Narrative therapy blogpost #1: Externalisation

There is so much that is rich when reading about externalising practices. I don’t know where to begin. It feels a bit like contact with magic. There is something of wonder here.

Perhaps my strongest response to this topic has been that for externalising practices to be meaningful in our work we need to have access to our own playful and creative qualities – and not allow ourselves to be objectified into serious counsellors or adults with important things to do. And so I have decided to allow myself to play with externalisation in some areas of my own life and work.

The first part of externalising is developing a rich picture of the thing – in this case I think "rigidity" is a good characterisation of qualities that stop my playful and creative side from shining out.
Some of the ‘tactics’ rigidity uses with me in my line of work include:

Enhanced ‘worry’ about getting jobs done
Fear that I’m not doing a good job, or that I won’t ever get it right
Tiredness – leading to reliance on old ways of doing things.

So if I jump from this to the alternate characterisation: my own stories of being creative and playful have a lot to do with a character known as "fun!"  The history and sources of fun’s magic in my life include:
Playing with my brother for hours and hours when we were kids
Being around other people who are also having fun
Drawing on richly textured imagination because it helps me go deeper and have more fun
Getting lost in the moment

Now, let me just push ‘pause’ for a minute (because I could go on for a lot longer about this)... and go back to the readings – what are some of the fun and creative ideas I have had as a result of this reading?

The creative impulse is something that can be added to a situation – and it has the power to influence what comes out the other end.
When we ‘play around’ with externalising, we are also playing around with questions of power. At times we are perhaps being disrespectful to established societal expectations. Other times we may be creating opportunities for power to be expressed in new and unexpected directions.
I love the way externalising practices are able to uncover huge areas of opportunities for people to test out their abilities or review the multi-faceted ways they have already responded to the events or issues of their lives.
I also loved reading about the widely different situations and styles of approach that have been used with externalising. There seems no limit to the creativity that can be accessed!

I would now like to mention the sparks that have formed in my mind about a specific situation I am meeting up with at work:

Situation: Responding to a school community asking for support in the aftermath of a suicide in the larger community.
My instinct, if externalising ‘suicide’, is to immediately think of a big suicide monster, that sucks all hope and love up a dumps it in the sewer. It can take the entire colour out of a place and leave it looking grey and desolate.
But my relationship to suicide is not the main question here – the community members themselves will probably have quite different experience-near ideas of how suicide affects them. The key point made by Russel and Carey is to start by seeing what is already internalised – and then creating space in which an alternate view can emerge.

I remember when my colleague Paul mentioned the difficulty or perhaps danger of externalising around suicide issues in a culture where people already feel helpless in the face of something that seems to them to be an expression of hostile magic.
At this point I am wondering whether it will be this ‘helpless feeling’ that might be a useful focus for externalising. But how can this topic be approached with fun, and love, and creativity?
On reflection, I noticed that there are lots of ways in which people – both in the community I am talking about and also in the ‘therapeutic’ community – are drawn into ‘internalising practices’ that are so pervasive in our lives. It almost seemed as if people were looking for a recruit (therapy) who would act as an expert to somehow ‘fix’ the ‘tide of helplessness’ they were dealing with.
One of the texts I read was an account of ‘Conversations with AIDS and CARE’. I gained hope from reading about the courage displayed in communities devastated by AIDS – the courage to say: ‘stick by stick, we will make a bundle that cannot be broken’.  And to break out into song & to dance the character of “Mr Aids” out of the village!
So why not break into song and dance here? What is there to dance about?
Someone has died, and now is the time for traditional grief and ritual around death to be expressed.
There is perhaps something to celebrate – that a powerful healing tradition exists and continues.
The fact that people still recognise and care for one another’s pain.

I don’t know the answer yet; however I now have a strong connection to the path I would like to explore in my own related-ness to this problem: the path of fun, creative, keen, loving exploration that is disrespectful (when necessary) to established societal beliefs and performs massive leaps of enthusiastic imagination (whenever possible) to create room for new statements of belief and action.

And I pay respect to the landscape I am standing on, for Michael White’s inspiration – externalisation - which he regarded as an ‘old friend’ (conclusion to Ch1 ‘Maps of Narrative Practice).