"What is Narrative Therapy?" with Jill Freedman, MSW

let me see Facebook can be true yeah it says it's streaming a lot okay all right

good afternoon I'm dr. Virgil Moorhead jr. I'm the behavioral health director here at two feathers Native American Family Services I'm also part of the big

lagoon Rancheria which is Yurok and Tala wah Native American and I'm glad to be on here with Jill Freedman our guest

today as well as my colleague Jennifer Oliphant and a little bit about two feathers for those of you that may be tuning in on our speaker series for the

first time we're a family service agency in Humboldt County which is about five hours north of San Francisco right on the beautiful Pacific Ocean and we

primarily serve Native American youth and families we have a behavioral health team we also have cultural programs we also have a rap model that's called

making relatives and we really try to provide intensive services to youth Native youth and families and one of those which were excited about to talk

about today is providing a psychotherapy family based counseling to youth and families and and really using a lot of

the theories practices ideas from narrative therapy this is our first time talking about narrative therapy although

Jennifer and myself are trained in narrative therapy and we believe we have one of the foremost experts in narrative therapy Jill Freedman on with us today so I'm

going to throw it over to Jennifer for her to introduce herself and then to enter introduce Jill thanks Virgil hi my

name is Jennifer olefin and I am the czechs hope for tomorrow grant program director here at two feathers I provide clinical supervision to the therapists

within that program and we an intensive counseling program aimed at preventing suicide and it is so I have

been learning and practicing narrative therapy for the last six years and so it's an absolute honor to be able to introduce our guest Jill Friedman I

can't believe I get to interview her and Jill is a co-director of Evanston Family Therapy Center and founding member of the Chicago Center for Family Health

she's internationally recognized for her advances in narrative theory in training and she's received the 2009 award for the innovative contribution to family

therapy and has co-authored more than 30 journal articles and book chapters and three books so thank you so much Jill for coming and talking to us we only

have an hour with you and so I want to toss it over to you right away so that you can maybe kind of start with an overview of what is narrative therapy

okay so before I begin I just would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land where my Center Evanson Family Therapy Center

is located the notion Abha group here which I had been calling the Potawatomi but I think their preferred name is Nash

Nava and so and we're in Evanston which is part of the larger Chicago the Greater Chicago area so I'm going to

just start with a really brief set of ideas about narrative and then if people have questions we can hear those and then I thought I might talk about ways

of structuring work with families and couples okay so I hope this works

didn't do exactly what I thought okay hmm okay so as I was saying to Jennifer as we were getting started that I would

probably pick different things that I thought were the most important characteristics of narrative therapy on different days and I think that that that's an important thing probably about

narrative that it has a lot of different ways that it responds to different kinds of problems and it sort of depends what kind of work you're doing but I'm just these are some

things I was thinking about as I was preparing to speak with you oh and two steps back I just want to thank you Virgil for inviting me and I'm happy to

be here getting off to a really racing start but I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you you're welcome

okay so yeah so the first idea is that people are the privileged authors of

their own stories I think this is a really important idea and that is really different from a lot of kinds of

psychotherapy it means that we believe that people know more about their own experience about what's helpful to them

then an expert does and this idea really shapes the kind of therapy we do because it's much more collaborative and it much more is always asking people is this

helpful is this going in a direction you want to go it's really trusting that people have a lot of knowledge about their own life and about what's what's

useful so I think it's really a central part of the work the second idea I was thinking about in preparing is that

people have relationships with problems but are not themselves problematic so Michael White talked about people and problems being separate and that what

we're doing is we're not trying to fix somebody or change somebody or having somebody adapt but we're more having them think about what kind of

relationship they want to have with the problem which might have to do with moving away from it it might have to do with it's having a smaller place in their life it might have to do with

their having a different understanding of it but this is really important because it speaks to identity that we think that people have multiple possibility

these and that because they're engaged with the problem it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with them another implication of this is that

we're looking at the socio-cultural context the ideas and the culture about how people should be or shouldn't be and

whether person or family fits with that or doesn't fit with that we think those are all part of what makes something to be thought of as problematic rather than

