Brief and Narrative Therapy - Journal 2

          In my last post in this series I discussed some thoughts on the "Brief Therapy" concepts found in this book.  I'd like to just make one more comment before moving on.  This book reminds me of a phrase that was a tagline for the television show "Nip / Tuck" that used to air on FX.  The show was a drama about plastic surgeons and one of its taglines was "Tell me what you don't like about yourself."  That phrase seems to have a lot of ressonance with the idea of outcome-oriented therapy.  "Tell me what you don't like about yourself" so we can fix it and move on.  I don't totally agree with the concept, but nonetheless its something that came to mind.
          More recently I've started reading "Narrative Therapy:  The Social Construction of Preferred Realities." As far as i've gotten in the book (about 30% or so) the idea of narrative therapy is to shift focus from a systems orientation to a "story" orientation.  Now, I really like this idea because in a therapeutic setting many things are relative.  We craft stories of lives to make sense of our worlds.  Interestingly enough, modern neurology tells us that memories are not constant.  They cange within our brains, the "chemical" memories change every time we recreate and retell them.  I am very fond of the idea of deconstructing stories for the purposes of therapy.  That is, when I ask someone to tell me about a specific story, I'm not really that interested in the facts of the story, but much more so in what the process of storytelling reveals perceptually about that particular individual.  How do the relate to the charcters and feelings within the / their story?
          However, I can't help but be left with a feeling of lacking.  Like there is just somehting missing about this therapeutic theory.  It seems very well oriented in its theoretical approach but for me, I feel like there should be more to it.  I am absolutely all for deconstructing meanings and reading between the lines in a story; but so far I haven't found anything in the book that "sticks" for me or really strikes a chord and ressonates.
          I recall having conducted a series of interviews in 2011 where I asked a series of university professors what the goal of therapy was.  The most common answer was to end client suffering.  From reading this book the authors prescribe that "the goal of therapy is to participate in a conversation that continually loosens and opens up, rather than constricts and closes down" (44).  I am not so certain about either of these statements.  Rather, I think that the goal of therapy (generally and vaguely) is much closer to creating and stirring something provacative and captivating within an individual.  Perhaps this is something good, and perhaps something not so good, either way; there is a spurring of activism out of deconstruction so deep that everything becomes rattled and all that is left to death with is what as always laid at the core.




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