11
Sharevision
The “Bambi”
In this chapter, I want to argue that the field has been evolving toward a more communal set of practices for therapy. Michael White and David Epston had begun to use the reflecting team as an audience for the project of re-authoring someone’s story. I, too, had been struck by the way a reflecting team could fold in persons who were not originally part of a troubled situation but might change its outcome beneficially. I found confirmation of this idea in social constructionist Kenneth Gergen’s (1994) comments on the interactional context of meaning. Finding the idea that meaning originates within an individual mind to be deeply problematic, he writes:
Words (or texts) within themselves bear no meaning; they fail to communicate. They only appear to generate meaning by virtue of their place within the realm of human interaction. It is human interchange that gives language its capacity to mean, and it must stand as the critical locus of concern. I wish then to replace textuality with communality. This shift allows us to restructure much that has been said about meaning within texts as a commentary on forms of relatedness.” (pp. 263-4)
I resonated to this outlook. In coming to New England, I had set myself the task of finding places where family therapy was hard, if not impossible, to do, and where problems resided in complex social envelopes. This search led me to a child protection agency in the hills of Northern Massachusetts called People’s Bridge Action. It had started in the ’70s as a street-front outfit and still had the flavor of a renegade brigade. They weren’t looking for a consultant but an anti-consultant, and I saw that any effort to project expertise on my part would be taken as a dare. On the other hand, what better place to hone my search for a less hierarchical way to teach and practice?
I initially learned about PBA from a colleague named Lisa Thompson, who worked there until she decided to get a degree in social work. She wanted to bring me together with the Director, Richard Baldwin, figuring we would hit it off, and she was right. It seemed that he was as disestablishmentarian as I was. He had a background in fine arts and was a bona fide painter to boot. With the consent of his staff, he offered me the job. However, it only paid $35 an hour, for a total of two hours a month plus a commute of an hour each way. So the staff generously decided that what they really needed was to come down to Amherst once a month, have their two-hour consultation at my house, and eat a crunchy lunch at an alternative eatery called Daisy’s.
This fit my subterranean purpose well. From talking to the group, I discovered that they liked the idea of doing a case consultation along reflecting team lines. We agreed on the need to depathologize our work and found the emphasis on stories rather than problems immediately helpful. Of course, one hazard of a staff that bright and democratic was that everyone was equal but not all were the same. Case discussions could be like religious debates, as the tensions between individual orientations and relational orientations played themselves out.
I suggested we try something new: we would go round the room and, instead of trying to give suggestions or advice to the person presenting a case we would come up with an image, a play, a movie, or a book. Personal experiences that resonated with the situation were encouraged. We would not engage in back-and-forth arguments, and we outlawed so-called constructive criticism, along with advice and suggestions of any sort. Baldwin was interested in narrative theory and other ideas that were coming out of the increasingly influential postmodern movement, so at first we called our process “narrative supervision.” Then Baldwin came up with “sharevision” (being something of a software nut, he was inspired by the computer term “shareware”), and it stuck.
The reflecting process turned out to be a process that actually did dissolve problems. Many of the dilemmas aired in agency case conferences were no-win binds where fixing a situation in one place only caused it to break down somewhere else. There were many cases where, for instance, an alcoholic husband would keep beating his wife, she would get a restraining order or go to a shelter, he would reappear sad and sorry, she would take him back, and everything would return to the status quo. The staff would bombard the therapist with suggestions, but she would often reject them, saying that she had tried each one. The group would then suggest that she refer the family to another therapist or agency. The therapist would refuse, the tension level would rise, and an argument over whether the therapist was “codependent” would break out.
This kind of scene was guaranteed to produce the well-known occupational hazard called “burnout,” but once I began to use a reflecting process, these tense escalations stopped. I began to think that burnout was an understandable side-effect of ineffectual help. In fact, the most pressing task of case conferences was often to upgrade the morale of the discouraged therapist. Once she felt more hopeful, she could often find new ways to deal with her intractable clients, if only to bear witness and “be there.”
