13
The Christmas Tree Village
Counter-Narratives
I first met Michael White in Adelaide back in the mid-1980s. I had been asked to be one of the speakers at an international conference on children and the family in New South Wales, and to give a workshop in Adelaide. White offered to be my guide or, the way I saw it, my “Nanny.” It turned out that he and his wife, Cheryl, had a newborn of their own, and I was going on trips to the wine country and posing with kangaroos, so I didn’t get to spend much time with him. However, I was intrigued with Adelaide and the group of bright and original-minded family therapists I met there. It didn’t surprise me when White came up with the kind of right-angle ideas that baffle futurologists, because they do not follow a straight line of progression.
White and his New Zealand colleague David Epston (1990) were among the first persons in the field of family therapy to be inspired by the critical writings of French philosophers Michel Foucault (Hoy, 1986) and Jacques Derrida (Norris, 1991). Blending these ideas with offerings from cultural psychology (Bruner, 1990) and anthropology (Geertz, 1973; Myerhoff, 1980), they created a rich new tapestry that they called narrative therapy. The first time I saw White work in this way was in 1988 at a family therapy conference in the U.S. He showed us the tape of a session with a little boy with a soiling problem that illustrated a technique called “externalizing.” The intention was to personify the problem so that it could be seen as an outside hostile force and then to form an alliance with its victims to defeat it. Using what they called “relative influence questions,” they would ask how the problem influenced the person’s life, and then how the person’s life influenced the problem. This idea acknowledged the person’s status as a sufferer, but also introduced the possibility of agency.
Pursuing this goal further, White and Epston might give the problem a name, like Trouble, or Mischief, or Sneaky Poo, depending on how the child or the family described it. Monster Busting and Fear Taming were other strategies for fending off threats to children’s peace of mind. This technique had an instinctive naturalness and charm that appealed both to children and to the adults who came with them. They appealed to me, too. I felt that this was a way in which therapists could draw upon the language of the people they saw instead of the language in which they had been trained. The technique also undermined the tendency of psychiatric terms to locate emotional and behavioral disorders within the person.
The next time I saw White at work was on a videotape in the early ’90s in which he was using a version of Tom Andersen’s reflecting team. His interviews now included a reflecting team, transposed, following Myerhoff (1986), into a “definitional ceremony” that could provide witnesses for change. Using the metaphor of re-authoring lives, White (1995) would try to find a “preferred outcome” to serve as the basis for a counter-story. A teenager who was living in a detention home would mention that he had taken a shower that morning. White would ask, “Does this mean that you have begun to be your own caretaker?” If the young man nodded assent, he would turn to the father and say, “Were you surprised to hear this news about your son?” The “news” would then be echoed and built on by the reflecting team. Not surprisingly, the family members would become engaged in this optimistic procedure, and begin to add other evidence on their own.
While at first finding White’s teaching practices too structured, I have come to admire what he does more and more. He is extremely personal in his style, constantly checking with the people he sees, picking up their language in the most careful way, while never being more than an inch away from their experience. I began using the adjective “tender” in watching his tapes, and I had never used that word to describe a therapist’s work. There was something new here, something to do with the way a therapist might acknowledge her own emotions, as opposed to manipulating the emotions of those who consulted her. I also came to admire the intellectual consistency of White’s theory-building. I felt that no other practitioner had succeeded in making such useful links between the poststructuralist wing of the postmodern movement and therapeutic practice.
But before I go into the details of White’s work, let me go back to where I left off in Chapter 8 and sketch the intellectual journey that led to the allied concepts of deconstructionism and poststructuralism. Unlike the philosophical conversation out of which postmodernism emerged, this new strand became closely entwined with American literary theory. I will try to lay out its complicated history below.
The End of Structuralism
Looking back, you could say that the 20th century was a palace of structuralist thought. Every field offered an internal armature that explained its doings. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud gave us intrapsychic structures; psychologist Jean Piaget gave us cognitive structures; anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gave us myth and kinship structures; sociologist Talcott Parsons gave us the normative structure of the nuclear family; linguistic philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure gave us structural linguistics; the New Criticism described the symbolic structures of literary works; and family systems theory introduced the idea of the family structure. So if you want to talk of poststructuralism, you must imagine all these London Bridges falling down at once.
