The fundamental new direction in therapy is more than just a set of new techniques explains Bill O'Hanlon in an article first published in 1995.

MARISA, an Italian immigrant to New Zealand, worked as a house cleaner. Although she was an intelligent woman who spoke impeccable English, her block against writing had prevented her from getting a job more suited to her skills. After more than two decades in an unhappy marriage, she had recently visited a psychic who told her she had lived her life as a 'doormat'. So, she enrolled in an assertiveness training course at a nearby community college but, during a role-playing exercise, she had panicked and run from the room. She thought she was going crazy. Soon afterward, she went to see narrative therapist David Epston and within minutes of their first session announced to him, "I'm bad! I'm bad! I'm bad!"

Marisa then told Epston her life story. Born in Italy just after World War II, she was her mother's 21st child. It was only many years later that she learned that her true father was a 72 year old family friend who had been close to death at the time of her birth. While for the few remaining years of his life he had been loving toward her, her mother and her siblings viewed her as a lower form of life, telling her she was only fit to be a servant. At 13, she had been sent to work as a housekeeper for an older sister in England, where she was treated poorly and was sexually abused by her sister's husband. When she was 18, she decided to escape her family and emigrated to New Zealand where she married and found menial work Recently, she had begun to chafe against her long subservience within her marriage, and her anger sometimes frightened her.

After the session, Epston, who was then developing his narrative approach to therapy, wrote Marisa a letter:

"I take it that telling me, a virtual stranger, your life story, which turned out to be a history of exploitation, frees you to some extent from it. To tell a story about your life turns it into a history, one that can be left behind, and makes it easier for you to create a future of your own design. Also, your story needs to be documented so it isn't lost to you and is in a form available to others whom you might choose to inspire. They will come to understand, as I have, how you were, over time, strengthened by your adverse circumstances. Everyone's attempts to weaken you, by turning you into a slave, paradoxically strengthened your resolve to be your own person. This, of course, is not to imply that you haven't paid dearly for this and haven't suffered. You almost accepted your family's attitude towards you and this accounted for the doormat lifestyle that you lived for some time.

"You probably wondered why your father loved you quite so much when your mother didn't want you. She taught you a servant mentality: that is, to do for others and expect very little in return. For a mother to betray a child into servitude, she must have had to convince herself you were bad; otherwise she couldn't have been your Judas and betrayed you. You were turned into a Cinderella with other people in charge of you. Your family did the worst for you and tried to have you believe that that was the best you could or should expect because you were 'bad'. They tried to convince you (and were undoubtedly successful for periods of time) that you deserved their punishments and cruelties.

"Seeing that medium who called you a doormat was a turning point in your life and you started your revolution with your husband because he was closest at hand. When you were a slave, you no doubt chose a partner who would be your master and you could serve, grateful for crumbs from his table. Your husband must have been shocked by your demands for justice and equality in your relationship. You had not spent all your strength in your suffering and slavery. Instead, this marked the onset of your taking action in this family. You started accepting and trusting your own experience. Your own power was being drawn upon to shape events in your life for the first time. You broke out of some of the things that were depressing you and keeping you down. You gave yourself evidence that your anger was righteous anger. I gather your appreciation of yourself gained you more respect in your husband's eyes.

In your 30s, your own power surfaced and was accepted by you. And no one could submerge it any longer. You had so much courage, in fact, that you decided to seek justice and put things right. By doing so, you drew a distinction between your history and your future, In your history, your life was defined by other peoples' attitudes and ideas about you; in your future, your life will be defined by your respect and appreciation of yourself. Your mother's death finally freed you — you no longer had to search for a mother who could never be. You were released to go forward in your life, believing in yourself. No wonder you feel dizzy with possibility. Remember, being a prisoner can make you accommodate to your prison. To be released from it is disconcerting, and many return to it for refuge. I believe you always, always, had some sense that evil was being done to you and, for that reason, you were never made into a real slave. Rather, you were a prisoner of war, degraded, yes, but never broken. To my way of thinking, you are a heroine who doesn't know her heroism."