When I first introduced a reflecting process, I noticed it had an amazing serenity effect. For one thing, everyone had his or her own space bubble. Unlike the case conferences of the past, there was no chance of being interrupted or not being able to get a word in edgewise. An anticipatory quietness prevailed; people would go off on riffs that were often inspiring and had the rest of us in trance. I remember Shakespeare being invoked in reference to an alcoholic mother whose children were about to be taken away by the state. The therapist felt angry, useless, sad. In an unlikely comparison to Romeo and Juliet, someone said that even though the Bottle of Poison was threatening the Cause of Love, it had not yet succeeded, so despite the manifest dangers, she must be doing something right. This idea, while a bit ludicrous, gave the therapist some space and calmed her down.
To those who would say that this approach was not aggressive enough for child protection, I can only answer that this staff knew all about protection. Two young female social workers told me about their fears when they went alone to rural homes to check on reports of child abuse. I was struck by the name they used for themselves: Bambi. The enemy’s name was The Men in Orange, because every fall the hilltowns were full of hunters in orange hunting suits. The Bambis, quite logically, thought of themselves as prey, especially those who were bisexual or gay. They had entered the child protection field out of their own commitment to human rights, and to them it was personal.
To illustrate, here is a story I heard from a young social worker at another outreach agency where I consulted. She had gone to the house of a family where a daughter had been running away from home. The mother and daughter were out, so the father answered the door. He was clearly not glad to see the worker. As she sat down to wait at the kitchen table, he picked up a knife and began flourishing it suggestively while buttering a piece of bread. At the same time, he told her about an upcoming pig slaughtering ceremony that his community looked forward to each year. He said that his six-year-old boy loved to drink the blood. At this point, the worker told me, she decided to leave. Thinking to myself that consultants can do very little with pig slaughtering, I concentrated on every possible way to dignify the work of this young woman, acknowledge how assaulted she must feel, and tell her not to lose heart. I don’t remember what I said to her, but it probably had something to do with Joan of Arc.
The Wild Turkey
Another story was told me by one of our own “Bambis,” therapist Jean Flegenheimer. She was working with a young woman, Lorna, who was refusing to leave her house. She had no friends, no activities, and wouldn’t come to see Jean at the clinic, so Jean had to drive to her home. Lorna had asked for help because her mother had recently died and she was afraid that she would “fall off the line” or “go crazy.” Her mother had been agoraphobic, and her death was due to complications from self-starvation. Her father was no help; he was a World War II veteran who suffered from flashbacks and, during these spells, would hold his family at knifepoint. Lorna said that he had sexually abused her younger sister, who was now bulimic and suicidal but would not admit to the abuse. Married for the second time and raising two young children, Lorna blamed herself because she had not been able to prevent her mother’s death.
In our meeting, Jean told us that she had felt stymied in trying to help this paralyzed young mother. She took to going over and sitting in her kitchen and just talking to her. One day, the woman told her about a wild turkey that had come to the field in back of her house. She put out some seeds and bread crumbs. The turkey began to eat the food she left for it. Soon it came regularly and became tame enough to wander close to the house and to Lorna. Jean felt that she, too, was trying to connect with a wild creature. The story of Lorna and the wild turkey symbolized many things: the preoccupation with food that was such a problem in this family; the fear of becoming too close to other humans; the need to nourish and be nourished; the problem of “wildness.” All these issues were contained in the group’s reflections about the turkey and Lorna’s efforts to care for it. Not only were we touched, but our collective conclusion was that Jean’s attempts were paying off.
Lorna did indeed begin to show signs of moving out of her slump. She enrolled her three-year-old in a playgroup; she got the children’s father to take more responsibility for them; she began to reconnect with her sisters; and she even mulled over the idea of going to church. She was now driving to the agency to see Jean. As Jean continued to speak about the case, it changed from another hopeless-sounding situation to an inspirational fable. Lorna had used the story of the wild turkey to communicate about a dilemma of loneliness, and Jean used it to describe a dilemma of connection. Janine Roberts later included it in her book, Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy (1994), but it was such a special story that I wanted to retell it here.
The PBA group, too, felt like a “wild turkey.” Some of the staff’s ways sounded more New Age than I was used to, but my agenda was to learn their language, not to impose mine. Eventually, I hoped, we would arrive at “our” language. The format that we jointly came up with for our consultations was very simple. We would start with a moment of silence, then go round to share what had been going on for us during the past month. During this segment, we acted as a support group. The second half of the meeting consisted of a reflecting process. Someone would present an issue which could be a clinical dilemma, a personal matter, or a crisis in the agency. Everybody would offer an association, after which the presenter would comment back. As this meeting was only held once a month, the group set up pods of three or four persons who would meet in a peer supervision format during the other three weeks. Saving money was imperative, because the staff only had a small amount that they used for all consulting services.