I was alerted to this change by the buzz around narrative theory. Just as the New Critics had made a fetish of symbolic structures, the next wave of literary theorists seemed to be looking for laws of form similar to those of structural linguistics (Berman, 1988). Then came the encounter with deconstructionism. Dazzled by Derrida’s invention, these theorists swerved away from the structuralist project and began to doubt the existence in a given text of any patterns at all. Scholars began to say that the meanings in a book were not placed there by the author but were created by the encounter between the reader and the work. An approach to literary criticism evolved known as reader response theory (Fish, 1980). In essence, this meant that every time someone read War and Peace, it was a different book.
With my early indoctrination into the New Criticism, I came into family therapy with a structuralist bias intact. New critics believed that literary works contained systems of meaning determined by the work’s immanent structure (Berman, 1988). From my college days, I knew that poet T.S. Eliot thought of these structures as “objective correlatives,” or concrete embodiments of abstract ideas. For instance, Melville’s Great White Whale might symbolize a man’s obsession or his struggle with evil. As these systems of meaning were usually not spelled out, a class of literary specialists arose whose life work was to discover and comment upon them. Nobody ever doubted that they were sitting there, in that poem, or in that novel, waiting to be found. I spent four years of college trying to do just that.
But this was pre-Derrida, whose ideas were instrumental in dismantling this whole empire. Although he grew up in the structuralist tradition of de Saussure, Derrida set out to revise it through a textual practice he called deconstructionism. He preferred this term to poststructuralism as a way to categorize his work, but the two cover similar ground. Gone was the belief that each text contained a core of meaning the way a bowl contained an apple. The text had not one but an infinite number of meanings, and the dominance of any one meaning was only an illusion because all other meanings had been “suppressed” or “deferred.” Derrida called these suppressed meanings “traces,” and pried them out in close readings of works by Nietzsche or Marx or Freud.
It was not Derrida’s intention, however, to attack the ideas of any particular philosopher. He said, “Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order” (Derrida, 1982, p. 329). In fact, it was only in the moment of deconstruction that one could “see” beyond the boundaries of the conceptual order that was being displaced. In a wonderful image reminiscent of the flybottle, Derrida spoke of “trying to find a crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed” (1976, p. 14). Like Wittgenstein, Derrida was aware of the need to see beyond or through the linguistic structures that color what we think is real.
Then where did the term poststructuralism come from? As far as I can ascertain, Derrida’s ideas about deconstructing texts spread like wildfire across the intellectual landscape. No literary monument was safe, and the demigods of Anglo-European social and literary theory were being pushed off their pedestals. In the U.S., with its strong tradition of literary criticism, a group of American critics (Berman, 1988) developed their own deconstructionist outlook, which they called poststructuralism. Here is one description of its provenance (Poster, 1989):
The term poststructuralist, local to certain intellectual circles in the United States, draws a line of affinity around several French theorists who are rarely so grouped in France and who in many cases would reject the designation…. Americans have assimilated Foucault, Derrida, and the rest by turning their positions into “poststructuralist theory.” (p. 4)
By the end of the 20th century, these ideas had begun to shake the foundations of American social thought.
In the field of psychology, not surprisingly, a similar un-doing was going on. Psychologists were deploring the concept of an essentialist self that grew hydroponically without reference to context. A major proponent of this view was cognitive researcher (and charming writer) Jerome Bruner (1986). Influenced by the Russian linguist Lev Vygotsky (1978), Bruner stated that culture was constitutive of self and self was situated in culture. He was also a key person in bringing narrative theory to psychology, pushing the idea that the narrative mode, not the truth or logic mode, was uniquely suited to the study of human life (1986, p. 13). He also believed that the organizing principle of folk psychology was story-like, and that “what does not get structured narratively suffers loss in memory” (1990, p. 56).
Psychoanalysts Roy Schafer (1981) and Donald Spence (1984) were among the first clinicians to attack the “truth” approach to emotional problems. The idea of the psychoanalyst digging for the the buried city of Troy was a persuasive one, given the modernist belief in hidden structures, but Spence and Schafer declared that the archeology metaphor was wrong. They argued for a “narrative retelling,” not an excavation of pots and shards. The therapist’s job was to help his client create a story with aesthetic appeal and ability to persuade, not to find out what was “really there.” In one bound, these pioneers used narrative theory to leap over the modernist views bequeathed to them by their predecessors. Of course, there was one modernist aspect they overlooked: the idea of the “better story.” This immediately introduces hierarchy and puts the therapist in the position of editorin-chief.