something about a particular person our particular relationship we have the idea that identity is relational I'm really curious about

whether this is a Native American idea because I know with a lot of indigenous people this is really a way of thinking

about identity in Western psychology identities thought of as really individualistic you are a particular way

and it's sort of affixed things but in a lot of indigenous cultures there's the idea that we know ourselves through the way other people respond to us through

the way they think about us through what's appreciated by who were in community with what we're part of what we affiliate with I really like this

idea very much and it was an idea that that's different than the pulling yourself up by the bootstraps individualistic idea that was part of

the culture I grew up with I don't know if it's more familiar to you yeah I said definitely is and you know that you know

one of the speakers that I was talking about Megan bang was talking about the open the idea of you know our

relationships with nature well you know we can be dominant control over nature our have relationships with nature so

that's a different kind of identity and how we many indigenous communities see ourselves so it's not even with you know other humans is also with nonhumans I'm really glad you brought that up because

it's it's probably not something that's as obvious to me but certainly in interviewing people in the therapy I've done with people there could be many

things that they're in relationship with besides people could be animals it could be nature it could be all kinds of things and I think that's really

important we're thinking about that and we're also thinking about identity not being fixed

that it's shifting and so one of the phrases that Michael White who was one of the founders of narrative therapy talked about is how are we becoming

other than who we've already been and so we're trying instead in a lot of traditional therapies there's this idea of really getting to know who somebody

is sort of peeling the layers of an onion you probably heard that metaphor to get to who somebody is in there it if there be it's more the idea that things

are shifting and changing through time and as people step into doing something different they become different and as we notice that that's creating a

platform for the next step they might take that will also create a difference in their identity so we're focusing on the shifting identity in the direction that people would like their identity to

move in and what they're doing that's contributing to that and how their participation and things other than

themselves is also helping move in particular directions I also think that

something that's really interesting to me is that we're not thinking about narrative therapy is having the truth about a way to work or how things should

be we think that therapy should be fitting for the culture of the people seeking it and for me that's really interesting because in different

contexts different cultures people respond more to certain parts and not to others and change them to fit and that

contributes to all of us so in the early days before narrative therapy had a name Michael White and David Epstein really

resisted naming it because they wanted it to change they wanted it to grow and one of the ways that it changes is through how it's applied in different cultures

the book publishing industry won out though and they did eventually name it and what they and the word that they

started using was narrative but there were other possibilities it didn't have to be narrative but I really like this aspect this narrative aspect before I talk more about that I'm just curious if

they're questions just about those basic ideas I'm looking on the Facebook to see if anybody entered any questions one of

the benefits of the live stream is we get to see questions in real time well I'm seeing a lot of thank yous and love

this and identity is relational yes but no questions yet okay a question and I don't know if you're going to go into it but if we're talking about like the core

sort of foundation of narrative therapy that would the political side of it also

you know be just in the sense of Michele Foucault and in in the the power and in taking into consideration those dominant

sort of discourses yes yet the sort of core foundation narrative so when I was talking about people have relationships with problems burner not themselves

problematic and that we're looking in the larger context so we're looking at

those discourses that people don't fit with and those particularly if I'm thinking about families and couples I'm

looking at two different things one is a power inequities power relations I'm thinking is there some idea in the

larger culture that's creating an ax power imbalance here that's supporting the problems that people are coming to talk about in therapy so to me that's built into this this idea the other

thing that I'm thinking about is are there idealized images that people are trying to live up to and thinking that there's something

wrong with them or their partner or their child if they don't live up to those ideals dimma jizz so very much when we talk about people having

relationships with problems we're thinking about those problems being supported in these larger cultural discourses and in power power relations

just is that what you were thinking about yeah and and you know I was just you know Minnesota was on my mind and

just you know because I think one of the things that got me into this inter narrative therapy was that it was one of the sort of practices that I thought

took into consideration social justice and equity issues and really worked to deconstruct and and in you know in many indigenous communities it would be

called decolonized sort of dominant discourses and theories because oftentimes those don't work for indigenous communities so can I just

speak to for a moment it's sort of related to what you're just talking about so Dulwich Center in Australia in