During the next seven years, the agencies that served the poor in Massachusetts came under increasing pressure to become more cost-efficient. This meant that larger agencies began swallowing smaller ones and that professionals who lacked reimbursable degrees were at risk. Many of the staff at PBA had no such degrees. During the last three years of my service, there was a new upset each month: directors were being replaced, staff was being let go, services to families were being disrupted. Finally, PBA was engulfed by North Central Human Services, a large community mental health agency in the neighboring town. The caseloads got bigger and morale dropped lower, but our small staff kept meeting. And what was so amazing was the creativity of this particular group in the face of a collapsing professional world.
I remember a meeting in 1992 when we began to brainstorm against the inevitable. The agency had long been an outpost of reformers, feminists, and idealists, many of them graduates of the UMass School of Education. PBA’s offerings consisted of art therapy with families, children’s music groups, anger classes to transform low self-esteem into protest and ropes courses to build strength and trust. Individual therapy was available for persons in crisis, but the major emphasis was on repairing networks and creating community. Chief among the agency’s projects were a program called Mak-It, designed by Ellen Landis and Deborah Muyskins for a group of young, poor mothers, and a group called Mosaic, directed by social worker Catherine Taylor, for mothers whose children had been sexually abused and whose families had been torn apart by the judicial system.* Here I want to tell the story of Mosaic and our entry onto a larger stage.
New Voices
Mosaic represented a collaboration between Taylor, videographer Carlos Fontes, and a group of unusual mothers. The title was an acronym for Mothers of Survivors Are Interested In Children. They had first met in one of Taylor’s anger classes, and all of them had daughters who had been abused by a husband, boyfriend, or male relative. Fontes, originally from Portugal, had extensive experience in the popular video movement, which used video to help marginalized people tell their stories. Taylor suggested to Fontes that he help the group make a videotape of their struggle to recover from their collective nightmare. The subsequent document, “Not Alone,” was a powerful and moving set of images, shot by Carlos and edited by the Mosaic mothers, who also wrote the script.
But this and other projects were now endangered. As the staff met and pondered how it could take hold of its future, it seemed to me to be answering its own question. We looked around and saw that there were many unusual and colorful programs gathered under our leaky circus tent. Somebody suggested we have a one-day fair at which we would present our ideas to our colleagues in the Valley. So, under the title of “Transforming the Story of Trauma,” we held an event to acquaint local agency people with examples of the way we had been using drama, music, art and games to change the context of help. The hope was to move people from a framework of pathology to one of play and imagination. Emboldened by the success of our collective story-telling, we decided to have a national conference in Northampton on a similar theme the following year.
This second conference was called “New Voices in Human Systems,” and it was the first time I had ever tried to design such a meeting. I had the resources of North Central Human Services, then directed by organizational consultant John Szivos, to back me up, and the artistic services of Dick Baldwin, who designed our brochure and poster. The presenters were outstanding writers, teachers, researchers, and practitioners like Mary Catherine Bateson, Mary and Kenneth Gergen, Sheila McNamee, and the late Donald Schoen. When I made up a list of recent books and articles by all the speakers, reflectors, and facilitators, I came up with sixteen titles, all published since 1990. At the end, the Mosaic group covered themselves with glory by showing their video, “Not Alone.”
The three days of this conference were attended by 250 persons representing human services, teaching, and organizational consulting. In shape, the event was reflexive and collaborative. Each presentation flowed into and fed back upon the next. The two daily speakers contributed what I called starter dough, giving brief talks that were then commented on by two reflecting panelists. After this the audience commented, and then the ball was passed to twenty small discussion groups, each with two facilitators. Basically, this was the reflecting process writ large and transposed to the level of a conference. To my surprise, not only was it a success, but it actually broke even.
