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This article was downloaded by: [University of Strathclyde]On: 13 November 2014, At: 07:41Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
European Journal ofPsychotherapy & CounsellingPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rejp20
A relational constructivistapproach to narrative therapyLuis Botella a & Olga Herrero aa Ramon Llull University, BarcelonaPublished online: 22 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Luis Botella & Olga Herrero (2000) A relational constructivistapproach to narrative therapy, European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 3:3,407-418, DOI: 10.1080/13642530010012048
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642530010012048
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A relational constructivistapproach to narrative therapyLuis Botella and Olga HerreroRamon Llull University, Barcelona
Abstract
This paper presents our understanding of narrative therapy from a relationalconstructivist approach, as a way to further develop the dialogue betweencontemporary constructivist theories and social constructionist approaches. Inthe first section the ten main assumptions of relational constructivism arediscussed. In the second, a case study is presented in order to illustrate ourtherapeutic use of these assumptions.
Keywords: constructivism, social constructionism, relational construc-tivism, narrative therapy
Fourteen years have passed since the publication of Sarbin’s (1986) foun-dational volume Narrative Psychology. Throughout these years, narrativeapproaches to a variety of human psychological processes have gainedpopularity, and some of them constitute a growing body of research nowadays.The appeal of narrative as a root metaphor for human psychological func-tioning seems to be particularly noticeable among constructivists and socialconstructionists. To quote but a few selected examples, see, for instance, the1994 special issue of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology devoted tonarrative theory and therapy or the section on ‘The Narrative Turn’ inNeimeyer and Mahoney’s (1995) volume on Constructivism in Psychotherapy.
Our aim in this paper is to make a distinctive contribution to this ongoingdialogue: one that rests on our own understanding of narrative therapy from a relational constructivis t approach (Botella in press). Thus, the paperis divided into two main sections: (a) an outline of our understanding of relational constructivism and its main guiding assumptions, and (b) a casestudy in which we illustrate the practice of narrative therapy from arelational constructivist approach.
Eur. J. of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health Vol 3 No 3 December 2000 pp. 407–418
The European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & HealthISSN 1364-2537 print/ISSN 1469-5901 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/1364253001001204 8
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Relational constructivism
What we call relational constructivism (Botella in press) constitutes ourattempt to press the dialogue between constructivism and social construc-tionism further (see Botella 1995), as well as enriching it with the voice ofnarrative and post-modern approaches. As will be obvious from our outlinein this section, relational constructivism is heavily influenced both bycontemporary constructivist theories and authors and by the philosophicaland literary works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mikhail Bakhtin that aremore often associated with social constructionist positions. We have beendeveloping the ideas presented here during the last ten years of our academicand therapeutic work, and nowadays they inform and inspire our ownpractice as psychotherapists at the Servei d’Assessorament i Atenció PsicològicBlanquerna (Blanquerna Psychotherapy Unit). What follows, then, is a briefoutline of the ten main assumptions of relational constructivism in ourpresent conceptualization of it.
1 Being human entails construing meaning From a constructivist standpoint,human psychological processes can be equated with ‘efforts after meaning’(Bartlett 1932). Human beings are proactively oriented towards a mean-ingful understanding of the world in which they live and their own placein it. Being human entails active efforts to interpret experience, seekingpurpose and significance in the events that surround us (Neimeyer andNeimeyer 1993).
2 Meaning is an interpretative and linguistic achievement Experiences inthemselves do not carry meaning. Even if this is a painful insight for ourhuman narcissism, the universe seems to keep on with its business of beingwhat it is regardless of the impact it has on our fragile lives. To render theotherwise purposeless drift of life events meaningful and more or lesspredictable, one needs to pattern them, to �nd similarities and contrastsbetween them and to locate them in unfolding frames of intelligibility – i.e., to interpret them. Such an interpretation is a linguistic achievement,since language is human beings’ way of patterning experience. Obviously,such patterning is never a �nal and perfect one, and it must be subject topermanent change, transformation and development so as to accommodateall the unexpected twists and turns of the ‘purposeless drift’ we mentionedbefore while still retaining a sense of one’s own value and agency over one’slife. Such a development, in the optimal case, increases the interpretativeand predictive power of our constructions by rendering them increasinglycomplex (i.e., differentiated and integrated). As we shall see, transformationand intelligibility are two crucial goals of narrative therapy from a relationalconstructivist approach.