Marisa moves on

Several weeks later, Marisa returned to therapy, along with her husband. She had reread the letter many times. It was, she said, "reality," there in black and white, and she could not deny it. As a result, she now saw herself as a person who had had a terrible life but had always been strong and had never submitted completely to a devalued view of herself. She saw the events that had recently alarmed her as evidence that she was finally leaving old 'victim' patterns behind and creating a new life. She told Epston she didn't feel a need to see him any further at that time.

Five years later, she contacted Epston again. By then, she had launched a career as a dress designer and told him, "My life has a future now. It will never be the same again." The first session and the letter, she said, had been the beginning of a life of greater self respect and achievement. For some time afterward, she had reread the letter, especially when she suffered from flashbacks of her brother-in-law's sexual abuse. After a while, she had not needed to reread the letter at all, and had finally destroyed it.

I first saw Epston's letter to Marisa a few years ago, on a plane coming back from New Zealand, in a sheaf of materials he had given me on narrative therapy. I have read scores of exciting case histories showcasing new techniques over the years, but this was different — it made me cry. I was moved by how Marisa had reclaimed her life and I marvelled at how this transformation had been accomplished.

Then, as now, I was working mainly as a brief, solution oriented therapist. Although I had occasionally witnessed dramatic transformations, most of my work was far more modest than Epston's work with Marisa. I helped people get out of stuck patterns and move on with their lives. If Marisa had come to me, I probably would have helped her with her writing block. I might have asked her what other things she had mastered after thinking they would be impossible. Could she transfer that sense of competence to writing English? I might have asked how she had learned to speak and understand English and tried to use the same methods to help her learn to write. I think I would have helped Marisa. She might have gotten a better job, incrementally improved her life, and triggered further positive changes. I think she would have been satisfied. But Epston's ambitions for Marisa had been bigger than mine would have been.

"If you come to my office," his letter seemed to say, "I'm going to help you re-invent your life. You are more than the story you have told yourself about who you are." Marisa was not only going to write, she was going to get a new life, a new chance. For Epston, it was always the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and each session offered the possibility of a new beginning. His work, I thought, contained the ambitions of long-term therapy within a short-term time frame. Yet there was more to it than this. And I couldn't quite grasp how it was done.

The fork in the road

In the years since that day on the plane, I have read about or watched many other therapeutic encounters involving David Epston and his friend and sometime collaborator Michael White, the main developers of the narrative method. At first, it was like watching magic. A person like Marisa would come in, walking a road they'd been on for years, a road that seemed destined to lead to more misery. During the conversation, a fork would appear, a path that had always been there, but somehow had gone unnoticed.

It wasn't that I'd never seen that happen in therapy before. I had often helped people find roads they had missed, in the form of solutions and resources that they'd previously used successfully and could apply again. At other times, I helped them find a new destination on the map, and we bushwhacked and experimented until we hacked out a bumpy new footpath.

But Epston and White seemed to go beyond that: they conjured up doorways to new identities out of nowhere. It seemed inexplicable, radical and elegant. When people found themselves in a corner, Epston and White could paint a door on the wall where it was needed, and then, like Bugs Bunny in the cartoons, open it and help them walk through it. I wanted to know how to paint those doors. But the first few times I tried to imitate what I had seen them do, I was more like Elmer Fudd, who tries to walk through the doors that Bugs has painted and crashes into the wall.

So, a couple of years ago, I invited David to Omaha, Nebraska, where I live, to give a workshop. He showed a videotape of his third interview with Rhiannon, a 15 year old girl who was close to dying from anorexia.

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© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Bill O'Hanlon (1995)

This article first appeared in Volume 2, No, 4 (1995) of the Human Givens journal.

BILL O'HANLON, MS., is the author of several books including: In search of solutions, Solution orientated Hypnosis: An Ericksonian Approach, A Brief Guide to Brief Therapy. He teaches workshops internationally and has a private practice.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

>Find out more about the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College events

Brief Psychotherapy
strategies Seminar

How to lift depression: effective brief therapy Workshop

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

>Find out more about the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College events

Brief Psychotherapy strategies Seminar

How to lift depression: effective brief therapy Workshop

Return to top