At this time, I joined with systemic therapists Ros Draper and Margaret Robinson from the Tavistock Clinic in London, and Jim Wilson and Geoff Faris of The Family Institute in Cardiff, to organize a small conference in Devonshire called The Dartington Event. At the suggestion of Cathy Taylor, representatives of both the Mosaic group and the Mak-it group attended and presented their ideas at the first meeting. It was unusual in British conferences to mix professional psychotherapists with peer advocates who had once been “clients.” However, their heartfelt stories moved many of the people who heard them speak, and the Mosaic Mothers became a tradition at that conference for several years.
When PBA finally closed its doors in 1996, few of the original staff were still there. All the people I knew had found new employment, and in some cases had started consulting practices of their own. I remember the ritual we used when the end was in sight. I was living in a retirement community in Northampton, on a hill above the community’s meetinghouse. One of the staff members, social worker Akiba Mermey, was a practicing Sufi, and he, with Lisa Thompson, organized a leaving ceremony for us. I bought two dwarf Golden Delicious apple trees and planted them beforehand in front of my cottage. Lisa started us off by burning the usual mixture of cedar and sage while we held hands, then Akiba led us in a Sufi dance and we all whirled in place. We offered appreciations of our long connection to each other, hugged each other, and took our leave. Later, when I went down to the meetinghouse to get my mail, I ran into a group of puzzled neighbors. They asked me, “Who was that group of crazy people on the hill?” I tried to explain, but what could I say? That we were therapists doing a rain dance? So I left it vague. In the six years since the demise of PBA, one of the two apple trees was sliced off by a mowing machine, but the other one blooms every year in the spring and bears wormy but golden apples in the fall.
In looking back on these experimental days, there seemed to be no end to the uses to which Andersen’s reflecting process could be put. I also used it to teach family therapy seminars at the University of Massachusetts and the Smith School of Social Work, and was struck by the way it changed the dynamics of the class. Left to its own devices, a mixed gender seminar of more than 12 people would evolve into two groups: people who raised their hands (usually male) and people who didn’t (usually female). The first group, which I called the Lions, would begin to feel smarter and smarter, and the second group, the Lambs, would feel dumber and dumber. Soon this latter group never raised their hands at all. Changing to a reflecting format insured that every voice would be heard.
Naturally, there were complaints by devotees of “open and honest” debate, but I explained that I was interested in affirmative action for shy people. For instance, in a large group, I might ask smaller pods to take turns talking together while the others listened in. This seemed to provide the safer environment I was looking for. Sometimes I would join the pod that was speaking, adding my protective status to the mix. This seems like a contradiction to the project of not being an expert, but I took care to set things up so that ideas would come out of other people, not just me. I also began to think in terms of moving in and out of hierarchy, because it is too simplistic to believe that a therapist or a teacher can ever be status-free. But the most important discovery I made during these years was that a reflecting process, applied to different venues and to different contexts, was one way to influence the emotional atmosphere of any group toward more openness and comfort.
Jack and the Beanstalk
My most successful example of a reflecting process in therapy is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. After I left Brattleboro, Judy Davis and I continued to do consultations together. On one occasion in 1994, when I was doing a joint consultation for PBA and North Central Human Services, I asked her to join me. Present were twelve-year-old Jack and his mother, Lori; Jack’s therapist, Jeanne Ingress; and two new therapists, one who would work with the family’s two other children and one who was going to work with the whole family. David Haddad, the Clinical Director of North Central, and about twenty-five staff members from both agencies, were also there. Dick Baldwin, fascinated by media affairs as usual, was acting as our camera man.
I have many ways of doing these theaters-in-the-round. Here I began by introducing myself and Judy and explaining to everybody about the reflecting team and how it was going to work. I told them it was “like a beehive or a big brain, like many, many brains buzzing together.” The next step was to introduce the four people who would be our team and to ask the rest of the participants to listen “as if” they were the professionals in the case (see Chapter 12 for a discussion of Harlene Anderson’s interesting “as if” exercise). Judy and I then thanked Lori and Jack for being willing to come to this consultation. Lori, the mother, was a big woman in her forties, comfortable-looking but with signs of strain in her face. Jack, who was sitting next to her, meek and hunched-over, reminded me of an endearing puppy.
In a reflecting consultation, I always start with the person who has asked for my help. Because the family has usually never heard of me, I weave myself to them through that person. So I turned to Jeanne and asked, “What was it about this family that inspired you to ask them to come?” Jeanne explained that they were so friendly and outgoing that she was sure they would not object to such a crowd. Lori had called her earlier in the day and said she had been crying all morning because her son Jack was in trouble again. Jeanne had told her about our meeting, and how the family we were going to see had cancelled, and Lori had jumped at the chance.