Adelaide Australia along with the University of Melbourne has a master's degree program and narrative therapy and community work and one of the things

that they've done in that program is they've there there's a group group of people who participate in that program but one of the partnerships that I've

been able to have in participating in that program is with Tullia Graham Butler who's an Aboriginal woman and so

one of the we gave a talk on on trying to decolonize narrative teaching together and one of the things that stood out for both of us in this program

was if I was teaching and the Aboriginal people had the right the it was completely built that no matter what was going on in the

room they could leave and have their own yarning conversation outside of the room and then come back and so I had the

experience of teaching something thinking it was really important and the group of people would get out and get up and walk out of the room and that was

really humbling because I couldn't predict what was going to really work for them culturally but the context that

was created by Dulwich Center made it possible for them to communicate with each other and when something wasn't culturally fitting and what was really

fantastic I think for everybody was when they were willing to have some of those conversations in front of the larger group hmm so then we could hear some things about what wasn't culturally

fitting what it was that they were hearing that was different than their culture and then we could think about like how do we incorporate this in the

larger teaching space so that was really great so I was thinking about that when you were talking about those cultural differences and and what could have happened was that people would have felt

marginalized you know if it wasn't set up that way then the Aboriginal people would have just been aware that it didn't fit and then they would have a choice do I just go along with this do I

leave you know they would have been marginalized but it was built in that they had you know that that they had the

right to have a voice that we would pay attention to and that they could decide what was fitting and what wasn't fitting

and it was a real and it is a real collaboration and partnership I'm sure there's much more to go and I'm sure that there are things that that I don't

notice and but I feel like it's a real privilege to be able to be in on finding out what we're doing that doesn't fit

instead of just assuming everybody's gonna see it a particular way yeah Jill I really love that and it sounds like you were able to create that space and

have that kind of collaborative process within that agency and it makes me think of do you have a process for expanding

this to maybe the kind of culture of mental health so I guess what I'm thinking specifically is you know therapy should be fitting for the culture of the people that seek it but

we don't have systems that support that sometimes and I'm wondering how you've navigated that I think that's really

difficult and I'm not so sure how well you know I mean I can have particular relationships with particular people I don't I wouldn't make any claims that

I've made a difference in a system one of the things that's been really interesting to me recently Jean my

partner Jean and I have been doing a consultation group with psychiatric nurses so so that's been really interesting and they're the reason that

we're doing this consultation group now is that code let's come into the hospital although their unit is a psychiatric unit there have been people there with with Kovac and so they've had

to face that and that's really changed things and one of the things though that that we're hearing about a lot is all of these kinds of rules and regulations and

ways that things have to be done that wouldn't be fitting for for narrative ideas and we sort of talked about how

the possibility of being subversive and one of the things that we've talked about is how much easier it is to do that as part of a team than if you're

just secretly trying to do it so I'm sure that there are people who have who have done much more in that bigger context than I have

thank you yeah I could talk about it a lot but yeah mm-hmm should I go ahead

here yeah where we could maybe continue to go for a little bit with the presentation and then you know we'll take some questions from the audience and then Jennifer and I have some

questions how does that sound perfect okay I can make this work okay so one of the things that I that I really like is

the narrative metaphor thinking about the narrative metaphor and the way that that I think about it is I actually have

an image that I carry with me and this is the image if we think about each of

these little lines as an experience we could this picture could represent your morning or it can represent your life

depending on how you make generalizations so when people come to therapy they usually have certain

moments that represent the experience that they want to tell you about that they think reflect their lives and these are stories that they've told over and

over maybe only to themselves when they're taking a shower but maybe to their best friend but they've usually rehearsed what they're going to tell you

that's the problem and if if we're seeing a family or a couple they might have some of those moments that overlap although they probably have different

meanings but they also have other things that that are involved in the story that they are talking about about their lives their thin stories you can see there are

all sorts of experiences that they've had but only these viewcount and usually that's the situation people are come to

are in when they come to therapy so I think the single most important thing that we can do is listen from

