Stories From The Therapy Room

(A non-clinical approach to psychotherapy and counselling)

A 40 year old client of mine was on the third session with me. I noticed that in every session she spoke about numerous things. Sometimes, she discussed her difficulties in talking in front of people at her place of work and other times she spoke about how she has progressed from where she was before to where she is now in her career. She talked about her financial insecurity since her divorce. And she also told me about her sexual exploration and the shame and guilt she goes through.

Curious, I asked her why she thinks she needs to tell me everything. Her intention was that if she tells her therapist everything, it would help the therapist help her. However, I was confused about how to organize her random thoughts. At the same time I was aware that she needed this space to share what was in her mind and this was one way she felt heard. Her therapist listening to her also helped her open up so many thoughts and emotions she had bottled up. 

On an intuition, I asked her to narrate her experience like a biography, like telling a story. I felt like this might give me an idea of how she was organizing her thoughts and would understand how she perceived herself. The client was willing to go forward with this so that we could further explore. I told her she has to finish her biography in 3 minutes and start with, “I know a person called Rani ..” 

Thus began her story …..

“Rani is a dirty person – when she decides to do something she just goes ahead with it without considering the consequences. Rani is 40 years of age and she is quite successful and that is one of the positive aspects to her. Rani is also very self critical, judges herself and this stunts her growth and sometimes scares her to put her ideas across to others. Rani’s childhood was filled with anxiety which continues to this day.” 

Though her experiences were narrated at random in the 3 minutes, I was able to perceive that she had appreciation for her achievements, and realised that her critical side limited her experiences.   She had gone through some difficulties in her childhood which has made her anxious and unable to have fun. 

Earlier, I used to tell my clients to write down their story starting with, “Once upon a time there lived a person called ..” This new approach, to work on it like it was a biography beginning with “I know a person called ..” helped the client dissociate, maintain objectivity and also gave me the clue about the plot of her story. In this client story the central theme was the fight between the client’s inner critic and her inner rebel. The first sentence of her story was, “She is a dirty person.” This is the voice of her inner critic. She believed that her  inner critic’s standards were high and she needed to be perfect, otherwise she felt that she was worthless. Though it was evident to me that her inner critic needed to be shrunk, the storytelling was what helped the client identify her inner critic and the importance of paying attention to it.  

When I asked the client where she would like to start her work with me, she said, “I want to give attention to the inner critic.” Now we had a clear focus to start our work in the next session.

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When the client’s experiences are narrated in a random way, asking them to tell it as a story can help in organizing the experiences and prioritizing what needs to be worked on.