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3 Language and interpretation are relational achievements As discussed, amongothers, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), language is not the private propertyof any particular individual’s cognitive processes, but a form of game weplay together; i.e., the relational product of shared discursive practices andjoint actions. Our interpretations of experience are patterned by and locatedin the context of shared forms of intelligibility. The process of becomingsocialized entails learning how to make sense of life events in forms that do not push us into a corner of relational isolation. Developing as a humanbeing means learning from our parents, peers, teachers, friends, lovers,colleagues, acquaintances and role models, how to feel, think and act inparticular situations so as to be validated as a member of our relationalnetworks. Even when we do not want to be accepted, the forms of actionwe undertake to become outcasts are also forms of socially and relationallysustained patterns of meaning making.
4 Relationships are conversational Since relationships and interactions aremediated by language, they adopt the form of conversations. In the contextof a conversation, meaning is not an exclusively individual responsi-bility. The meaning of one’s words or actions is always open to a process of supplementation (Gergen 1994); i.e., one’s words or actions need to besupplemented by the others’ to mean anything at all. Thus, the meaningattributed to one’s words or actions is never a �nal one and, potentially,they may be interpreted in many ways: this meaning can always bereconstrued, reframed, transvaluated. Every new interpretation clears thespace for a new version of events, while it also reduces competing ones tothe not-yet-said.
5 Conversations are constitutive of subject positions Conversations areconstitutive of selves; such a constitutive force derives from their provisionof subject positions. Since the meaning of one’s words or actions does notdepend exclusively on oneself, but on a process of unfolding supplemen-tation, conversations create subject positions that are contingent on thevery conversation taking place. In this sense, a person can position him- or herself differently depending on the conversation he or she is taking part in. Such an amalgam of subject positions becomes constitutive of one’sself-concept – conceived of not as a totally private process, but as the resultof internalizing signi�cant conversations. As novelist Lawrence Durrell hadone of his characters say in The Alexandria Quartet:
We live lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality isconditioned by our position in space and time – not by our person-alities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based
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upon a quite unique position. Two paces east or west and the wholepicture is changed.
(Durrell 1988: 210)
6 Subject positions are expressed as voices When a subject position isdiscursively expressed, it becomes a voice. Voices are thus the discursiveexpressions of different subject positions constituted in internalizedconversations. As Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) aptly noted, authorial voicesare likely not to be totally coherent, but to maintain a dialogical relation-ship among them, some being more dominant than others. Both innerdialogue and externalized conversations assume the form of a dialecticalinterchange, in the sense that one’s words are not only addressed to theobject of one’s discourse, but also to every other competing discourse thatone might imagine.
7 Voices expressed along a time dimension constitute narratives Since theessence of narrative is time, the expression of a voice along a time dimensionassumes a narrative form. Given the dialogical nature of subject positionsand discursively expressed narrative voices, there is always more than oneway to tell one’s life story, more than one voice to be heard, more than oneplot to be voiced. In this reconstructive potential lies the essence of humanchange in general and psychotherapy in particular; were it not for theindeterminacy of meaning-making processes, the only way left in some caseswould be to abandon the scene altogether.
8 Identity is both the product and the process of one’s self-narrative constructionCertainly, the answer to the question Who am I? shapes and de�nes one’sidentity in a given moment. However, the way one selects the events to be included in (and excluded from) one’s narrative, the main themes one organizes it around, the characters one regards as signi�cant or non-signi�cant, the voices one privileges or silences when telling it . . . all of itis as constitutive of one’s own identity as the content of one’s life story.When seen in this light, identity becomes synonymous with authorship.From what we have said so far, it is obvious that there is never a single �xed,�nal or true life story to tell, nor a single way to tell it, but more than one.As Mary Catherine Bateson says:
In the postmodern environment in which we live, it is easy to say thatno version is �xed, no version is true. I want to push beyond that andencourage you to think about the creative responsibility involved in thefact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one istrue and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and of context.