moment that stands outside of those thin lines those stories don't become

important by chance those stories become plate those are places where people don't fit with the larger ideas and the culture with the

expectations about how they should be with the ways that they're they think their children should perform in school there are certain sets of norms and

values and ideas about what should be happening and what people don't fit with those they have stories about how they don't fit and those become the problematic stories so we're listening

for something that wouldn't be predicted by those stories it doesn't necessarily have to be that those things aren't operating but that's something that just

doesn't wouldn't have been predicted by those problematic stories and what we're doing in narrative therapy is we're connecting that to other experiences

we're hearing the stories of those experiences and then we're creating other storylines so that eventually

people and families have multiple storylines what I really really like about this picture is that the problem

story doesn't disappear but it looks different as just one thin line of these multi-storied lives so that's what I'm thinking about in doing narrative

therapy I'm thinking about what stands outside of the problematic story and sometimes we have to go back to those political stories that you were talking about Virgil and take them apart a

little bit to be able to see beyond them but then we find something outside of that and we're interested in the telling

and retelling of those stories now when people come to therapy usually

that's not the idea that they have in mind usually that the idea that they have in mind is that they're going to

describe what's going on and they hope that the therapist agrees with them and will sort of set straight the rest of the family members or they're looking at

a therapist is sort of like a judge or an instructor who's going to eat tell them what to do or tell them who's right or you know give them ideas of sort of

going to get them back on track with what this political expectation or norm was and so we're not up to that in

narrative therapy we want to do something really different than that and what I'm thinking about particularly in

working with families is how can I engage different family members to listen to one person and to really understand

their story and then to have them contribute to it in some way and just have another family

member be able to talk and for people to hear their story so for me it's really useful in doing that to set up a structure and that's what I thought I

might focus on a little bit today and I'm gonna I think I'll tell you a story about how we how we first started thinking about this this happened a long

time ago it was one of our early year-long programs people were coming from different places to learn narrative therapy and one of the things that we

did was either gene or I would interview each person and make a videotape of it it was back in the days of the VHS

videotapes in the box I interviewed Jane and our idea was it would be good for people to experience thinking about the questions we asked to

have that experience and also they could have the videotapes so they could look at it so I interviewed Jane and people could talk about either

work or so it could be like a professional consultation or it could be like marva an interview about some aspect of their life they could be

interviewed about whatever they wanted and Jane decided that she wanted to talk about her marriage which was not going

very well and so I interviewed her about her marriage and I didn't think it was a fabulous interview I I thought it was an

okay interview not a really helpful interview but I don't think it did damage anyway she she took the video as you know we give we gave it to people at

the end and about two weeks later she had she was coming home from work and she opened the living room door looked

inside and her husband Martin was sitting on the sofa in front of the TV the coffee table was in front of him and

on the coffee table was the box that that VHS video had been in and she looked at him as she was standing on the

threshold and he looked at her and she was thinking oh should I come in she hadn't told them about this interview so she was really quite worried about how

he would respond and but she came in and he said I understand some things I've never understood before now she was really really shocked to

hear this because she was pretty sure that everything that she said on this video she had said to him in person and it and they've been in several

couples therapy she didn't think anything was new on this video at all so she was really surprised but in the days after that it seemed like he understood her in some ways he

didn't before and he got this idea that the two of them should come see me in therapy because this was the most helpful interview that he had experienced so she didn't know if that

was a good idea but they talked about it and finally he called me and he told me and I said well you know she's in this year-long program it's probably not the a great idea and he

said well after the program you know can we come and I said well I hope things are better by then but six months after the program if they're not better you can call and we'll see what we can do so

he called six months later and he said you know I've been holding on to this hope we really want to come and so they were living in a different city they we

decided ok we'll we'll put aside the weekend and we'll spend as much time with you as it seems useful Jean and I

together did this and so they came and within the first 45 minutes you could

just see Martin so disappointed this is a disappointment and I said how is this

going for you and he said it's just like all the other therapy sessions it's not helpful we persisted we spend a number

of hours over that weekend but we didn't it wasn't such a useful experience and they went home and we thought about it and they thought about it and then we

