rafis was staying in town and he said he knew the way, so we followed him. We went up the hill, then around the outside of the wall, then around to a parking lot, and up a hill into a cobbled street, then we back-tracked through a field and up to a fenced yard, then back down to the outside of the wall again. And then, we began asking people along the way for directions.

Finally, we could see the steeple of the church, and we arrived just three songs late into the performance. But getting lost was never so much fun, filled with jokes and laughter.

The opera itself was just OK, but what made it worth the price of admission was watching the local people on the wooden benches mouth the words along with the singers, and respond with hearty applause and loud shouts of “Bravo!”

This moment seemed like a fitting image for our narrative work — how the music of life is elevated by the response it receives. And the path we followed to get to this local performance reminds me this bumper sticker: Not all those who wander are lost.

— October 2018