(Bateson 1993: 42)
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9 Psychological problems are the consequence of the process of construing one’snarratives of identity What we call ‘psychological problems’ or ‘disorders’constitute a loosely and ill-de�ned cluster of human ways to belong andrelate to the world. What seems to be common to practically all of them,however, is the subjective experience of unintelligibility and loss of personalagency that they introduce into one’s narratives of identity. Under a myriaddifferent discursive expressions, people who complain about psychologicalsuffering refer naturally to one or both of the aforementioned narrativeblocks: I don’t know what’s wrong with myself and my life, I cannot make senseof things any more, I don’t understand what’s happening to me, my life seemsunpredictable , I’ve lost control of things, I cannot be the person I used to be, my feelings and my actions are beyond my control. . . . It is as if, somehow,our position relative to our narrative of identity had been pushed to a stateof authorial powerlessness. Life (as in the Simon and Garfunkel song) seemsunreal, an illusion, a scene badly written in which one must play. Thefeeling of creative responsibility that comes from mindful authorship is lostand replaced by a sense that a fateful and inescapably gloomy future awaitsone. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s metaphoric notion that every cultureplays its own mythical music, and that this music takes away our freedomunless we examine it, disenchant ourselves from these myths, and decidewhich of these songs we want to keep is certainly a beautiful metaphor forpsychotherapy.
10 Psychotherapy can be equated to a collaborative dialogue addressed totransforming the client’s narratives of identity Psychotherapy takes place inlanguage. Despite the pervasiveness of the medical model and medicalmetaphors, psychotherapy derives its transformative potential not frombeing a ‘treatment’ or a ‘cure’, but from its being a specialized form of humanconversation in which new subject positions are voiced, new narratives aretold, new forms of intelligibility emerge, and the not-yet-said �nds room tobe consciously and mindfully heard. The skill of the therapist is the skill ofclearing the space for such a transformative dialogue to take place. Sheneed not be a skilful or strategic technician; her goals need not distance herfrom the client by turning her into someone whose only interest lies inchanging people’s behaviours, rendering them more rational, restructuringtheir family systems, or illuminating them about the hidden intricacies oftheir unconscious processes. Certainly all of the above may be worthy andvaluable goals in a given moment of an unfolding therapeutic relationship,but they can too easily become totalizing narratives if the therapist triestoo hard or believes too faithfully. They can suffocate all that is new andfresh in the therapeutic dialogue if the therapist takes them too seriouslyand forgets that they are language games and that their power derives, thus,from their usefulness in pressing the dialogue further.
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Instead, from a relational constructivist standpoint, the therapist needsto be a human being capable of using language so as to bring forth newlanguage games, games that allow the client to regain the feelings ofintelligibility and transformation he or she had lost. In this sense, as GeorgeKelly anticipated in the 1960s:
psychotherapy is a way of getting on with the human enterprise andit may embody and mobilise all of the techniques for doing this thathave been yet devised. Certainly there is no one psychotherapeutictechnique and certainly no one kind of interpersonal compatibilitybetween psychotherapist and client. The techniques employed arethe techniques for living and the task of the skilful psychotherapist isthe proper orchestration of all of these varieties of techniques.
(Kelly 1969: 222)
In regaining a feeling of intelligibility and transformation over one’snarrative of identity, the dialectic tension between continuity and discon-tinuity plays a crucial role. Life seems ill suited to ful�l our desires or conformto our plans. Thus, very often the narratives we hear our clients tell us havebeen critically fragmented by some life event that has introduced anunexpected discontinuity in them – be it frustration, abuse, trauma, loss,illness, or a given symptom. This is likely to be the reason why most of our clients express their main goal in therapy as ‘I want to be again as I used to be’. Unfortunately, such a ‘narrative rewind’ is by definitionimpossible, since we cannot turn back time. Nevertheless, quotingKierkegaard again, life is lived forward, but it is understood backwards.Thus, as Bateson re�ects, ‘Much of coping with discontinuity has to do withdiscovering threads of continuity. You cannot adjust to changes unless you can recognise some analogy between your old situation and your newsituation’ (1993: 45).