decided to have a to call them up and we called them and said can you what we particularly wanted to talk to Martin we said what was so different about that

watching that video than actually engaging in the therapy conversation and we talked about it for quite a while and we can we realize that what was

different was that Jane wasn't there but she you know he wasn't trying to change her mind and that there was all this

distance there was time and space and that he could just pay attention to what she said and nothing else and then in the therapy sessions both with us and

with other people instead it was the two of them like trying to promote what they had to say so we really began to think about that quite a lot and how could we

build in people really just paying attention to the other person so we started thinking about creating a

structure and we started thinking about witnessing how we could invite people to pay attention just to what the other

person is saying and then to reflect on that in some way so we began when we

first began doing this we are sometimes when we do this we just talk to one person while we're talking about the other person in the third person

instead of talking to both of them together and at a certain point we might we will turn and ask the other person or the other people if it's a not a couple

of it's a family we might talk to the teenage son and a certain point turn to the parents and ask a question but we're talking about the we're not turning

we're not talking with him about us when we talk about his parents they're in the third person so we're not directly addressing them we're just talking to him until we change and address them and

then we're talking about him in the third person now some people will just go right with that but with other people they still

want to talk with each other or they interrupt each other and so sometimes we say something like I would you be

willing to have the conversation in a different way because you've probably talked about this at home right how did it go so can

we try something different and then we might talk with them about if what you're doing when you're listening is you're just listening for how they're

wrong or what you would say different then you're not really hearing them you're gonna get just as much time as they're getting and we're going to

insist that they just listen to you too so would you be willing to do that so we set up this listening and then we're

asking we're asking them to join in in some way so we're talking to one person while the other people are listening and then we're asking maybe all the other

people maybe one person we're deciding to respond no we found that that people can listen in different way but

everything can be lost if we turn if I'm talking to the teenage son and then I turn to the father and I say what were

you thinking as your son was talking he might just tell me all the things his son he disagrees with I might have completely lost what I did so it's a

really crucial moment to think about what I might say so instead of what were you thinking while your son was talking I might want to say something like are

you surprised to hear how many how many considerations your son had in making a decision to do this what does that tell you about what's important to him so I'm

sort of offering a domain that I think is going to contribute to the son's story and then I'm going back to the son and say what was it like to hear your

father acknowledge all the thinking that you did and how that helped helps him see you do you want him to see you that way

now some so I can I can ask both parents or however many people are in the family or I can ask one and you know I can do a lot of different things but the main

thing that I'm trying to do is get people to listen and understand and contribute to each other's stories when

we do that it puts it's often makes it possible for people to join together in responding to a problem instead of

wanting to contradict each other and that's what we're hoping for sometimes it's really really difficult for people

to listen to each other and so we want to offer a position from which they can really be a good witness so the example that I that I often think

of is I was doing a consultation interview for one of my colleagues and she was working with this heterosexual

couple who were in the process of a really messy divorce and before the divorce the father had introduced the I

think about nine-year-old daughter to the woman he was involved with but he he said that they were working on this project together he didn't he was

dishonest about the nature of the relationship and they had gone out to several meals together and so when the daughter discovered that the father was

actually involved with this woman and that that had something to do with the divorce she decided that she did not want to have anything to do with the

father but the father believed that the ex-wife her ex-wife to be was poisoning the daughter and it was her fault not

you know poisoning the daughter against him saying bad things against him and that it was the ex-wives fault that the daughter wouldn't go

we spend the weekend with him for example so it was really difficult to get these two people into the room together and the my colleague had asked

me to see them because she was really worried about the daughter who was becoming more and more upset and

distressed and isolated so what I did was I asked them to what they wanted for their children they had three children the daughter was the one they were most

worried about and I asked them what they wanted for their children and they began talking about all sorts of things that they wanted for their children then I said so can we have this conversation in

the lens that you're looking through is the lens of co-parenting and wanting the same thing the best for your children in

holding on to that lens they could sit down and I could interview one with the other in the reflecting position now I'm not saying this was easy I would often have to say wait a minute