Although Spence and Schafer described the territory, they did not capture the name. White and Epston (1990) took the term “narrative” for their own approach and made it stick. One great strength was that they brought in an anthropological mindset. Bruner (1990) had pointed out that you cannot study the mind without studying the nexus between mind and culture. This resonated with White and Epston’s multicultural, gender-sensitive point of view. Where psychology locates problems within the person, postmodern anthropology focuses on the specific idiom of each culture and calls into question the universals on which modern psychology is built.
Reconfiguring Foucault
It is a short step from Bruner’s world of cultural psychology to the view that we are shaped by the conventions of institutional discourse. Enter the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1972). White and Epston drew many of their best ideas from the writings of this gifted reconfigurer. If Bruner calls attention to the idea of cultural narratives, Foucault calls attention to institutional narratives. Haunting the dusty archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he pulled out firsthand accounts that made visible the evolution of each institution he studied. His inquiries into the changing discourses of madness (1965), justice (1979), sexuality (1978), and medicine (1975), from premodern to modern, laid out “the disciplines of the self” through which modern institutions stamped out subversive behavior before it even began.
In his book Discipline and Punish (1979), Foucault researched back to a time before the existence of the modern penal system and found an account of a botched attempt to draw and quarter a condemned man. In a scene out of Monty Python, the man kept trying to give pointers to his bumbling executioners. Foucault contrasted this grisly event with the orderliness of 18th-century French prisons and the efficiency of the guillotine. By taking what he called a “genealogical” approach to the development of modern bureaucracies, Foucault raised our consciousness about the taken-for-granted structures and procedures that control our lives. Unlike the old days, when centralized authorities like kings and judges supervised the conduct of their citizens, often brutally, this new type of governance operates so invisibly that we obey it without thought.
White and Epston (1990) apply a similar consciousness-raising to the received truths of psychiatry. For them, diagnostic categories are a way the culture imposes its “dominant narratives” on people’s “lived experience.” But instead of simply pointing out the flaws in the canon, which is what the anti-psychiatry movement has so often done, White and Epston come up with useful alternatives. The practice of externalization makes individuals aware of the powerful narratives that are running their lives. A similar idea is contained in the “telling and re-telling” processes of reflecting teams. Such techniques help people to stand outside the situations they are caught in and see them in a different light.
One psychological myth that White (1995) cheerfully beheads is the belief in “essences” that lie below the surface of the psyche. Individuallyoriented therapists have claimed that what they do is superior to short-term therapy because the latter only treats symptoms and not the underlying cause. Mirroring Jay Haley’s (1963) long-ago objection, White questions this surface/depth dichotomy. As a substitute, he proposes the anthropological distinction between “thick” and “thin” description (Geertz, 1973). White says that to speak of individuals in terms of traits, needs, or attributes is to rely on the “thin” identity categories of modern culture rather than the “thick” descriptions of narrative practice. These terms are a helpful substitute for categories like functional/dysfunctional or normal/abnormal, and many clinicians have adopted them with relief.
In another departure from the canon, White rejects the idea that attributes like “identity” or “authenticity” are traits that can be ascribed to the individual. For him, they are always the product of social negotiation. In helping people to discover “who they really are,” he says, modern therapies rely on a process of private introspection guided by an expert. In contrast, White believes that nothing is authentic until it has been acknowledged in a public space. He draws upon ethnographer Barbara Myerhoff’s (1986) term “definitional ceremonies” to describe such rituals. A definitional ceremony is any made-up procedure that allows people to bear witness to and give significance to persons or events that would otherwise go unnoticed.
White has also taken from Myerhoff (1982) the concept of “re-membering.” Myerhoff talks of a special type of recollection, one which highlights the important presences that have graced a person’s story, whether they are alive or not alive, nearby or far away. In the same vein, White asks people he is working with, “Who would you want to have in the club of your life? He describes his invention as follows:
The membership of this association of life is composed of the significant figures of a person’s history and those figures of the person’s contemporary circumstances of life whose voices are influential in regard to matters of personal identity. Re-membering provides an opportunity for persons to engage in a revision of the membership of the association of life. (1999, p. 66)
In his workshops, White says that these re-membering practices correct the distortions caused by the Western belief in a coherent or unified Self. White suggests we use a multi-voiced concept of identity instead. I think one reason the format of the reflecting team appealed to him was because it so graphically embodied a perspective with many heads.
White (1997) deconstructs other structuralist terms like hierarchy and boundaries. He feels that these concepts do little except protect the power of professionals over the people who consult with them. Deploring the fact that a therapist whose life is affected by the life of a so-called client can be faulted for losing boundaries, he says, “We have an obligation to identify how conversations with those who consult us change our lives.” After years of secretly rebelling against the fetish of the boundary in my work, and resenting the way it threw up walls between myself and the people who consulted me, I found in White’s blunt statement a refreshing truth.