Such a recognition, as Sarbin aptly noted, ‘provides the basis for analogy,and if linguistic translation is necessary, the partial similarity is expressedas a metaphor’ (1986: 6). Therapeutic change is, thus, a highly metaphoricendeavour.
Case study
Melissa is a 20-year-old university student who lives with her parents, her brother of 23 and her sister of 18. She consulted us in our UniversityPsychotherapy Unit because she felt stressed, depressed, anxious, anddisturbed by unwanted mood swings and ‘ups and downs’ that she did notknow how to incorporate into her narrative. The only narrative continuityshe could �nd between her usually stable self and her ups and downs was
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her tentative guess that there might be some connection between academictests and stress. Her personal theory that ‘anxiety takes control over meand then it leaves me’ left her helpless and deprived of any feelings ofagency, since she did not feel responsible for her own emotional state.
In addition, the almost simultaneous deaths of her uncle and her futuresister-in-law two years ago introduced another critical narrative discon-tinuity that affected the whole of Melissa’s family system. The threat tonarrative continuity was visible in Melissa’s therapeutic goal of ‘findingstability’. However, the way Melissa expected to regain stability (i.e., bynot letting her problems affect her, by not giving herself permission to cry)is an example of the impossible task of going on with one’s life story bykeeping an important life event from being incorporated in the plot. Almostinevitably, the voice of the suspended life event claims its right to be heard,and attempts to ignore it or reduce it to ‘symptoms’ threaten narrativecontinuity even more.
During the �rst therapy session, our open dialogue with Melissa had theimmediate effect of clearing the space for the emergence of a new patternto make sense of her ‘ups and downs’ other than as unpredictable moodswings brought forth by academic stress. Melissa felt that she was repeatedlydriven to a position of frustration and powerlessness because of the other’scriticisms of her based upon her perceived inability to live up to their expec-tations. Thus, new narrative patterns began to emerge in our conversation,even if they were still problematic because Melissa located the origin of heremotional states in the others, and because of the way she maintainednarrative coherence by acknowledging only negative voices.
Melissa maintained her narrative coherence by a process of negativenarrative smoothing; i.e., by incorporating only negative voices into her lifestory, selecting thus only those situations and comments that were coherentwith her vision of herself. By this process of negative narrative smoothing,Melissa ‘edited out’ those events that did not �t with the dominant voicein her narrative of identity. Thus, experiences that could potentially leadto a positive and satisfactory sense of herself were left uninstantiated andexcluded from her narrative.
In the second session, Melissa explained that, in her view, the oppositeposition to ‘taking care of myself’ was ‘taking care of others’. While the �rst led to unhappiness, the second led to a feeling of well-being. However,according to Melissa’s view, people who ‘take care of themselves’ were‘independent’ and ‘successful’, while those who ‘take care of others’ were‘dependent’ and ‘unable to achieve anything by themselves’. Dependentpeople were even prone to ‘sink into a black mood’ due to the weight theyattributed to the others. This dependent position was her own, and the one she wanted to change. She expressed the dialectic between the twocontrasting voices thus:
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What I want is to take care of myself – everybody tells me that I neverdo and that I should if I want to feel good with myself, but I don’twant to stop taking care of the others. I want both paths to lead me to well-being, because hearing what I’ve just said I realize that I will never be able to take care of myself if the price I have to pay isunhappiness.
Melissa had positioned herself in the same discourse as her mother as a wayof ‘being by her side’ and ‘against’ or simply ‘opposite to’ other people (e.g.,her brother). This position worked well for her until she found herselfpositioned differently in the realm of other signi�cant relationships – e.g.,the ones with her friends in general and her boyfriend in particular. Melissa’sdilemma was beyond the merely cognitive, and was rooted in the relationalground in which narratives of identity are validated. Abandoning thisposition might take Melissa away from her mother’s own position.
