Every prospective client comes to me with a story. These stories invariably reflect certain perspectives, assumptions, and conjectures. They are laden with facts, interpretations, heartbreak, hope, fear, pride, concern, love, success, failure, confusion, and a host of other currents both obvious and subtle. Often this story distills the complexity of a life lived over decades into a few short minutes of narrative. The stories are always, by their nature, an oversimplification. If I am fortunate enough to work with this client, I will hear the stories of other family members – all of which are a equally complex and inevitably partial. There will usually be some overlap in the stories, but they are almost always widely and obviously divergent in important respects.
It is most often these stories – these views of the world “as it is” – that create the limits of what a family can do together. Families define themselves, as a collective and as individuals, by the stories they tell. The stories then serve as boundaries that limit the family’s possibilities. In most ways, families systems cannot consistently outperform the stories they tell about themselves.
The core of the work I do is actually deceptively simple in theory – I guide families as they create larger stories for themselves. This happens through a process of education, coaching, mapmaking, and simply facilitating conversations that require the family to find new ways of being together and thereby creating a more robust narrative. The rewoven narratives become the center out of which individuals and families as a whole gain the capacity to act differently. These larger stories open new possibilities for thinking, acting and engaging with each other and the world.
Questions:
- What is your family narrative? In what way is that narrative too small for you?
- Think back on the last story you heard from a client. Other than the “facts” what did the client tell you about him or herself.