My Narrative Therapy Metaphor – 1 powerful tool anyone can use

This is Sarah at Pulang Studio and my work is all about the use of power and control in the workplace and I’m really interested in how do we transform our experience when we’re in it. I am informed by narrative therapy in my philosophy about how we experience life. And I have a particular metaphor for what that looks like.

When I think about who we are as human beings, I think that we often get given the messaging from the very very start that we are vessels, carriers of something and that those vessels might need to be fixed or they might need to be filled and therefore we need to achieve the filling or buy the fixing or have all these certain ways of creating wholeness and completeness in ourselves.

I actually think though that the truth of who we are is that we’re not the vessel. We are actually what’s inside the vessel, water. We are an absolutely perfect design of H2O water. And as that water makes its journey from the mountain to the sea, it’s got innate knowledge of how to transform itself in reaction to what it is experiencing. Whether that’s solid, liquid, or gas, ice, liquid water, or steam.

And I think when we honor that innate knowledge in ourselves and that we’re not actually something to be broken or fixed and that we are actually just here experiencing whatever terrain our water is going through, it’s a really freeing space. It’s a really creative space and we can start to wrestle with the big problems in our lives because the problems don’t sit inside of us. The problems are actually things about the terrain that we are going through. Narrative therapy also really brings that perspective of we sit within so many systems and contexts and identities that nothing is really fixed inside of us. It’s actually about how we are choosing to then I guess bring along with us what has happened to us in our lives.

And so a lot of I think traditional ways of figuring out who we want to be and how we want to fit into this world is around going down drilling down – looking at the patterns of what’s happened multigenerational patterns. And while some of that can be really useful context, I really love how narrative therapy is actually about looking out towards what’s something that we want to be in spite of all of that. Even if our water is flowing through the rockiest, harshest, driest, hottest terrain, how do we want to hold ourselves in that space? What kind of person do we want to bring into that?

I think it really moves us away from this kind of fatalist acceptance of well, I’m, you know, giving myself this label of I’m an for instance anxious person because my mother was an anxious person and she also had a really anxious mother. So that’s just how I’m going to experience life and into rather yeah I have a lot of anxiety that sits in my life. But with that anxiety sitting there I’m choosing to be really careful about how I look after myself and how I bring that anxiety into certain spaces with me. It doesn’t create a foregone conclusion that I’m going to be an anxious person.

So when I think about the metaphor that I work with, it’s about someone standing on a hill and surveying the picture of their life and where their water is flowing, their water, that’s their energy and their resources, their timing, the terrain that they’re flowing through. And I think one of the ways that we can really help to understand why we can often feel so so stuck, so minimized into this very tiny version of our life is that we can often kind of get set to gazing along the horizon for these little trickles of water that come off our main river of water. these little creeks or these little ponds that form off to the side and and often those little creeks and ponds are pointing out to a desert. It’s really dry. It’s totally true. They are problems. They are not where we want our life to be going. They’re not where we see our best self sitting. However, that’s just the deal. We have no control over it. Diseases happen, natural disasters, companies going under, changes in what we like, changes in our bodies, changes in relationships. All of these things are out of our control. And therefore, our life can take a bit of a detour. Our water can flow into different places.

And so, in that small creek space, uh, you can see in my picture, there’s a big flashing sign. That’s really an opportunity for us to name that space as its own problem. It’s not a problem within us. It’s not a shortcoming. It’s not a piece of us that needs to be fixed or filled in order for us to be a whole human. We are the whole human already standing on that mountain looking out over what’s happening in our life. However, we can also get really consumed by that sign that’s flashing and is saying, “Look over here. look over here”. And so that’s where narrative therapy is also something I think is that’s a really beautiful way of working with how do we get creative and how do we remember what is everything that’s adding up to this situation. And narrative therapy is about broadening our view of the horizon and out to the ocean, out to where we can find belonging and acceptance, comfort.

And I think most of our lives, I would say every single life, there is hope. And hope as in helping other possibilities exist, not excessive positivity. That is certainly not what I mean by hope. But certainly hope as in that this tiny offshoot of a creek that’s a problem or it could be a massively all-consuming problem that is off the main set of your waterways but is not the only waterway that is the landscape of your life. Your water is always flowing like all water in the world towards the ocean. It wants to connect. It wants to belong. That is the nature of water and it’s perfectly designed to do that and to get through the terrain. It can get through rock. It can break things open. It’s a powerful force.

So, there’s so much more to us to explore and find and ways to create meaning and to create compassion for how things are happening in our lives. And that I is what I particularly want to bring into spaces of exploring how power and control impacts our experience in the workplace and the kind of identity we might form about ourselves as we’re in the workplace or as we’re experiencing that power and control in the workplace and the kind of person then that we want to be and how we celebrate all of the life that we live in.

Thanks for hanging out with me in the studio today. It’s really cool to spend time together and I would love to share with you what I’ve got to offer. It’s all on the website pulongstudio.com.