Storytelling as Soul Work and Community Work
Belonging Practice 4: Collective Documents
Dear City Person,
Each month of this free weekly newsletter highlights my experiments with belonging through trying different ways of connecting with people, places, or nature. Today’s post will focus on collective documents which is a practice done within both therapeutic contexts in narrative therapy and also in community work outside of psychotherapy.
Before I define what are collective documents and share examples of them and their value, I will start with defining what is narrative therapy to provide context. Toward the end of this post, I will be inviting you to participate in two collective documents I am working on in collaboration with others and I encourage you to share the invitation with other people who may be interested in them.
Before I continue, I have some housekeeping to do…
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I love this definition of narrative therapy provided by Tiffany Sostar, who is a narrative practitioner, as it captures the spirit behind the title of my post today:
“Our stories shape how we see ourselves and the world around us, and can connect us to our own actions and choices in responding to the problems in our lives.
Narrative therapy is all about our stories – the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones we’ve been told; the ones we tell about other people, and the ones they tell about us. It’s about understanding where those stories come from, who they serve, and deciding whether we still want to give those stories weight in our lives. And it’s about reauthoring our stories, and strengthening our connections to legacies and histories of responding to hardship with skill and resilience.
A narrative conversation, either in a group setting or individually, can help us tell our stories in ways that honour our skills, values, knowledges and actions. For many marginalized communities, these skills, values, insider knowledges, and actions have been devalued and dismissed.
You already are the protagonist and the narrator of your own story, the expert in your own experience – nobody can give you that power, and nobody can take it away. But sometimes we lose connection to our deep self-storying abilities, and narrative therapy can help us get back in touch with that knowledge.” —Tiffany Sostar
A question for readers before I continue…
What stands out to you in Tiffany Sostar’s quote?
I would add that narrative therapy does not define people by their qualities and problems they face, rather it sees people as being in relationship with them. In other words, people are not problems, rather people are people and problems are problems. For example, if I were to label myself as a confident person, what happens to my sense of self when I have times that I experience self doubt because I am an imperfect human being?
I have been finding it more meaningful to think about my relationship with a quality like confidence rather than wondering if I am a confident person or not. The former helps me understand the times, relationships, personal and societal ideas, and personal actions that make it possible for me to have a more intimate relationship with confidence and which of those things distance me from confidence. I have noticed the more I practiced this way of seeing, the less I tie my self esteem to transient things and the more I can take action when I notice I have gotten distant from the qualities I value. It thus frees me up from the limitations of defining my story through a label that may only reveal parts of my story, not the whole picture.
For another example on the relational nature between people and problems, let us suppose that a child is often labeled as a “difficult child.” What happens to how other people see that child and thus treat the child? What happens to how the child understands themselves if they too internalize this idea that they are a “difficult person?” How would that impact their beliefs, actions, and mental health in the present and future? Even if there are scenarios that show that this child is not always “difficult” the label may still make it difficult for the child or others to acknowledge those exceptions and sustain them so that they too become part of who the child is. They will thus brush the exceptions away to make the stories that support the idea that this child is a “difficult person” more dominant and defining. Therefore the events that reinforce the idea that the child is a “difficult child” become part of the “dominant story” whereas the events that reflect other facets of the child’s life are the “alternative stories.”
Think of how often this happens at a societal level with racism, sexism, ableism, among other -isms that define certain groups of people through limiting ideas which have exclusionary and even violent consequences at individual and political scales as we have seen historically and at present globally.
Narrative therapy tries to make those limiting dominant stories and the stories about the person/community’s values, responses, skills, preferences, or hopes transparent so that the person/community will have more choices as to how they want to relate to a given experience or problem. This then becomes the process of “re-authoring” and helping people find their own “preferred stories.”
Below is a well-known TED talk about the danger of attaching to a single story. While not specifically about narrative therapy, the ideas in the video are relevant for it. In narrative therapy, people are described as “multi-storied” rather than “single-storied.”
This TED talk illustrates more of what this means and how connecting with the multiplicity of our stories can help us connect with ourselves and with each other in a meaningful way. This can be therapeutic when we have taken on unhelpful single stories from our personal experiences or societies:
Before I continue, I have a question from readers:
After reading what I wrote so far and watching the TED talk, can you think about a time when you experienced the negative effects of a single story? How did it impact how you treat yourself and other people?
The idea that people are not their problems does not mean that people are not accountable to hurtful or abusive behavior. We are still responsible for what actions, values, and ideas we choose to align with in a given moment as they affect us and our relationships.
It is also not saying that people do not have inclinations. For example, some people more often than not have intimate relationships with confidence and there are likely different factors that contribute to that possibility.
The idea of being multi-storied does not mean that it is “wrong” to find a label that is meaningful for us. It is more about acknowledging that it is one way among others of making meaning of ourselves and we can notice what it does for us and where we can make choices here. It also helps us to step back and not assume that everyone will find a given label, or the very act of labeling itself, meaningful for them. It thus opens up room for curiosity which is essential to deep nonjudgmental listening when hearing other people’s experiences instead of listening to them through a filter of labels they did not choose.
It is worth differentiating between how we subjectively make meaning of our lives (how a story is told) versus facts (the events as we can describe them with any of our five senses without the meaning-making). This is not to say that subjective meaning making cannot have real effects on how we experience the fact of an event taking place. For example, it is a fact that people can get infected with viruses but the way we make meaning of the presence of infection and how we respond to it are subjective experiences that can have real effects on us.