This vision is coherent with a discursive and relational approach toconstructivism that assumes that individual identity emerges in the pro-cesses of relational interaction, not as a �nal product, but constituted andreconstituted in the different discursive practices in which one participates(Davies and Harré 1990). We maintain our identity by means of a processof constant positioning that always entails a component of indetermination,since the meaning of any speci�c interaction is always open to alternativeinterpretations – or, in Gergen’s terms (1994), to new forms of supple-mentation. From this point of view, identity does not emerge from inside out nor is an exclusively individual by-product of one’s personal growth.Rather, the development of a sense of personal identity is comparable toattaining a sense of communicational or cultural competence (Hymes1972). It entails (a) learning to attribute meaning in terms of the forms of intelligibility characteristic of one’s community, and (b) positioningoneself (or, sometimes, being positioned) in the context of such forms ofintelligibilit y.
In the third session we introduced into the conversation the expressions‘the voice of your relationship with yourself’ instead of ‘taking care ofoneself’, and ‘the voice of your relationship with others’ instead of ‘takingcare of others’. By means of a modified version of the gestalt two-chairdialogue technique, Melissa allowed the two voices to dialogue. Initially,the voice of her relationship with others did not allow the voice of herrelationship with herself to be expressed. The latter felt oppressed, weary,belittled, powerless, deprived of any right to say anything. The former,instead, was the voice of moral righteousness, correctness, the voice of whatmust be done to be a ‘good girl’, although it was also the voice that oppressedand that caused Melissa’s suffering. Little by little, the voice of her rela-tionship to others became aware that it was causing pain and suffering to
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Melissa, and it began to develop a curious interest towards what was neededand wanted by the other voice. Melissa’s bodily posture constantlypunctuated these feelings. Whereas she sat erect in the chair of the voiceof her relationship to others, she adopted a belittled and almost foetalposture in the chair of the voice of her relationship with herself – talkingin a whispering tone. However, the voice of her relationship with herselfwas eventually able to express itself and to clear a space for dialogue. Itvoiced its complaints, its feelings of abandonment, its need and its right to be heard. At a given point during the dialogue, Melissa fell silent and,after some seconds, she said, ‘I’ve just realized that both voices are my ownand myself, and that I’ve been feeling divided and fragmented all this time.It’s meaningless, how could I split my self in two?’ Melissa wanted to �nishthe dialogue between the two voices with a hug between them. She feltthat now each one of the two was able to listen to the other, and that bothshould �ght together instead of against each other so that she would behappy. We asked Melissa to visualize the hug between her two voices, andshe said that the result had been a feeling of fusion between them.
Between the first and the fourth session Melissa’s symptoms had beensignificantly reduced. Melissa attributed such amelioration to the newdialogical (versus adversarial) relationship between her two authorial voicesas a consequence of the last session. She also attributed her changes to thepossibility of ‘telling my life story in the form of a narrative, connectingthings among each other in an integrated fashion, not in the fragmentedand disconnected way I used to’.
Melissa described herself now as:
A somewhat peculiar girl; I’m very complex and I feel a lot of differentemotions. However, I feel more optimistic now, I’m happier, I havedecided that it’s worth feeling good with the others and myself. I’maware of the importance of enjoying the things you do instead of doingthem because you’re forced to do them. I can also say of myself thatI’m a girl who tries to understand and help other people, and that I dothis because it helps me to feel good, important and useful, and mostof all because I like to see how the others trust me and share theirconcerns and problems with me. . . . Another thing that de�nes meis that, even if I’m not exceptional, I feel very special when I’m withmy boyfriend because he makes me feel this way. In summary, I’d saythat, just like many people, I’m a girl with many different sides, andmaybe I’m so complex because of this. But in fact, who is not madeup of many feelings and sides, even if some of them are contradictory?