remember what you're looking through is wanting the best for your child but that was like creating a position another sometimes we can say create a position

of friendship can you listen the way you would listen to a friend how would you listen to a friend what would you be thinking about what would you be holding on to and have people

listen the way they would listen as a friend sometimes that the most extreme

it's ever gotten for me was when I was seeing a heterosexual couple where there had been the man had been violent towards the woman she wasn't sure if she

wanted the relationship he begged her to come to therapy and the first thing she said was I don't know if I want to be here I don't know if I want to be in the

marriage and I suggested after a while I mean we talked for a while and eventually I suggested that I interview

him without her there at all that we videotape it and that she and I watch it later and that I asked her some questions and

that what she's watching for is whether it's going to be safe to come back into the relationship so that was like that's a really big position but it enabled her

to actually listen to some things he said when and put her in a position of deciding whether she even wanted him to

witness her experience but Rico all of these have to do I think that's all I have here yeah all of these have to do

with different positions people could be in all and what it's all about is people hearing understanding each other's

stories and being able to add to them reflect on them and that one of the ways that we're being influential is asking questions that help them do that and

break the pattern that so many families have when they're coming to therapy where one person's being blamed or there's a lot of conflict or a lot of

just a lot of misunderstanding about each other's experience so that was that's the main thing I mean I that's the main idea that I was thinking would

be useful to present and talking about narrative work with families so I'm wondering at this point yeah Thank You

Jill we shot through about three my questions I brought so that is fantastic and I really appreciate you sharing actual case examples I think that's

really helpful to hear the stories attached to the structure another thing that well so I had a lot of thoughts from what you said but something that kind of sat out for me is

one of the things I like about narrative is we're not privileged in the expert right where we're putting the client in the author seat of their own story and I think especially when I was newer I

interpreted that to mean were somewhat passive and we're not we're not passive in the therapy process and so the idea of you kind of you called it positioning

but invite the the people that you're working with to take a position in the room I really like that and it just made me think about it in a different way than I've

considered it before yeah so I didn't that was a comment I didn't have a question off of that but there are some pretty good questions and if you if you don't have a comment for

that piece the some folks have asked let's see the last one by Carlos sorry I'm sorry if I messed your name up Carlos

he asked what can we do if the people only have negative stories about themselves for example someone with suicidal thoughts well it's a big

question that I'm not sure that I could answer in an hour but what one of the

things that I can say is I I believe there's always other possibilities and I

think believing that makes a difference one of the things that one of the assets of ideas that that I really love about

narrative is called the absent but implicit hmm this is the idea that in order to think of something as being

problematic you have to compare it with something that's not that you've experienced that's not problematic and

that you treasure in some way and so if somebody is thinking about suicide I

might I'd be really interested in what you were holding on to before you began having these thoughts or even what

you've been holding on to this prevented you from taking your life up to now and that might be some some very small things but they could become really

useful in being told and retold and acknowledged and honored so but and I think we have to start from the point of

believing that that's not all there is it could be a big part of what there is but there's always other things that we want to be thinking about

yeah yeah thank you and Jill do you have any it may be examples of how to help someone or how maybe even a newer

narrative therapist might get to that point of finding some of those other stories oh I think that has to do with

learning to listen i think it's i think i almost never ask a question to get to

other stories sometimes it's really important to take apart the problem to find out what it is that people are comparing themselves to how the problem

takes over their lives you know what what some of those discourses are and then what the effects of those are and whether they want that or not does that fit with what you want for your life

this we're trying to create a gap between the problem story to be able to see beyond it so sometimes we have to talk about the problem story first to be

able to see that gap and go beyond it but at other times we can just listen you know when people say things like most of the time I'm really depressed

and then when they say most of the time that tells me they're sometimes they're live so I can be curious about those times that they're not or you know I

mean it's just it's so much in language and that I think the difficulty is slowing it down enough to be able to

hear it and so what I did in practicing was taping things and they don't have to be therapy conversations they could be

you know a television program and really thinking between times what am i hearing that's that's outside of what somebody's talking about to begin to hear those

