In this Collab on using re-membering practices in writing, we explored ideas to help connect you with your own team that supports you to be the person/therapist/teacher you most want to be. We worked with some writing prompts to put this into practice and see who we long to talk with and what you hope they might ask us about.
Irene (trauma survivor) and Christoffer Haugaard (psychologist) developed a practice of witnessing in relation to Irene’s alter ego in fictionalized life stories. This developed out of necessity in order to address an intensely traumatic life history and powerful identity conclusions that were out of reach for regular conversation. The approach that we developed used two essential survival strategies from Irene’s childhood: Her invention of an alter ego and her imagination of having an audience to the injustices in her life. Over time, these practices became the central structure of our collaboration. In this collab salon, Christoffer will describe this practice with examples and present Irene’s account of the effects.
We live through the narrative metaphor, yet many of us as Narrative Therapists find ourselves lost when invitations to metaphor beckon at the edges of our therapeutic conversations. From the forgiving editorial space of Narrative letters, this presentation invites participants to identify, expand, and inhabit metaphor to externalize problems, develop unique outcomes, and recruit an appreciative audience. Akansha and Randy will share some of the metaphor-centered letters they’ve written and invite participants to begin exploring metaphor in text while collaboratively resisting the gravitational pull of Cleverness that sometimes keeps pen from paper.
What does it mean to “author your life?” Like all things, the phrase has no fixed meaning. It is just a collection of words. For us, the phrase takes us to the politics of meaning-making and calls into question who has the rights to claim authorship of anything. We stand in support of the idea that you have special authorship rights when it comes to whatever it is that matters to you, whether that is your personal identity, events that have taken place in your life, or a project that you are taking up and care about. Writing what you think and feel, and why, in your unique way is precious and no one has any right to demean or diminish it. No one else has a right to evaluate what you think or how you express it. They can share the effects that it has on them or take a different position, but they don’t get to cast judgement on the legitimacy of your position or the quality of your expression.