I then asked Jeanne what her concerns were, and she said she was worried about Jack, whom she had been seeing for two years. She asked him if he minded her talking about him, and he said he didn’t care. She then went on to ask Lori whether she or Lori should tell the story, and Lori invited Jeanne to do so. Jeanne told us that Jack got into another fight at school, and the teacher had found a knife in his pocket. The school said that if he got into one more fight, he would be suspended for good and there was also a threat of a CHINS petition, which meant that the state would take custody of Jack.
Jeanne then described a childhood heavy with violence. After Lori divorced Jack’s father, she had a boyfriend who used to beat her. In order to get the boyfriend out of the house, Jack told the police that this man had sexually abused him, even though he later said this was not true. Jeanne said to us, “Jack is a protector.” Jeanne also told us that when Jack was small, three adolescent girls who lived in the same house had sexually molested him. Then one of their boyfriends found out he had AIDS and cut his wrists at Jack’s kitchen table, spilling much blood. Jeanne said that as a result of seeing and experiencing so much violence, Jack had a lot of anger in him. In fact, the fights at school had gotten so bad recently that he was sent for three weeks to a hospital for observation. After being put on medication, he was allowed to come home, and, except for this latest incident, he had been doing well.
At this point, I was hearing the “cascade of violence” theory: the idea that if a boy is victimized as a child, a cache of anger will build up that will spill over into violence to others when he is bigger. A social picture to that effect was already forming, backed by health professionals, agencies, the school. So, looking consciously for an emotional connecting point (see Chapter 14), I cut in to ask Lori: “Is that why you were crying?” In response, Lori said she had phoned Jack’s father to tell him about the incident and he had told her, “My girlfriend says we’re going to court for full custody and you’re not going to see Jack anymore.” I asked Jack, “Did you know why your mom was crying?” He didn’t, so Jeanne explained that his dad had threatened to take him away from his mom. He replied that if this happened, he would sneak out at night and run home from the city where his father lived. He was a sparky little fellow.
The conversation went back to the fight. Jack said he had gotten mad at a boy who had kicked one of his friends in the face and was always sitting on his little brother. Lori said that the presence of the knife in Jack’s pocket was an accident. The night before, Jack and his older sister were bothering the mother’s boyfriend and he was yelling at them, so she sent them upstairs. While there, they decided to run away to Maine, and Jack had put the knife in his pocket because they were going to use it to catch fish. I asked Lori what of all of this had pushed her to come in that morning, and she said her worst fear was losing Jack. She said, “I’ve had him since he was inside of me. I don’t want to lose this kid.” Caught on video was the loving look she gave him.
We broke now, and our reflecting team of four, led by Judy, seated themselves in a circle. Judy started, saying that Lori and Joe were so different from what she had expected. After having heard about a family where so many terrible things had been going on—abuse, violence, hospitals, police—she said she had an image of an adolescent boy who was “really tough, really angry,” and who was probably being dragged in by his mother. “What I saw instead,” she said, “was this sweet looking boy. What came across the most for me was the love that was in this family. His love for his mother and his mother’s love for him, just permeated everything. So I was struck by the difference between the story I made up in my head and the story I now have after meeting them.”
David Haddad, the clinic director, commented on how resilient and alive Jack and his family were. He had expected to see a family that was more beaten down. He commented on how far Jack was willing to go to protect his mother, brother, and friends, and how his mother was willing to go to any ends to get what she needed for him. He wondered how they were able to maintain such resilience. Ellen Landis, a dance therapist, spoke of the mother’s “sense of knowing and caring,” and how she and Jack protected each other. Then another therapist said that what came up for her was the sense of justice. She noted that Jack had figured out a way to get rid of this man who was abusing his mother, and that when he saw his brother getting hurt he went after the attacker. In other words, his sense of justice got him into trouble. She wondered what it felt like to be in the other systems that stand for justice, like the Department of Social Services, and how the different concepts of justice fit together. She commented on how everybody is trying hard to do what Mom and Jack are trying to do—make things work.