Poststructuralism and Beyond
And now, here comes a question. In his criticism of traditional psychotherapy, White (1997) leans on the insights of poststructuralism rather than postmodernism. Why does he prefer this term? Why does he no longer use the idea of deconstruction, which appeared in an earlier essay (Epston & White, 1992)? I don’t know, but I have an idea. Wittgenstein and Derrida believed that the accepted canons of philosophy and social thought had been influenced by the essences and structures of Platonism. They both tried to make the familiar strange by pulling conventional concepts out of their usual sockets. Under the banner of poststructuralism, White has simply applied the same “outing” maneuver to the shadow architecture of modern psychotherapy.
Then what about Foucault, the Great Original, who neither took a clear position nor aligned himself with anyone else’s position? Unlike Wittgenstein and Derrida, he had in his cross-hairs not the deceptions of language but the discourses of disciplinary institutions. He set out to expose the “capillary” nature of power and the way it pervaded the most ordinary exchange. In the past, activist meta-narratives like Marxism pitted a generic “us” against a generic “them.” Foucault did not lead us to the barricades, but he did something perhaps more useful. He gave us the tools to first recognize, then take action, against what has been called the micro-fascism of everyday life.
Perhaps this was why White and Epston took Foucault as their guide. In a manner of speaking, Foucault was one of the first persons to use externalizing techniques as a means of making visible the practices of oppression. By staining the germs on the slide, so to speak, he offered us the ability to first perceive and then resist them. The discourse of mental health is permeated with dynamics and essences that colonize and degrade personhood, and part of the narrative therapist’s mission is to flush this operation out. One thing White does particularly well is to deconstruct humanistic language, showing, for example, that concepts like “self-actualization” and “personal growth” dissolve as soon as you begin to question developmental metaphors for identity and container metaphors for the self.
At this point, I asked myself about the similarities and differences between the collaborative and narrative approaches. These two schools do agree strongly on one theme: the therapist takes a back seat. For Anderson and Goolishian, it is important that the therapist defer to the family’s expertise, allowing the presumption of knowledge to be more fairly distributed throughout the conversation. For White (1995), the task is not to deny the therapist’s knowledge but to decenter it. White hands off much of the work of re-authoring to other persons in the family or community, perhaps aided by members of a reflecting team. One other thing Anderson and White have in common is that they are both improvisational theater directors. They may set the scene for a transformative event, but they let it unfold on its own.
There are also many differences. Despite the fact that White and Anderson both take aim at the essentialism of modern schools of psychotherapy, Anderson’s theorizing stays at the level of the general stance (the emphasis on not-knowing) and the therapeutic relationship (the emphasis on collaboration). She is clear about her distrust of essentialist ideas, but she offers general, not specific methods for dealing with them. In contrast, White and Epston actively counteract the myths of psychotherapy that put people into belittling categories. They give people documents of self-worth or certificates that testify to courage. They set up “leagues” for people with common conditions or handicaps. Some of their best deconstructive questions challenge professional hierarchies: patient to psychiatrist, “How does this new medication you are prescribing for me fit into your plans for my life?” In that sense their stance is very “knowing” indeed.
Anderson seems to feel more at home within the framework of postmodernism, which outlaws the representational view of reality along with modernist “meta-narratives,” but makes no other claim that can be translated directly into practice. By adopting the framework of Poststructuralism, on the other hand, White not only challenges psychotherapy but also hits at the disciplinary discourses and procedures clarified by Foucault. Since day one, the narrative school has promoted an “ethic of accountability,” emphasizing the duty of therapists to counteract, or at least make people aware of, the consequences of harmful interpersonal myths. As a result, the narrative approach is becoming a larger consciousness-raising movement for persons whose position of privilege has protected them from noticing the effect of this privilege on other peoples’ lives.
What differentiates the activism of poststructural approaches from plain vanilla activism is its emphasis on a Foucauldian consciousness. The enemy is not any single person, group, or ideology, but the pejorative language games that haunt our ordinary exchanges. Here the enemy is the flybottle, which stands for the culturally accepted ways of thinking and talking that control our postures and beliefs.