If you want to learn more about narrative therapy, I recommend clicking here for a booklet that you can access via the Dulwich Centre which is well known within narrative therapy and narrative community work spaces or click here to see if there a copy you can borrow from a nearby library. Also check out the free and paid offerings by the Dulwich Centre that is open to everyone even if you are not a therapist by clicking here.
If you want to dive into the philosophical ideas that influenced narrative therapy, I recommend reading about social constructionism, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Click here to access this article that offers names of philosophers you can start with and a summary of how their ideas influenced narrative therapy.
What are collective documents and where do they fit in narrative therapy?
While narrative therapy is often thought of as a type of psychotherapy approach, it has also been applied as a method of community work outside of therapy contexts. Collective documents are one among many examples of narrative community work.
A collective document is a communal method of documenting the alternative stories that often get missed by the dominant stories as mentioned earlier in this post. Examples of what gets documented can be:
the story of values people are trying to stay connected to
ways people responded to a problem
stories of relationships and activities that keep them going or that are in general meaningful to them
their hopes and how they are trying to stay connected with those hopes
times when a problem was not as dominant and what made those times possible.
Documentation can happen through someone writing all the above down during a guided live group conversation, writing down notes from one-to-one interviews, audio-recordings, having people exchange letters to one another which then get gathered into an archive, or an online forum/shared Google doc. Collective documents may either be kept private within a given group of people or it could be shared with the group’s consent to benefit other people who want to learn from those who have lived similar experiences.
There are creative ways of documenting which don’t have to be limited to typical speech such as collecting artwork, poetry, zines, or recording dance and music.
Examples of Collective Documents
Click here to see examples of collective documents and other kinds of narrative community work by the Dulwich Centre.
Check out Dear Diagnosis website by clicking here. This website was started by a narrative therapist who invites people to write anonymous letters to their diagnoses and to other life problems. This process helps people to focus on their relationship with a problem rather than having the problem be the only thing that defines everything about them.
Below are two examples of creative forms of collective documents that go beyond regular speech.
Nicole, a classmate from my narrative therapy certificate program, runs a private group in Washington, DC called Pen, Paper, Process. During the group conversation, Nicole writes down one-liners that reflect the things people are caring about and ways they respond to problems. These can easily get missed when one rushes through listening. At the end of each group meeting, Nicole reads each line to the group as though it is a poem. Group members shared how they felt surprised that they had said those things and felt moved by seeing how much more impactful and meaningful the words they said sounded than if they had only said them once and forgot about them. I unfortunately cannot share a specific example of what this looked like as I want to respect group members’ privacy.
Vani, a narrative therapist based in India, created a Spotify playlist where people contributed songs that helped them get through tough times. Vani has shared a link to this playlist for other people to benefit from it. You can follow Vani’s Instagram page and find the link to the Spotify playlist by searching for the handle @ therapyofmanystories .
The Value of Collective Documents
Since it is easy to miss out other facets to the “difficult child” story in the example I shared earlier because of how embedded that story became, documenting those other facets of the child’s life can help make them more visible in front of us. Doing this documentation with a community of other people witnessing this story can make this even more powerful as the act of telling a story to a community makes it come to life in a way that it doesn’t when it is stuck privately with us. As Maya Angelou says:
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”
Typically, the other people contributing to the collective document share their responses to a similar experience or are only reflecting on how a person’s story moved them. This benefits everyone involved as people not only share their stories but can also see how their stories can have value for someone else while at the same time learning from other people’s experiences.
The act of storytelling in this way helps people feel less alone in their experiences and connect to multiple facets of their own story rather than through a single story. So often, when people are told to share their experience with a problem, they will focus on how the problem is impacting them. While this can be helpful, sometimes people get stuck with what to do next after this or end up ruminating about the problem more.
While there are likely other groups outside of narrative therapy that do similar work, I wanted to focus my post on collective documents as presented within narrative therapy and narrative community work.
If you know of any such groups doing similar work, I would appreciate hearing from you through Substack comments or private email replies!
I want to end this post by extending an invitation to you. I am currently working on two collective documents. Both are offered virtually as people are spread out. I personally prefer doing this live rather than virtually as it would allow me room to ask follow up questions to thicken the responses but sometimes this is not always possible. Anyway, here are the two projects I am inviting you to participate in:
Stories about Moving
This is a virtual collective document about what helps people deal with life transitions such as moving homes, schools, neighborhoods, cities, or countries or graduating from high school or university. I am working on this with a young person who sees me for therapy who wanted to learn from other people’s lived experiences with transitions.
The young person consented to having this shared so that we can gather more stories and other people can benefit. So far we have received two stories and the young person found it helpful to see that things can potentially turn out ok even if one may struggle with transitions. If you would like to contribute or if you know of young people in your life who may be interested in contributing even if only one line, then please share this link to the Google Doc with them:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lU687fjpxwXqYDrVhAM2J9TmJd6yJmReBttvbJUlYMk/edit
Reaching out in our Lowest
I am collaborating with insightful.ae to gather stories about what helps people reach out for social support when they are feeling their lowest. We so far have five responses and would appreciate more. I will then write about what stood out to me in people’s shares and write about the topic of reaching out when we feel our lowest in a future newsletter post. If you are interested in contributing a story, feel free to either comment on Substack, send me a private message on Substack, or to reply to this email privately.
Next week’s newsletter will feature peer respite programs and some research on them.
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
“What if your empathy allowed you to fully feel the pain of others? Whose pain and suffering would you like to feel?”
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.