small moments that don't fit with the overall story it is really about hearing things that that are a little bit

inconsistent with the claim somebody's making and being - very tentatively ask some questions and see where that takes us huh now what

an interesting idea to tape things and practice listening I love that I think I'm too much is going on when we're in

the room with a family like you know it's we have to have our ears tuned because at that we're trying to get a connection we're trying to understand

like there's just too much going on if you're not used to paying attention to those little moments yeah yeah it's a great point Virgil I saw you trying to

ask a dog I was just wondering you know one of the things that we've done to feathers is we have a program it's a like a locally culturally based program

that that we borrow from our local traditions and one of the themes has come out of like decolonizing deconstructing mental health as is is

the power of language in looking at you know how we see depression in our own language what is that how did how do we

define that and so I know that that narrative therapy is very they prioritize the discourse and language

and I just wanted you know for example than calling somebody that we work with the client and in how we write progress notes and so I just wanted you to you know I think because it seems like

language is a sort of core pillar of narrative therapy so I wanted you to talk a little bit more about that okay

yeah so I don't call people clients um I usually sometimes it gets confusing in writing but in life doesn't they all so

they're just people who are coming in talking with me also naming problems not in expert medical language but in ways

that are experienced near for them there's a very beautiful description Michael White gives I think I've seen a video of him doing this but I think he's

also written about it where he's seeing a family and the Sun in the families that says he has

ADHD and Michael says Oh what colors and then he begins talking about working with somebody else who made a painting of their ADHD but he that Michael

doesn't know if his is the same one or not and they had this whole they go on and on and he eventually asks this young person if he could wake up in

the middle of the night when he's having that like a dream about it and be able to capture what colors it is so that they can know it's all about people's experience is different and there's so

many different ways for represented and if we use like objectifying medical expert language

it usually narrows people's experience and we may miss a lot so I think that's

I think what you've said about using cultural language is also interesting

because I don't want to assume that the language that I would use or if I'm hearing about a color that he would

paint it that that I have been that I know the meaning of that color a lot is about not assuming that we know about other people's experience and that's so

interesting getting to unpack and find out what people are meaning and a quick or maybe quick follow-up to that is you

know there's the research out there about like therapist factors like that around outcomes and that you know it often the characteristics of the actual

psychotherapists or you know determines or not determines but you know increases successful outcomes let's say and so my in one of the things that I took in from narrative is that we narrative

therapists very much come at it from a very sort of open curious you know as I think David abstinence book one of his

books is wonderfulness and so I just like for those new therapists and that are just you know getting into the field

like what is it about you think the the narrative therapy and and the the the qualities and the characteristics of the person doing narrative therapy and how

important that is and in you know just your thoughts around that well I think

that the idea of collaboration rather than expert knowledge I think that that has to say something about where we stand as people and I think that for

many people that's very encouraging I think there are some people who want an expert to tell them what to do but I think for most people they want things

to change and get better and there's an encouraging experience and being collaborated with about that and having their experience recognized and honored

I think curiosity is really really important because that leads to being able to expand things you know stories

unfold it's not like we have this course then we're going to it we're interested curious and things unfold and we can't even predict where they would go I think

there's something exciting about that um also I think because we're not so into rules we're thinking about the effects

of things rather than the rules that we might be a bit freer to join people instead of like thinking so much about

boundaries and being professional so I think that that the willingness to be in that position says something about the

identity of narrative therapist as well thank you that's you know I think part of my question was coming from I was in

a webinar yesterday using positive youth development and just importance of being affirming and positive strength-based with youth and I think

you know part of that also is that curiosity piece and just not coming in with an agenda and trying to find the strengths of the youth you know because we're we do a lot of work in the schools

and so a little bit unpacking discipline and consequences and in labeling kids as

you know dropouts yeah so I see we have some questions but I wanted to throw it over to to Jennifer I'm gonna put her on

the spot got any more questions to keep this conversation going well thank you for a dull um man we're about six minutes out and I have unless I'm some

questions for you Jill but I thought maybe kind of a fun way to move towards concluding could be if you had any