Communities of Concern
What seems radical to me about White’s approach is the way he creates small, local communities as witnesses for suffering and change. These bodies function as a kind of therapeutic Greek chorus, or attending community. As I said above, they can be composed of persons from an audience or from a reflecting team, but they can also consist of friends or relatives who are already in the picture. White has begun to keep an “outsider witness” registry on which he will put names of persons he has worked with who are willing to help others with similar problems. These outsider witness groups have proved to be enormously effective in bringing their perspectives to bear on someone else’s life. I will offer one or two examples here of such ad hoc communities by describing two of the videotapes White has shown in workshops over the years. The first interview was with the family of a tenyear-old boy who would probably be called in the U.S. a “conduct disorder.” The social worker who was trying to work with him described him as “never speaking to therapists” and “leaving therapists in tears.” It was she who had brought the child and his parents in for a consultation.
The boy was a robust, ten-year-old charmer whom I will call Greg. He initially lived up to his billing as a non-talker, but each time he shrugged off a question, White merely turned to the parents and asked the same question of them. They would answer and White would turn to the boy and ask if he agreed. Greg would nod or shrug and in this way he began to be threaded into the conversation. His mother told White that he had recently begun to behave better at school but was still doing alarming things at home. She recited a number of incidents, like coming at her with a knife and pushing his brother off a bike. She was particularly worried by the bad headaches he was having.
White asked Greg if he worried about these things too. He said “Yah.” “You worry about dangerous situations?” “Yah.” “Why?” “So I don’t get hurt.” It turned out that he didn’t like the “aggression” he encountered at school. His mother told White that he was having less trouble at school than before, so White asked him if he would rather bring his school achievement into the home or his trouble at home into the school. No answer. White stopped the videotape to inform his workshop audience that this was not a good question. Then, on the tape, he took a piece of paper and asked Greg to draw a picture of home as “Trouble’s home territory.” Would he like to “squeeze Trouble out of Trouble’s home territory?” Greg said, “Yah.”
White then asked the parents how Greg had kept Trouble from “ruining things at school.” His parents spoke of several ways he did this, like telling himself to walk away from fights. Then White asked him, “Is this idea of being an adviser to yourself new or recent?” Greg said he’d had the idea for about a year. White got him to agree that this was part of “caring more for his life.” Then he asked the parents if they were surprised to hear this. When they said they were, he asked Greg if it was good for them to know this. Greg answered, “Yah.” White asked him why he thought this, and he said, using a whole sentence, “So they’ll know what I’m up to.”
Greg’s newfound loquacity astounded everyone, and he kept it up. Toward the end of the interview, White asked Greg if he’d ever been asked so many questions, and Greg said no. On a scale of one to ten for answering questions, where would he put himself? “Ten.” When asked if that was good or bad, he said “Good.” When asked if it made him feel better or worse about himself, he said, “Better.” White asked the parents if they approved of the idea that their son was developing these “skills in caring for his life,” and they said they did.
This is where other therapists might stop, but White went on to ask who else in the family had these skills. The answer was Greg’s grandparents and a couple of cousins. Would they make a good audience for hearing about the skills Greg was developing? Yes. Everyone then agreed with White that it would be useful for him to ask some of these relatives to a future meeting and listen to their thoughts on this subject. The feedback from that session and the later one with the relatives was that Greg’s behavior changed dramatically for the good. The parents told White that they were amazed at how much their son had talked in the interview and that he was behaving much more reasonably at home.
Following this general tack, White (1997) has gone on to create “communities of concern” out of many other kinds of presences: imaginary friends, stuffed animals, even people who are dead. In another taped interview, which White (1997) has also written about, he was meeting with a woman whose husband had just died and who was overwhelmed with grief. The woman was proposing to take her own life so that she could be buried beside her husband, and she had indeed made one unsuccessful attempt. White had helped her to overcome some feelings of depression a few years before and she had come back to see him.
In this very shortened account of the session that I saw, the widow had told White that her friends would be angry if she took her own life, but that her husband would understand. When White asked her to describe the behavior of these friends she said, “Exceptionally egotistical.” When he asked what her husband would say to her, she said he would want her to “be herself.” White then asked if it was positive or negative to bring her husband’s voice into the conversation, and she said it was positive. She added, “He was with me downstairs.” White then asked the woman when her husband was with her most, and she said, “When coming here.” In fact, she said, he was sitting right next to her at that moment. White asked her if his presence helped her “get on with her life,” and she said, “Yes.” She said that he often came and sat with her at moments when she was thinking about him. White said he would like to help her bring her husband more frequently into her life and she said she would like him to do that.