Judy came in again, saying how helpful the word justice was. She noticed that a story about the family had evolved that had to do with anger, but somehow that word didn’t fit for her. She said, “There’s a piece that’s anger, but maybe that’s not the title of the book. It might be a little chapter. But justice, wow! He’s this little crusader for justice.” David commented again on Jack’s resourcefulness and added, “He has a message for kids that often doesn’t get talked about. Many kids his age are dealing with insignificant things in comparison with the kind of struggle that Jack has gone through. It’s not always easy being a kid. It’s not just going to school, it’s all these other things. And we who are adults and work as teachers and caregivers have to listen to these messages and give kids a voice. We don’t often do that very well.”
The team now went back to their seats in the larger circle, and I asked Lori and Jack what their thoughts were. Lori, nodding her head, said, “They care.” Jack only shrugged, so Judy asked him, “Is this what you expected to hear?” and he said “I didn’t expect this,” gesturing to the assembled crowd. Everyone laughed, and Lori explained that Jeanne had said that just a few people would be there and to her this was a few. She said that her mother had 40 grandchildren, and when they all got together she didn’t even know who everybody was. Jack said his class at school had 24 kids in it, so he was used to it too.
At this point, I asked Jack an out-of-the-blue question: “Did you ever want to be an actor?” Sometimes an idea or image will come up from the “deep well,” as I call it, and I will have to decide whether or not to go with it. In this case, I did, whereupon Jack surprised me by saying “Yes.” When I asked what kind of actor he’d like to be, he said, “I’d steal Knight Rider’s acting kit.” Later I learned this is a James Bond type show for kids where the hero goes around helping people. What was fascinating was that Jack’s hero image of himself, though at odds with the school’s perception, was corroborated by later evidence.
Judy then asked Lori if the team had said anything that surprised her, and she said she liked David Haddad’s comment that kids ought to be listened to. She said that Jack had a teacher with a “strict voice”—the same teacher she had had when she was Jack’s age—who made him feel “this big,” so of course Jack was going to take out his anger on other people. Jeanne said she thought that Jack must have been surprised by the reflections because he was so often reprimanded at school for being a bad boy, and here he heard people say that he was a seeker after justice.
Building on my previous hunch, I said to Jack, “Well, I have a feeling that if we did a play, it would be called Jack the Giant Killer.” I asked him if he knew the story. He said yes, he had the book, but his brother had stolen it, and when he gave it back, it was “scribbled on.” He made a disgusted face. I would have asked him more about his impressions of the book, but I suddenly realized I had left the new social worker, Norma, out when asking about reactions to the team, so I turned to her instead. She said she wanted to hear from those persons in the group who had listened from the point of view of the teachers and other professionals.
When I went to the “as if” professionals, a number of corrective points were made. People talked about the need for safety and the concern for protection. One of the speakers made the sensible point that there is a difference between a DSS worker’s job and what therapists are supposed to do. When we had gone round, I turned to Lori and asked her to give this whole experience a grade. I said she didn’t have to give it an A plus, but asked that it “not be below a B.” Lori smiled and said, “Well, really, above a C.” I turned to Jack and asked the same thing, and he said, “A plus.” When I asked why, he said “Because you care a lot.” I thanked him for taking us so seriously.
Here Judy came in again. She asked what it would be like for Jack’s teachers if they were introduced to this story through the idea of justice. She said, “This child is the Giant Killer who, when he feels there is an injustice, acts in a way that looks to other people like anger. If this other piece of the story were given to them, would they interact differently with him and his family? How do you and everyone involved enlarge this picture that has so much more richness than the original story?” “And more goodness,” I added. Lori looked hard at us. She said, “Do you mean there is more bad showing than there is good? And you see good, so why doesn’t that come out more?” When Judy nodded, Lori said, “I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about, but people see the wrongs, hear the wrongs, so they’re not going to want to know nothing about you.” How true, I thought, and how important it was for her to say it.
So I asked Lori whether it would be helpful for people who might not know the whole story to see the tape. Lori said she would like her fiancé to see it, and Jack said he’d like to include his brother and sister. Norma wanted to show it to some of the other therapists she worked with, and Lori suggested setting up a meeting with the principal and the teachers at the school. Jeanne said that a meeting was already arranged with the school. Judy turned to Jeanne and asked if it was all right with her to show the video to them and she said, “Absolutely, I feel very good about this.”