Melissa felt that this was the point of no return, she had just got rid of theconstraining and tightening position she occupied among others and in the
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world in general; the position that, eventually, led her to suffering. Her newway of employing events in her narrative felt like liberation and providedher with a feeling of agency that changed her subject position. She hadshifted from being someone to whom painful and meaningless thingshappen to being someone who faced life proactively: from observer toauthor of her own narrative. As she said:
I used to feel weary because the voice of my relationship with myselffelt weary and belittled and was unable to �ght against the voice ofmy relationship with others since it suffocated the other voice andleft it silent. Now, however, I feel like doing things because the voiceof my relationship with myself feels happy and understood, as well asthe voice of my relationship with others because it has learned to helpthe other one. Thus, both express themselves now as part of a largerself, which is myself, and they feel now that ‘they’re in this together’.That �ght, now meaningless, was the origin of my weariness, my moodswings, my stress, my depression, and my vision of myself as lazy.
Throughout this case illustration, we have tried to address the followingkey aspects of our relational constructivist approach to psychotherapy:
(a) Our notion of psychological problems as causing a subjective experi-ence of unintelligibility and loss of personal agency. This is visible inMelissa’s dif�culty with making sense of her unwanted mood swingsand ‘ups and downs’ and incorporating them to her narrative of identity.
(b) Our view of psychotherapy as a collaborative dialogue addressed totransforming the client’s narratives of identity. This is visible in theway in which the therapeutic relationship is privileged over speci�ctechniques – even if techniques are also used.
(c) Our notion that one’s behaviour, emotions and cognition make sensein the context of one’s position relative to a network of relationships.This is visible in the way that this particular therapeutic dialoguefostered the emergence of a new relational pattern to make sense of our client’s complaint in terms of the position of frustration andpowerlessness she was repeatedly driven to because of the other’scriticisms of her.
(d) The way we use the metaphor of ‘voices’ to foster a process of opendialogue between dialectical positions both in terms of different people and in terms of inner dialogues between different positions of aparticular client’s self-identity narratives.
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Epilogue: a story about a story
Nacho, the elder son of the �rst author of this paper, used to have a pet toy when he was three years’ old: his plush parrot Paco. Nacho used to sleepwith his toy, he travelled with it, he used it to �nd some comfort in thehurly-burly of a 3-year-old boy’s life. Unfortunately, the Buddhist dictumthat ‘everything that exists is impermanent’ became true one fatal day, andPaco got lost, left behind by mistake in some inscrutable bank of�ce. Nachospent his �rst night without Paco somehow comforted by a story we toldhim: his plush parrot had decided to spend the night at another bird’s, afriend of his. I (LB) spent the morning after in a frantic chase for a plushparrot like Paco, who, unfortunately, had been purchased in a toyshop inTenerife (Canary Islands), not exactly the kind of place within walkingdistance from my home in Barcelona. I found all sort of plush pet animals:from the predictable teddy bear to tropical lizards and threatening tarantulasone would reasonably hesitate to call ‘pet animals’. However, no friendlyand multicoloured parrots like Paco. My searching and yearning for plushparrots began to worsen my own feeling of loss. When I was about to giveup, I found in a neighbouring toyshop a penguin surprisingly similar in shape(although obviously not in colour) to Paco. I bought it, took it home, andhid it under a pillow. I told my son Nacho that Paco had been visiting somerelatives in the North Pole, and had been so cold there that his feathers hadturned black and white instead of green and red and yellow. Paco was nowback at home, but hiding under a pillow since he was somehow ashamed ofhis new and less flamboyant outlook. When Nacho found the penguinunder the pillow he roared with a happy and surprised laughter �nding hisformer parrot transformed into a penguin. Since then, according to Nacho,Paco belongs to a peculiar ornithological species: parrotpenguins.
Every time I recall this story I discover new meanings in it, but so far Iwould like to emphasize two of them: (1) sometimes in life, a new toy is notenough, we need a new story, and (2) the credibility of some stories does notdepend exclusively on their verisimilitude, but on the love with which theyare told. Maybe these post-modern times we are living in have deprived usof some of our favourite toys, but they have also increased our awareness ofthe place they have among what is most human: the relationships weconstitute and that, in turn, constitute us.
Correspondence to: Luis BotellaRamon Llull University
Cister 24–34Barcelona, Spain
E-mail: [email protected].
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