Before she left, White asked if there was anything in his room she would like to take with her. She pointed to a stuffed bear sitting on the windowsill. This was a bear called Rupert that she herself had made some years before and “gifted” to White. White thought of him as a “stuffed team member” and had often sent him out to stay with children who wanted “to break free of the problems in their lives.” Rupert had come back from his latest adventure with a torn ear, so the woman said she would take him home and fix it. White asked if she knew why he was so well worn, and she said, “Because he’s been loved.” White added that Rupert was not only very accepting but able to keep wisdom to himself. The woman replied, “Like Bill.” Hugging the bear, she said, “One of the things I miss most is touching Bill.”
In a subsequent interview, she told Michael that when her granddaughter came to visit, she overheard her talking about Bill to Rupert. Shortly after that, when she went out to rake leaves, which she hadn’t done since Bill died, his voice came to her. She also heard him when she went out to the back garden. White found out that another voice in her life was her father’s, who had died when she was quite small. White asked her an interesting question: “If you could keep Bill’s voice in your life as long as you have kept your father’s, how old would you be then?” He also asked how it was that her granddaughter could speak with Bill too, and wondered whether she had passed that ability along.
In the discussion after the tape was shown, a member of the audience asked White about the fact that he had paid so little attention to helping the woman “work through her grief.” White said that during the first couple of interviews she had been weeping copiously, and that he had been weeping right along with her. It is not hard to imagine him doing that. What is hard to convey is the sweetness that pervades these conversations. In addition to their lightness of touch, one is struck by the intense emotional connections that arise spontaneously and affect everyone who is there.
The Christmas Tree Village
During the late ’90s, I was interested in creating documents that acted like reflecting teams in print. “Tekka with Feathers,” a series of commentaries on the work we had done with one of our families in Brattleboro, was one example (see Chapter 10), but I wanted to do more of these pieces. You might say that in those days I went about with my butterfly net looking for stories with wings, like the one depicted on the cover of one of Michael White’s books. The next example that fluttered into my life came out of a project the Family Institute of Maine had been funded to do. The Institute had received a grant for working with families who were struggling with AIDS, and the director, Cindy Osborne, asked me to join one of their cases as a reflecting team member.
Michael White had come a few times to the institute to give intensive workshops, and Osborne and Chris Behan, a narrative therapist on the staff, were particularly interested in experimenting with White’s version of a reflecting team. So I joined their team during an interview that Behan was conducting with a gay couple he had been seeing for several months. The younger of the two men had AIDS and was failing fast, so I suggested that I try to create a document that would testify to their story and also address the question of what effect a reflecting team had on the therapy process. Here is an account of the situation as I became aware of it and of the interview in which I took part. As I have done before in describing these events, I will use first names.
Meeting with us beforehand, Chris told the team that he had been seeing Bob and his partner Mark for about a year. Now that Mark’s health was declining, his family wanted him to come back to live with them, but he preferred to stay with Bob in the home they had created together. Early on, the couple had drawn for Chris a series of concentric circles on newsprint. Mark said that when he came to the end he wanted Bob to be in the inner circle, his parents in the next ring, and his grandparents and brother in the ring outside that.
Chris had explored the effect of the “dominant discourse” of homophobia on the couple, and found that Mark’s relations, especially his grandmother, were having a hard time honoring the couple’s relationship. Complicating matters, Mark had become a born-again Christian at age 13 and had come out as a gay man at age 20. He felt torn between the dictates of his faith and being active in the gay community. Gradually, Chris said, the couple had begun to be more open about their relationship. They had begun wearing matching gold bands and were now planning Mark’s funeral. Chris had helped Mark to deal more directly with his family, with the result that Bob was no longer in the middle.
Chris filled in the picture with more detail. For many years, at Christmas time, Bob and Mark had hauled pine trees down from northern Maine, where Mark grew up, and sold them at the side of the road. Mark, disappointed that this year he was too sick to help run the stand, busied himself setting up the miniature village they placed each year under their tree. This village had grown over time to include houses and shops, a tiny skating rink, and a diminutive railroad whose train regularly passed through town. The little village and its train had become an important symbol of Bob and Mark’s relationship.
The session I sat in on was made up of Chris, Bob, and Mark sitting together in the middle of the room, and the team sitting against the wall. Chris introduced us. The team that day consisted of Cindy, the director, psychiatrist Tony McCann, psychologist Eric Aronson, and myself, with social worker Penny Backman sitting in. Chris explained to Bob and Mark that the five of us would later be commenting on what the three of them had said, and that Penny was acting as an observer. This team had a floating membership and had met with Chris and the couple once before. At that time, some of the team members did not want to use a reflecting format, preferring to talk to the couple face to face. As those persons were not present this time, we decided to follow the usual procedure where the team reflects and the family and therapist listen in, then switch places.