advice for new narrative therapists or new therapists that are learning the craft of narrative therapy and maybe

even also newer directors who are trying to implement the model the therapists part is easier but I'll try then come

back to the directors I think the single most important thing that you can do gosh that was a little more exploiting

limiting than I meant it a I think something you can do that useful is have somebody else that you're doing it with I think that narrative therapy is

different than a lot of traditional therapies and so it's likely that if you're in a context where people are doing other things it's really hard to keep the ideas in the world view and the

mindset so I think it's really really really helpful to have somebody else who's also learning it that you can talk with about what you're doing and share questions and that maybe could be

available to be a witness to some of what you're doing so to me I don't think I could have done it by myself and and a lot of people in our programs find that

just so helpful to be in touch with each other to keep keep alive the new ideas that they're learning instead of getting

pulled back into old ones to do that with an agency I mean in some ways it seems like you can you know enlist the

agency I don't know I was I've consulted to a several agencies and a couple of schools and some sometimes the schools

would like take one particular idea and have it sort of go through the

classrooms so for example an idea at one of the schools where I worked was that that kids could catch each other on

doing something new and there would be like meetings about it and it would be posted on the on the bulletin board that somebody spied their friend doing X Y Z

which didn't fit with the problem these are schools for kids who've been kicked out of public school for problems so that so it was you know they knew what each other were supposed to be working on and they would keep they would be

spying for when the kids did something outside of that so and there would be lists there would be like you know sort of contests almost in the school that

was an interesting thing and in in yeah so I I also did a lot of consulting in particularly in agencies for people with

HIV there was a lot of using at staff meetings narrative questions hmm so thinking beforehand that some big

narrative questions hmm there would also be like a challenge at times if we're talking about a problem and somebody's like describing the problem could

somebody else tell another story that fits the description but has different meaning just for the possibility of the second story and it just sort of could

loosen things up a little bit Wow yeah that's really interesting and so I'm imagining that might apply to in the way that you're doing

clinical supervision do you use do you kind of have a practice where you prepare questions ahead of time or you have a specific format for our

individual or group it's different for groups I might have like some questions beforehand that are big questions that people can that different people can

respond to sort of in rounds but then I'll pull out specific things that they're saying to build on for four individual supervision what I really

like to do is maybe and see a transcript or see some work in advance and and be really really thinking about two different kinds of questions one is like

new developments of the person so that we can I can ask questions to help build their story of the narrative therapist that they're becoming and the other is moments where they could have used

another practice so to be able to say what would have happened if you were thinking about remembering here so just to expand the possibilities so trying to

do both of those well I feel like my last five minutes was incredibly helpful to me and I'm probably gonna move

forward differently now thank you so much for that so we have one minute left

and maybe I'll toss it back to Virgil just I wanted to thank you and I wanted to also give you you know provide an

opportunity for any last words and including maybe you know your your Training Institute out in Evanston and

and also where we can find you and just anything any last words sure well I enjoyed having this conversation and I

you know it was sort of a funny thing because I'm seeing two of you but I assume that there's also other people so hello to the other people I'm at Evanston Family Therapy Center where we

were always behind on our website which is narrative therapy Chicago dot-com and I'm just really happy to be able to connect with people I think that in this

time of locked down and self-isolation it's really great that you're doing I don't know if you do this regularly or it's because of this but I'm fine I I've

been in a number of different conversations that are because of this situation and I think it's really I really appreciate being able to connect

with other people thinking about similar things so thank you for inviting me and I enjoyed talking with you

and you know thank you for your time in and your great wisdom and we will be there's we've posted a flyer about our

narrative training series so so look out for it on our already out there it's on Facebook so we'll have another one I think it's next week or the next week

Ronnie Schwartz and we have two more and so look out for it and hopefully you all took something from today's talk because

I know we did and have a good rest of the day I know it's going to be really sunny here in Humboldt County and so it's really out here in my air

conditionings not working so I'm sort of sheet with sweat that's one of the

benefits of living on the ocean right on the ocean that's great thank you so much Jill this was an absolute pleasure thank you