A Brief Look at Using Stories in Therapy

There has been a lot of modern research on the use of storytelling within Indigenous cultures, for good reason given the historical and ongoing atrocities done to erase these cultures. However, story-telling isn’t unique to these cultures and is, in fact, universal.

Part of the reason why is that our brains are hardwired to do pattern recognition. I’d highly recommend the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman if you’d like to learn more, but the gist is that our brains have two modes: system one is our instinctual base lines of thoughts, the one that could be attributed to the unconscious and subconscious, whereas system two is more active, a tad slower, and involves deliberate, conscious effort. Both systems function off pattern recognition, with system one relying on it to a much higher degree given its non-deliberate nature.

This is why stories are so intriguing to us. Stories map the world out in structured terms; they pattern and categorize events so that they have a clear causality. Without stories, the world may become random and communication impossible. Arguably, every sentence is a story. Richardson gives an example of this in the posted excerpt here of his book, wherein he discusses the various stories that can be told with a simple statement: “I love you”.

So how do we use stories within therapy? There are some obvious examples; bibliotherapy is a relatively commonly used technique wherein client and counsellor read through a book together to identify themes, techniques, attributes, or skills that could apply to the client’s life. Oftentimes, the book is self-help or a workbook that specifically tackles one of the client’s presenting problems; however, this is not a set rule, and I personally find it easier to engage with bibliotherapy when the book is fiction or even not a book at all. There is nothing that prevents the use of movies, plays, music, TV shows, games, or other pieces of media for bibliotherapeutic purposes.

Another common use of stories, especially with children, is to use them to help teach different lessons (especially helpful with teaching social behaviours). Sommers-Flanagan has a wonderful write-up regarding the use of this technique, and it’s one that’s not only applicable within therapy, but also for anyone working with children in their life, parents included! This should not be surprising to any parent, of course, as all good children’s television (the quintessential example in my min being Sesame Street) incorporates these ideas.

Even more common, cross-modality techniques in therapy are utilizing storytelling. The best example is journalling. Most people, me included, have been assigned journalling as an in-between session task. There’s a lot of reasons why a counsellor may assign you to journal, but most come down to the two systemed brain discussed previously. Because system one is so quick and instinctual, the stories that it tells can often make leaps in logic. Oftentimes, this is fine; in the same way that your brain can and often does automatically filter out or fill in visual information to no real harm or effect (your brain filters out your nose for example), system one making story leaps is often no big deal. However, the issue comes when the leaps in logic are too big or too illogical. In writer’s terms, this is known as “jumping the shark”; the moment in which a story tries to do something that it really shouldn’t be doing.

When our brains start jumping the shark, we can end up acting in ways incongruent with our real conditions. For example, I have a phobia of bees and wasps (Hymenoptera in general minus ants. Ants are cool). I will see one and freeze up, immediately shutting my eyes and wishing to be anywhere but in that space. Part of what is going on here is that my system one is connecting my visual stimuli with a story of massive fear, that I will be stung, that it will hurt immensely, and that I cannot handle that pain. It is jumping the shark, in that it is overemphasizing the pain and minimizing my competency/ability to handle pain. To do so, it’s likely drawing on many different experiences and consistently jumping the shark with them as well; minimizing experiences in which I was able to handle pain or was not stung and maximizing experiences when I’ve been hurt. It’s likely even drawing in entirely unrelated experiences, connecting my middle-child loneliness with the pain that a bee or wasp could give me. All of this is very quickly, so quickly that it’s not noticeable or conscious in the moment. I do not recognize the story being told, all I feel is irrational fear.

Journalling is meant to disrupt this process by slowing down system one and starting to activate system two. While system two is also prone to leaps in logic (any storyteller is), the fact that it is conscious of the stories it’s telling means that there is an opportunity to catch leaps in logic. Journalling is especially useful to this process because the physical act of writing down our thoughts adds in complexity, which forces a very deliberate effort. These characteristics do not mean that journalling will be perfect or solve your presenting problems. However, it can provide a better environment to analyze the stories we’re telling ourselves and determine if they are appropriate for the situations we are facing.