REWRITING OUR STORIES

" I came to the middle point of my life, and I realized I didn't know what myth I was living." Carl Jung

As Frank Baird points out, we're all born into a particular culture and point in history, and each of us makes sense of our lives by situating them in stories. We're introduced to our cultural story almost immediately. We're provided with information from our families, our teachers, and most of all - at least in the case of Americans - we're taught our culture's dominant story by the media. This all pervasive story, maintains Baird, comes to dictate what we pay attention to, what we value, how we perceive ourselves and others, and even shapes our experiences.

By the time American children graduate from high school, it's been estimated that they've been exposed to a minimum of 360,000 advertisements, and on average, by the time we die, we Americans will have spent an entire year of our lives watching television commercials.

George Gerbner cautions that the people who tell the stories are the ones who control how children grow up. Not so long ago considering the vast history of human kind, we received most of our cultural story from wise elders. Do we truly fathom the significance that today profit driven television has become our primary storyteller? When you consider what the message of this incredibly powerful story teller has been, it's not too difficult to appreciate how much soul our cultural story has lost, and how much of our individual spirit has been silenced by a story heard hundreds of times every day in America. What's the title of this story? It's "buy me."

Recently, I've begun to wonder how much of my own story has been lost to my culture's dominant story. I think about so many aspects of my life where my own wisdom has been sacrificed to the story that I was born into, one in which I've had no authorship rights to.

And then there's the story I was introduced to as a psychotherapist. A story that stressed that the 'patient' is sick or broken and needs to be fixed, rather than that the person is in process and responding to the world in which he or she lives. It's also been a story that identified the therapist as the 'expert,' instead of a companion and ally - one with wounds of his or her own.

James Hillman in, "We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy," bravely (and outrageously according to many psychotherapists) declared that most psychotherapy models do something vicious to the people whom they are meant to serve. They internalize emotion. How? By so often turning the rage and pain brought on by the injustice, chaos, poverty, pollution, agony, aggression, and so much more which surrounds us, into personal demons and inadequacies. For instance, offers Hillman imagine that a client has arrived at his therapist's office shaken and outraged. While driving his compact car, he's just come very close to being run off the road by a speeding truck.

The outcome of this scenario, asserts Hillman, all too often leads to an exploration of how the truck reminds the client of being pushed around by his father, or that he's always felt vulnerable and fragile, or maybe is furious that he isn't as powerful as 'the other guy.' The therapist ends up converting the client's fear (in response to an external experience) into anxiety - an inner state. He or she also transmutes the present into the past (the experience is really about unresolved issues from childhood); and transforms the client's outrage about (the chaos, the craziness, the dangers, etc of the client's outer world) into rage and hostility. Thus, the client's pain regarding the external world has once again been turned inward. It's become pathology.

Hillman explains, "Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world. Therapy introverts the emotions, calls fear 'anxiety.' You take it back, and you work on it inside yourself. You don't work psychologically on what that outrage is telling you about potholes, about trucks, about Florida strawberries in Vermont in March, about burning up oil, about energy policies, nuclear waste, that homeless woman over there with the sores on her feet - the whole thing."

After closing my psychotherapy practice, and having an opportunity to step back and think about the process of psychotherapy in general, I've come to appreciate Hillman's wisdom. He maintains that a significant amount of what therapists have been trained to view as individual pathology, is often an indication of the sickness that exists within our culture. In doing this, says Hillman, "We continue to locate all symptoms universally within the patient rather than also within the soul of the world. Maybe the system has to be brought into line with the symptoms so that the system no longer functions as a repression of the soul, forcing the soul to rebel in order to be noticed."

Narrative therapists while they may not all agree with Hillman, may very well call Hillman's perspective an 'alternative' story. When we begin to explore and acknowledge our preferred or alternative stories, we're embracing a creative process in which we possess authorship rights to. The alternative story is based upon our own experiences and values, rather than those which we've been expected to accept without question. We're no longer simply 'readers' of our story, but writers too. We start to deconstruct the data we've been instructed to notice and buy into, and begin to create new and more personally relevant meanings.

According to Baird, when we accept the challenge to dismantle our dominant stories, we're then free to explore what story we'd prefer to live.

Writing this book has initiated this process for me. I'm slowly examining the various components of my life, and reviewing my stories - both those pre-written and those I've experienced. In doing so, I'm composing a new story, one that's uniquely my own, and yet intimately connected to the stories of all of my brothers and sisters.

Chapter One - The Quake

Chapter Two - The Haunted

Chapter Three - Myth and Meaning

Chapter Four - Embracing the Spirit

Chapter Eight - The Journey

next: MYTH AND MEANING Chapter Three