Then Lori did a double take, saying, “I just hope Jack’s teacher won’t take what I said in the wrong way. She’s a really nice person.” I said, “You can tell her yourself when you show her the tape,” and Lori said, to much laughter, “That’s the God’s honest truth.” I said that our idea about the videotape was that it was not just a record but something that could add power to everybody’s voice. And that it did not just document the past but could affect the future. Dick Baldwin was still taping at the far end of the room and I knew he had the same opinion, so I said to him “Right, Dick?” and he said, “Right.”
Then I stood up to say goodbye to Lori and Jack, but to my surprise Lori just sat there and pointed to Dick. “He never got in the picture,” she said. I felt a little shocked. How could I have forgotten to include him? This was another example of the way this method seems to spread ownership: if I left someone or something out, another person would so often remind me. So I asked Jack if he wanted to hold the camera. He nodded and walked briskly up to Dick, being photographed all the way, and Dick walked back to our group, being photographed all the way back. Watching the tape later, that sudden switch as Dick and Jack exchanged roles spoke volumes. Judy, in an article she wrote about the case later (Davis, 2000), noted how Jack looked all at once taller and prouder. She said that this moment seemed to her like a small coming of age ceremony and that it was similar to the Bar-Bat Mitzvah ritual that she had written so much about, despite it being in the context of therapy. In this opinion, she agreed with Michael White, who has often used the ritual of therapy is to create a public validation of a person’s worth.
I then asked Dick what his thoughts were, and he gave a very eloquent reply. He said that he was trying to follow the conversation rather than just taping the individuals as they spoke. He was asking himself, “If I were Lori, what would I want to see?” Whenever possible he had included Lori and Jack in the picture, pointing out that in most taped interviews the family members are separated from the team and one can’t see their reactions to what the team is saying. He ended by sharing his impression of how “loving and powerful” they were as a family.
I liked that word “powerful,” as it was a description that specifically described this family and was not just positive in a general way. To reinforce the different story that the video captured, I suggested we have a screening at PBA. Dick agreed and said it would be good to hear a conversation that moved from “a family experiencing problems” to “a family in collaboration with others trying to change something.” He said, “It was exciting to see something growing like this.” I said, “Like a Beanstalk.” Then we relieved Jack of his duties and he turned the camera off.
When I looked at the tape, I saw that many of its images confirmed what Dick had hoped to show: the intensity in Lori’s face when she said “I don’t want to lose this kid”; the knowing look between Lori and Jack when the team spoke of the way they protected each other; the interest and surprise in their faces during the introduction of the concept of justice. The whole family did come in to watch the tape later, but Jack told us that Lori’s fiance started talking after the first few minutes and so they never saw more than a bit. I was pleased anyway; we were honoring the new picture of Jack by making it public.
A year later, Judy and I were going to our conference in Devonshire and we wanted to show this tape as an example of a reflecting process. We arranged with Jeanne to meet with Jack and Lori again, to get their permission and to check in with them. I was expecting that Jack would be the same hunched-over, subdued person, and to my surprise in came a tall young man who had shot up about six inches. He was indeed a Beanstalk! He was also alert, funny, talkative, and alive. We learned that he had been given antipsychotic medication while in the hospital and was still taking it when we first met him. Lori told us he had stopped using it shortly afterward because it made him feel like a zombie.
Jeanne told us that she and Lori had fought to get Jack into a new school and that he had responded well to the change. He was getting better grades and had developed techniques for walking away from fights. Lori was looking especially attractive, having cut her hair in bangs, and told us that she was marrying her fiance in a few weeks. The children from each family were going to give their parents away, and Jack had already picked out his tuxedo. Continuing on this future track, I asked Jack what he hoped to be when he grew up, and he said “a bus driver or a lawyer.” Judy then asked what his biggest wish would be if he had a million dollars. In true Knight Rider style, he said, “I would buy houses for all the homeless.”
One of the things that was beginning to impress Judy and me was the halo effect of bringing people together to witness and support Jeanne’s efforts. A staff worker at PBA had said admiringly to Jeanne that she had never known a family to get so many services. One way we kept this halo effect going was by showing the videotape at workshops and bringing back sympathetic messages from the audiences that viewed it. I had been at a conference where Michael White said he had asked a reflecting team to do the same thing. It had occurred to both of us that the reflecting team was a natural agency for creating what he called a “community of concern,” and I was calling an “attending community.”
