Earworms!! They drive me mad. They have followed me all my life. Childhood ditties, teenage ABBA, church songs (so many church songs), then the songs that occupy a mother’s world. “It’s Madeline, it’s Madeline…” If you know, you know. And now, at 60, I have Joni Mitchell wandering around in my head with clouds and looking at things from both sides.
Perhaps that song fits where I am at the moment. Not just personally, but in my work too.
I started Defining Stories in 2018 because I had fallen in love with Narrative Therapy and this idea that the stories we tell about our lives shape how we live them. Eight years later, I still believe that. But I understand stories with a bit more nuance now.
Maybe that’s just getting older. You think you know something and then life comes along and says, well, actually, have you considered this? Sometimes rather brutally (throws glitter accompanied by maniacal laugh). Eight years of sitting with people has certainly changed things for me. So has losing people and loving people. Writing. Changing my mind. Questioning things I once felt quite certain about. Watching my children become proper adults, which is frankly terrifying and wondrous at the same time. Living through a pandemic. And repeatedly discovering that life has very little interest in my plans for it.
I used to think stories were mostly about meaning. I don’t think I paid enough attention to power.
Who gets to tell the story? Who decides what it means? Those of us who love history know how slippery this gets. History depends enormously on who is holding the pen. Chinua Achebe famously observed, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I think our personal histories can be like that too. Who held the pen? Who still does? And which stories were handed to us so early that it never occurred to us that we were allowed to question them?
There are national stories, family stories, cultural stories, religious stories. Stories about what it means to be a good woman, a good man, a good mother, a good religious person, a successful person, a resilient person. Stories about where we should be by now. What we should have achieved. What we should have got over. How a person of our age really should have their shit together.
Some stories nourish us. Others are bloody awful houseguests. They move in and start rearranging the furniture. Before long they are telling us what to think about ourselves. “You should have known better.” “You should be over this.” “Look how well everyone else is doing.” “You’re not enough.” “You’re too much.” “You fucked that up.” On and on they go.
And sometimes one of those stories gets so loud that it starts speaking for the whole of a life.
This is probably still the thing I love most about Narrative Therapy: the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem. I know. It sounds like it belongs on a T-shirt, possibly next to a picture of a sunflower. But over these years I have seen what can happen when that idea is taken seriously.
Because if I am not the problem, we can turn around and have a look at the problem instead. Where the hell did this story come from? Who taught me this? Why have I believed it for so long? What does it want from me? What does it conveniently leave out? Have there been times when I haven’t gone along with it? What else has been true about me that this story doesn’t mention?
Maybe that is what I am hearing in Joni at the moment. The other sides.
Not finding the right story. I’m becoming less convinced there is one. And certainly not replacing a miserable story with a nice positive one and calling it therapy. Life is far too complicated for that sort of weaponised positivity.
It’s more about making room for contradiction. For the bits that don’t fit. For the possibility that something I have believed about myself for forty years may contain some truth and also be completely wrong. I rather like that thought.
And when I think about it, perhaps it isn’t surprising that I ended up doing this work. I grew up around storytellers. Particularly when I was very young, I had the extraordinary privilege of sitting at tables with people who told stories. I listened. I suspect I learned far more at those tables than I realised at the time.
Now, as a therapist and supervisor, I still spend much of my life sitting at tables. Real ones and metaphorical ones. People bring their stories and we have a look at them together.
Often we start on one side. Sometimes we stay there for some time before a little butterfly of a memory turns up, or a contradiction. Something the old story had forgotten or hidden. We notice a small act of resistance or protest that didn’t look like resistance at all at the time. Another side appears. And then perhaps another. Not necessarily a happier story. Just more of the story.
So yes, eight years later, I still believe stories matter. I probably believe it more than ever. I just don’t think I know them quite as well as I once thought I did. These days, I think I’m more interested in staying curious about them than being certain about what they mean.
Maybe that’s what Joni has been doing in my head all week.
Or maybe it’s just another bloody earworm.
Nicole Conner is the founder of Defining Stories and is an accredited narrative therapist, a professional supervisor, and a registered counsellor with the Australian Counselling Association.