Narratives, Speech & Therapy

Freud, the father of the therapeutic industry, realized that when people were listened to at length they tended to feel better. He sometimes called his analytic process “the talking cure.” And while I and many other therapists also employ body-based methods of healing, or suggest shifts to habit, the realm of therapy remains primarily a realm of words. We communicate our understanding of what’s present here and now in our lives, or recollect the past, and in an effective therapeutic relationship, there is something useful that happens when two minds come together to hold what arises.

Many techniques have attempted to look at the words themselves and suggest interventions to try to change patterns of speech and thought. Gratitude practices are a well known form of this sort of intervention—positive psychology would suggest that there is something useful about optimism, and suggest practices that put a client in states of positive recall. Clients might be encouraged to make it a daily habit to count their blessings, with a belief that over time this sort of looking at the bright side becomes an instinctive habit.

Narrative therapy is a whole branch of therapy that explicitly encourages “re-authoring your life” to create versions of memories that feel better than the stories clients come into therapy with. This might involve something akin to uncovering core negative beliefs, and shifting the story into something more empowering. In my own time working with narrative therapists (I like them a lot, I’ve hired on three) I’ve been able to shift from thinking about my childhood as a cauldron of misery into exactly the kind of testing ground that prepared me to be of use to the world.

I used to date a film actor who’d had an exceptionally difficult childhood, including witnessing his own father’s murder, and all sorts of strange social and familial dynamics in the aftermath of that tragedy. He never capitalized on this tale of woe, even though he was well aware that it was the sort of story that interviewers love, and it would almost certainly garner public sympathy. He didn’t like staying stuck in a victim story, or the kind of one-upsmanship that can happen when people get together to compare their woes. He liked, instead, to think that he was, like a superhero, forged by fire, and it prepared him for all the trials of entertainment pressure and public scrutiny—catapulted by pain into purpose. That’s the sort of powerful narrative that can give one a feeling of reassurance and strength rather than keeping one in an endless loop of negative recollections and regrets.

There’s another flavor of the narrative game that I enjoy playing around with, but don’t have a perfect sense of utility around—perhaps you’ll know the sorts of thing that I mean. It comes up a lot in communities that like spirituality, coaching, and healing practices—things like Neurolinguistic Programming, any form of self-hypnosis or quantum mysticism. People who believe there is a sort of magical manifestation quality to language, that we create reality with our words in a powerful and potent way. I think about “In the beginning was the word,” the opening line of the new testament. Of course, in Attic Greek, word is logos which is more than just speech, it’s an organizing principle, the root word of ‘logic,’ and also conveys a meaning of embodiment, of word-made-flesh. A common interpretation of this part of the Bible is that Christ himself is embedded in “the word.” That some kind of organizing principle was created, right from the start, and that an embodied form of God was a component of that creation from the start, the same way all the potentiality of a plant is contained within a seed.

Occult traditions operate on similar principles with words. The whole point of spell-casting is that words themselves have magic potencies, that simply saying something, or thinking something, is an act of implicit creation. Some conscious language practitioners take this quite far, and avoid speaking aloud words like cancer, or anything else that might imply ill health or rot or entropy of any kind. A more accessible representation of this principle might come up in something like the avoidance of gossip—in true recognition that talking badly about ones friends or associates behind their backs might damage reputations, thoughtful people avoid the verbal habits that contribute to these schisms and ill feelings.

Recently I attended a conscious language workshop that I liked quite a lot. In it, participants were encouraged to make slight updates to their habits of speech, considering things like how it shifts us to use the word “choose” instead of “want.” Like, instead of “I want to get a new job,” “I choose to get a new job” or even “I choose to take actions in service of finding a new job.” When I try this on I experience a felt-sense of increased power. I’m not in a state of longing, I’m in a state of choiceful pursuit of my goals. I liked this workshop enough that I looked up the creator of the practice, and watched a few of his videos, some of which were quite long-form workshops. In viewing these, I encountered my own resistance, which I like to trust. Among my own principles for seeking teachers is an energetic discernment. I ask myself—would I like to be more like this person? Does this person seem content? Does this person seem to be connected to purpose, and of use in the world? If all of those criteria are met, then I am quite interested in learning the methods that got them to that place. When I was with the energetics of this community, especially as I witnessed group calls between people who’d spent extended time in these trainings, instead what I was present to was something that seemed like fear. The avoidance of “the C word” (cancer) and strong, forceful, endorsements of shared mantras, seemed to me more like habits of paranoia than habits of optimism. To assiduously avoid something seems to me to just place it in the realm that Jung would call “the Shadow.” When someone tells you not to think of an elephant, generally it’s all you can think about.

I’ve preferred practices that are more like linguistic catharsis. Carolyn Elliott has an excellent ritual of writing out fear inventories, confessing them aloud to a trusted friend, and then burning them. I’m quite sure she adopted this from Step 4 of the 12 Step Programs, but the innovation of including ritualistic burning really adds a quite useful element to the practice—embodying it and ritualizing it in a way that seems to induce quite a lot of rapid change. In phases of my life when I did daily fear inventories I was freed from quite a lot of fears, many of which never returned.

But that’s not an avoidance practice—it’s an embracing practice. It’s turning into the couldron of pain and sorrow, acknowledging it, the worst of it, deeper and deeper, and then not staying alone with it—saying it aloud, letting it be witnessed. Only then does it burn up and go away.

That’s how I think it works, really. That’s what I think therapy is. We don’t re-author our lives by avoiding what pains us, we re-author our lives by first acknowledging the worst of our habituated stories, our persistent fears, and then letting something alchemical happen that transforms that energy into something of use. Like pain into purpose—forged by fire—into your own superhero story.