In the beginning of the session, Chris asked the couple what was going on for each of them. Mark described feeling as if there were two people inside him, a gay man and a born-again Christian, and that he had to keep them from offending each other. He said, “The two people inside of me have agreed to get along even though they don’t agree.” Bob said that he had accepted Mark’s right-wing affiliations, even though he didn’t share them. He felt that in a couple, each person had to make compromises in order to make the other person happy. I was impressed by how each partner put his love for the other ahead of the personal ideologies that divided them.
Chris then asked Mark to read a letter he had composed to be read at his funeral. In it he declared his faith in Christ and said that he did not believe that God was punishing him and that he knew he was going to Heaven. It ended: “Thank you all for being part of my life. It may have been briefer than most, but I assure you that I enjoyed every day and lived it to the fullest. I love you and will see you again soon.”
Chris now asked the team to share their thoughts. We had agreed to speak not as professionals but as persons who had been allowed into a very private space. Cindy and Tony both remarked on Mark’s depiction of the two people inside himself. Tony said he was reminded of how well gay people keep secrets, because they get so much practice being one way at home and another way in public. Cindy was reminded of the time she was visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington and found out that Martin Luther was anti-Semitic. As she had been brought up Lutheran, she said, this shook her to the soul. What was different from the usual clinic-speak was that they talked about the issues that had been raised in the interview with reference to their own lives.
When it came to me, I said that I found it hard to deal with the idea that Mark was dying, despite the fact that he was the same age as my own grown children. I said I was touched by his saying that he would be in Heaven waiting for us and I also thanked Bob for his part in taking care of Mark. Eric said that as he listened to Mark’s letter for the funeral he found himself asking, “What is Bob’s place in that funeral?” He commented on Bob’s statement that he had to hide his feelings for Mark in public and wondered if that might change. Mark had previously asked whether he should edit his speech, so Tony said passionately that he did not believe anything should be cut at all.
After listening to these comments, Chris, Bob, and Mark got back into their small circle while the team moved back to the sidelines. Mark related strongly to Tony’s description of gay people being better at keeping secrets and described how difficult it was to put on a different face depending on whom he was with. Bob’s associations were to the movie The Remains of the Day, where Anthony Hopkins passes up the chance to show his affection for Emma Thompson. He said that he himself never showed emotion, so he was glad when Tony expressed how strongly he felt about Mark’s speech. He also said that it was important for Mark to tell people, especially the older people in his birth family, what his beliefs are, and to say that even though he’s gay he still believes he’s going to Heaven. Then Bob shared the fact that it was hard for him to accept a compliment for something that a person would do automatically. If he took care of Mark, it was because it came from his heart, and he didn’t think anyone should thank him for it.
Chris now asked Penny, who was listening as an outside observer, for her thoughts. She said that she had been asking herself if there were enough energy coming from a format like a reflecting team to make a difference to a couple seeking help. What she found was a theme about dichotomies. She noted how each reflection placed one view in opposition to another, with both views being held “in the same breath, in the same person, in the same way of thinking.” She ended by saying, “So I felt that the idea of holding these oppositions was what caught energy.” I liked Penny’s phrasings, but noticed that her assignment required her to operate from a “metaposition,” while the rest of us were trying to inhabit a more horizontal space. White uses the term “experience-near” for this latter posture.
The two groups now sat together and exchanged reactions. Cindy asked the couple what difference it made having the two groups speak separately rather than face to face. Bob and Mark said there were advantages either way. The large group felt “more like family,” but not having to respond immediately was seen as helpful too. Tony wanted to hear from Bob and Mark how it felt to be asked to comment on what the consultants said. He told them that from the viewpoint of his own training, asking a client to answer the question “What had an impact on you?” would seem like heresy. Bob and Mark said they were very comfortable with the question and thought it made sense. Chris made a date with them for two weeks later.
This was the last time any of us except Chris saw Mark alive. Chris told me later that the couple only met with him a few more times, but that, toward the end, the two of them were able to draw a magic circle around their relationship. After he was hospitalized, for instance, Mark allowed Bob to give him a foot massage in public. At this point, the question of who would be with Mark at the end took center stage. Mark’s relatives, especially his grandmother, assumed that it would be limited to the family. Aided by Chris, Bob was able to arrange a parting ritual that included everyone. He got the family members to agree that, when it was time, they would go one by one into Mark’s room and say goodbye. Bob would then rejoin Mark and would be with him when he died. And this is what happened. I was deeply impressed by this outcome, and told Chris that I felt it might never have happened if it were not for him.
