Narrative Practice Key Learnings: Re-membering Conversations

In continuing with Michael White’s concepts within Narrative Practice, “re-membering conversations” is a process that I found particularly interesting.  The first thought that came to mind was psychology constructs such as “cognitive restructuring.”  To first understand the cognitive restructuring construct, Carlson & Heath (2010) depict it as a process where an individual reappraises a stressor as less threatening.  The construct suggests that as the stressor becomes less threatening, the stress should theoretically be reduced.  Alternatively known as “cognitive reappraisal,” the reframing process is an internal process of self-threat appraisal.  The relationship between the stimulus and the response is changed.  Reflecting on White’s (2007) attention to the externalization of client concerns elicits the question of how to restructure one’s relation to the concern in a way that allows the externalization process to have an opportunity to have more detail and richness in alternative plot development.  For myself, I see “re-membering conversations” as a narrative form of cognitive restructuring.

White (2007) describes re-membering as a revision of the memberships that create their association of life.  Various memberships and associations that the individual has collected throughout their life can be upgraded or downgraded in their significance, and the individual can revoke or grant authority to the voices of others that have impacted the individual’s identity.  Thus, part of the focus of re-membering conversations is a rearrangement of historical relationships with others and their self-identity and potential future.

When White speaks about the revision of memberships, there appear to be some parallels to an existential perspective.  Viktor Frankl’s technique in logotherapy of helping clients find meaning (as cited in Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2015).  David Howe (2009) looks at existentialism as freedom in which we can become whoever we choose to be, albeit with personal responsibility for who we become.  If there is no essentialist core to who we are, we are free to grow and evolve into who we want to be from an existential lens.  White’s use of “re-membering conversations” seems to challenge an essentialist core (dominant narrative or discourse) by recreating meaning around events that reframes our understanding of ourselves. An example of this is White’s (2007) use of questions that ask the client to explore the positive contributions they had on the lives of significant others.  It also provides opportunities to draw on the strengths of the individual – what pieces of resiliency or the client’s abilities or circumstances led to enhancement in the lives of others.  These stories of resiliency create the counter-narrative – fitting well with a developing narrative of the “expert self” that is a component of the strengths perspective (Howe, 2009).

White (2007) recognizes that relationships are not a 1-way phenomenon.  Negative conclusions of the self that stem from the dominant narrative can be replaced by new narratives that have more positive conclusions of the self.  One of the articles I could not obtain a copy of, but which interested me in this book was “Saying Hullo Again: The incorporation of the lost relationship in the resolution of grief.”  What I got from its mention in Maps of Narrative Practice was that the practitioner asks questions that reopen opportunities for people to reclaim their relationship with significant others.  The practitioner then explores with the client the ways these understandings may be brought up once again and circulated in their social circles.  This can include an audience that partakes in developing an understanding of the client’s identity.

Another branch grief resolution includes exploring the real and potential impacts these preferred understandings of self (identity) may have on the individual’s daily life.  Further exploration can then emerge on how the individual can move forward in life with the newly emerging identity. White (2007) does make mention of including the impacts the griever had on shaping the identity of the deceased – forming a restructured relationship that highlights the reciprocity between the living and the deceased.

One of the ideas I found significant was the idea of life’s story with prior selves.  This provides a framework in which we have an option to revise our identity.  This may be particularly useful in events that significantly alter the individual and their understandings of self and relationship to the world.  It may be useful to examine what the literature says about re-membering conversations and their role in identity reconstruction after trauma.  While White (2007) discusses the details of one’s life story and selves, he makes mention of using questions to draw out the shared values, symbols, values, and historical events.  The drawing out of these components draws me back to Viktor Frankl’s (1984) “Man’s Search for Meaning,” particularly part two’s “the meaning of suffering.”  In this section, Frankl describes a process in which the client can “transform a personal tragedy into triumph, to turn one’s predicament into human achievement” (p. 135).  The example Frankl uses in this section revolves around a man who has lost his wife.  Similar to how White focuses on what the client has contributed to the lives of others, Frankl turns the conversation with the widowed husband around from his grieving to the man sparing his wife the suffering of her becoming a widow and being alone without a husband.  The key difference between the example provided by Frankl and White is that White interviews the client to have them generate the narrative, where Frankl appears to offer the narrative as a suggestion without a full understanding of the client’s narrative and personally constructed meaning system.

As White explores how to take a client through a re-membering conversation, the following aspects stood out for me:

• Allow clients to challenge what they can identify as isolating.
• Understand that there can be more than one identity (perhaps this is a recognition of intersectionality), and that there can be multiple ways for identity to form
• Work with the client in the interview to explore how contributions of others make in our lives influence our understandings of self.
• Our lives are interconnected with the lives of others, and those interconnections provide shared life themes.  These shared themes can provide an opportunity to reflect on identity aspects such as hopes, dreams, values.  What are the empowering or strengths-based conclusions one can make of themselves and their relations to others from the interconnected identity aspects?
•  Clients can open up a revision of membership to give more authority to some pieces of their identity over others.  Other components of identity can be revoked, disqualified, or given less power.
• Go into the description of preferred  versions of one’s identity along with the knowledge(s) of life and skills that have been developed in the significant relationships of people’s lives
• Allow personal agency to be rebuilt by working with clients to develop an understanding around the bi-directional relationships clients have with others (what contributions did the client receive from the other individual, and what contributions did the client provide to that individual.
• Seek to include an accounting of the client’s significant others and figures as they go through the recollection of their historical identity

In the examples White provided, my general understanding of the process is as follows:

• Work with the client to allow for exploration of what a significant figure has contributed to the life of the client
• Allow the client to witness their own identity through the eyes of the significant figure.  Have the client describe how the connection the significant other had with the client shaped their sense of who they are, and their perceptions of what life is about.
• Have the client recount what they contributed to the life of the significant other.
• Have the client explore how the connection between themselves and the significant figure.  Have the client describe how they could have shaped the significant figure’s sense of who they are/were and what their perspective on life may have looked like as a result of the client-significant other relationship.
• Explore with the client the significance of the bi-directional contribution’s (especially those the client gave to the significant other), and how this impacted the significant other’s identity
• Explore how the impacts the client had on the identity of the significant other impacts their own self-identity.  Note: This may also be an excellent point to consider exploring the resiliency of the client.

References

Carlson, N. R., & Heth, C. D. (2010). Psychology: the science of behaviour (4th Canadian ed.). Toronto, Ont.: Pearson Canada.

Frankl, Vikor E. (1984) Man’s search for meaning: Revised and updated. New York, NY: Washington Square Press

Sommers-Flanagan, J., & Sommers-Flanagan, R. (2015). Counseling and psychotherapy theories in context and practice: Skills, strategies, and techniques (2nd ed.) Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons

White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. New York, NY; W. W. Norton & Company