The following year, I showed our tape at teaching events in Britain, Australia, and Mexico. One young Mexican psychologist, Jania Quintero, was particularly touched by the Beanstalk story and gave me a postcard and a letter to take to Lori and Jack. On my return, Judy and I once again arranged with Jeanne to meet with the family. Jack was taller than ever. Jack’s little brother Danny came in, too, and entertained us with somersaults. Then I read aloud Jania’s postcard, which had a picture of the volcano called Popocatepetl on the back. It said:
Dear Lori and Jack, Lynn Hoffman came to my city this year and showed us a tape about your family. This is to tell you that the echo of the mountains brought your voice and love to many hearts around the world and especially to mine.
While I was reading, I noticed that Jack was busy scribbling, seeming not to pay attention to Jania’s message. When I asked what he was doing, he showed us a letter to Jania. We found it hard to read, because Jack’s handwriting was not of the best, but here it is:
Hi. I am doing good. I hope all you people like my video. I see myself as a good role moddle. I see myself as a very popelar person. I hope my family is doing a lot better. I do hope people will see this video and see what I have to say because I do like to save my mom and brother. Now that my brother is older he is being a little brat. But I do like what I have and I do hope you will all listen. Jack
When we asked how things had gone with the family, Lori told us a startling story. Their landlord, one of the richest men in the area, had tried to molest Jack. He was well known in the neighborhood for sexually abusing children and had been getting away with it for years, but Jack and Lori took him to court. Even though the family lost their apartment, they succeeded in getting their landlord registered as a sex offender. Our young giant killer was still on the job and although Lori’s husband had been fired from his job, he found a new job in a relocation company, and the family found a new house in a better area.
However, not all the news was good. Jack was doing well at the new school, making As and Bs, and continuing to keep himself out of fights, but he was facing a court hearing the very next day. One evening recently, his mother had gone over to “pop a zit” on his face, and he became very agitated and struck out at her. This led to a fit that was so violent that the mother’s husband had to sit on him; in fact, it sounded like some kind of neurological episode. After he calmed down, he had no memory of what had happened, but his sister was so frightened that she called the police before anyone could stop her. His mother didn’t want to press charges, but the police took Jack to the station anyway and gave him a court date.
This was alarming, so we asked Jeanne what she was going to do, and although she didn’t go to court, she did call the lawyer and social worker who were involved with the family and encouraged them to be there. At the hearing, we heard later, the judge gave Jack a lecture about how he shouldn’t hit his mother and followed it up with twenty hours of community service. When Jeanne told us this, Judy and I gave a sigh of relief, but the incident showed the power of the record. The police knew all about Jack, even though it was three years since he had been in a single fight.
After this meeting, we sent Jeanne a Certificate of Appreciation commending her and the family for all their good work and listing their joint and individual accomplishments in detail. In this we were copying White and Epston (1990), who had been using similar documents as part of their effort to create “counter-stories” for people. Not long after that, PBA suffered the fate of many agencies serving poor families in the Massachusetts hilltowns: it closed down. Jeanne lost her job, which left her in a difficult situation because her degree did not allow her to be reimbursed by insurance. She also lost touch with Lori and Jack, because the family had no telephone and had moved. However, Judy sent a copy of her article to Jeanne, and Jeanne wrote a letter back, thanking Judy and saying,
You also made it sound like my work had meaning, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent (for how will we know how Jack turns out until he’s fully grown?). I’m so grateful to you for evoking the warm feelings that originally went with this work. By the time it was over, the chaotic dysfunction of the agency & the inhumane demands of managed care, covered what was once sacred & good with a veil of such negativity that it became impossible to see if anything we did or thought had any value whatsoever. There are so many lost boys like Jack in the world. Your paper gives a real sense of hope that there are answers that can be evoked.
In ending this story, I want to repeat what I said above about the idea of using the reflecting process to further a new kind of communal work. Our team was not attempting to influence the community in a social action sense; instead we wanted to make a more communitarian event out of therapy. Conventional psychotherapies—individual, group, family—seemed to distance people rather than bring them together. Jeanne’s letter reminded us of “the loneliness of the long distance therapist” and made us glad that we had become witnesses who could appreciate her work.