After Mark died, the team met one more time. Chris told us that Bob and Mark had asked him to say a few words at Mark’s funeral and that he had considered not speaking because of his concerns about confidentiality and overstepping professional bounds. However, he had thought better of it. He said, “I needed to acknowledge how I had been touched by Mark in this life. I needed to ignore what Lynn calls ‘the fetish of the therapeutic boundary.’”
Chris’s eulogy to Mark is too long to quote verbatim, so I will condense and paraphrase it. He spoke about the strange position he was in of being Mark’s therapist, because he felt that if clients knew he might speak at their funeral, they might not tell him much. So he said he wouldn’t tell any secrets about Mark. However, he did want to mention Mark’s enormous capacity to love. The proof was that Mark was able to love both the family he was born into and his family of choice, despite their differences. Chris went on to talk about what a gifted teacher Mark was, and what he had taught Chris about courage and dignity and honesty. He talked about Mark’s sense of humor and the jokes he cracked in the hospital. He said that Mark was “the kind of man who could contain complexity” and that he had an incredible ability to bring opposites together.
Chris then said that he knew how sad the people there were feeling, and that it was okay to feel sad, and also to feel relief that Mark was no longer suffering. He said: “All those feelings are okay, even anger is a normal feeling to have. Anger because he’s gone, anger because his life was too short. He was 33 years old.” Chris commented on how many funerals he had gone away from angry because nobody there had been able to say the word AIDS. He noted the many people there wearing red ribbons, which stands for AIDS awareness, and talked about the courage it took to say, “I am not going to be silent about this.” Chris praised Mark for having the courage to stand up to the employer who fired him from his final job and to say how wrong that was. He commented on the loss for the world that “someone so young and so brave and so handsome and so funny and so sweet” was gone.
Then Chris told his audience about the idea of “saying hello again,” a concept he had learned from Michael White. He wanted to join Mark in his belief that we would all say hello again in the hereafter. Another way people could say hello was by seeing Mark in themselves. Chris said, “Every time you realize you are sticking up for justice and fighting discrimination, every time you have a sense of humor against incredible odds, that’s the way you can say hello again to Mark.” A final way to say hello to Mark was to think of a wonderful memory of him right then. And Chris produced one, saying:
We’ll be able to remember Mark when we see a tiny train and a miniature village beneath a glimmering Christmas tree. I don’t think any of us will ever be able to see a Christmas tree, for whatever reason, again, without thinking of Mark. We will be able to say hello again to Mark, even though we have said goodbye.
After reading this eulogy, I went out and bought a Christmas tree ornament in memory of Mark—a shiny colored-glass engine that hangs on my tree each year. It has now graced several trees, and it will go down to my children, together with a copy of the story, when I die.
Coda
In the months after Mark died, Bob felt the loss bitterly and kept very much to himself, but Chris saw him alone a few times to round things off. I was now finishing the document we were calling The Christmas Tree Village. I felt throughout as if I were a scribe composing a history as it ran parallel to my own. This was inevitable, I suppose, since I had come in as a stranger to sit in on a team that was only just getting itself together. It was presumptuous to think that I could have any kind of relationship to the couple. I think Cindy wanted me to be a consultant, but that would have been inappropriate. As a result, I kept a respectful distance and leaned on long-distance channels like transcripts and the phone.
I did have some influence on the materials we used. As Chris and Bob’s meetings were tapering off, I asked Cindy if she could sit in on one of these meetings and get some feedback on the couple’s experience with us. Bob agreed to the meeting. In the audiotape of this conversation, he said that he had thought a lot about our comments in regard to his being “giving” and wondered if they were really true. He finally decided that if they were true, it was Mark who made this possible, because Mark himself was so giving. In regard to the reflecting team, he was ambivalent. He said that he didn’t hold with counseling but that being in a one-on-one with Chris, whether there was a reflecting team or not, made it easier to open up and talk. He said that Mark’s being the kind of person he was made it more comfortable, too.
Cindy commented on Bob’s idea that Mark may have helped him to be more giving and asked what he would do with this description of himself now that Mark was no longer in his life. Bob said he had learned to open his mouth a little more. In the past, he would bite his tongue rather than jeopardize his job, but now he hears Mark’s voice in his head saying, “Come on, