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THERAPEUTIC CEREMONIES, LETTERS, AND LEAGUES

Creating a richer description of the alternative story—as an aid in staying connected to this preferred narrative—calls for a number of supplementary practices employed by narrative therapists. The goal is for life to become more multistoried.

Definitional Ceremonies

Adapting some of the definitional ceremony metaphors of anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff (1986) for therapeutic purposes, narrative therapists may provide clients with the opportunity to tell (or perform) the stories of their lives before an audience of outside witnesses, drawing attention to how they attribute meaning to their experiences. Then they may call upon observers from the nonjudgmental audience (reflecting team members if the observers are professionals, outside witness group members if they are not) to respond to the stories they have just heard, in a sense retelling by them of the tellings they have just heard. Through this telling and retelling process, many of the plots and alternative stories of people’s lives are thickened and linked to their ongoing values and commitments. Options for future action are sometimes introduced, as clients hear what about their lives or identities captured the attention and imagination of the audience members. The definitional ceremony (White, 1997) helps authenticate clients’ preferred claims about themselves.

Definitional ceremonies, then, are multilayered and usually consist of tellings (by the person who is at the center of the ceremony), retellings of tellings (by the reflecting team or outside witnesses who have observed the tellings), retellings of retellings (again by the person who responds to what was told by the outsiders), retellings of retellings of retellings (by the first set of outside witnesses or a secondary group of witnesses), and so forth. The point is to thicken alternative stories, authenticating the persons’ preferred claims about their lives, and to promote the idea of options for actions that the person at the center of the ceremony might not otherwise have considered.

Outside witness groups of at least two members may be friends, family members, other therapists, or community members—anyone able to observe the re-authoring conversation between therapist and clients and later offer relevant retelling experiences. Morgan (2000) offers the example of a child, subjected to teasing and harassment, who is willing to meet with a team of children who have experienced similar oppression and may be able to offer their experiences in coping with the tormenting. Observing the narrative interview with the child and family from behind a one-way mirror—so as not to intrude on what is taking place—the outside witness group later changes places with the family, which then observes as each outside witness retells what he or she has just observed and experienced.

In some cases, witnesses may comment on how the conversation between therapist and family affected their thinking about their own lives. Called “decentered sharing”(White, 1997), this technique acknowledges the link between all participants, but does so in a way that respects the client family as the center of the retelling. The focus of discussion for the witnesses—typically in the form of questioning each other about what they heard—is likely to concern the alternative stories and unique outcomes they identified in observing the therapist-family interaction, and to indicate how what they witnessed resonated with their own life experiences. The aim of such dialogue between witnesses is to build upon each other’s stories and to further enrich

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In other cases, Epston sends letters of invitation to family members reluctant to attend sessions; most are surprised and pleased about his caring about them and their place in the family, and they may begin to attend. Redundancy letters note that certain members have taken on duplicate roles in the family (being a father to one’s brother) and wish to change them. In a related discharge letter, written with a client, another family member is thanked but informed that he or she is no longer needed to play that role. Letters of prediction, written at the conclusion of therapy, generally predict continued success in the search for new possibilities.

For Epston letters are not separate interventions, but rather organically intertwined with what took place in the consultation room. Whatever their form, letters render lived experiences into narrative form. Consistent with his or her egalitarian relationship with clients, the narrative therapist’s thoughts are not kept secret but are out in the open, to be confirmed, amended, or challenged by the family. Taken together, the letters create an ongoing picture of therapist-client collaboration as they seek to co-construct alternative life stories.

Forming Supportive Leagues

Separating one’s identity from an external problem is part of the underlying philosophy of narrative therapy. Typical of this outlook is the development of Anti- Anorexia/Anti-Bulimia Leagues, begun by Epston in New Zealand, that now exist in the United States, Canada, and Australia. They are based on the idea that people who have experienced certain problems, such as anorexia and bulimia, have the experience and knowledge about the problem to help one another by sharing experiences with others—and by building upon each other’s skills, to defeat the problem. Offering mutual support, participants can team up and begin changing their relationship to the problem, perhaps re-authoring their lives to cope successfully with food and body image. Members get to speak of personally painful issues they might otherwise keep to themselves, and then get to take some social action to bring about greater public awareness. Audiotapes, artwork, letters to one another, periodic meetings, handbooks, public speeches, a newsletter, monitoring of magazine and newspaper ads— all represent politically inspired efforts to develop a supportive subculture, a logical extension of narrative therapy’s goals of achieving liberation from destructive cultural narratives. The therapist plays an influential but decentered role here; in this community effort all voices are privileged, not just those of professional therapists.

One particularly noteworthy effort is the Anti-Anorexia/Anti-Bulimia League of Vancouver, Canada, organized by Lorraine Grieves and Stephan Madigan (Madigan & Epston, 1995; Madigan & Goldner, 1998) to help people with these problems come together and support one another, in the process changing from patient to consultant and community activist. Consistent with narrative theory and practice, this grassroots, politically active group has both an educational purpose—informing the public about issues surrounding societal pressures and body image—and a lobbying purpose— changing the media’s portrayal of the emaciated female as the ideal that women, especially adolescent girls, should strive to emulate. As Madigan (1994) puts it, the league represents the joining together of citizens to fight the institutional conditions that keep people with anorexia and bulimia trapped inside their problem stories, seeking help from health care systems that keep them in the patient role. The effort is a reminder of the narrative therapist’s insistence that the problem (not the person) is the problem, and that the problem is rooted in the dominant discourses of a society.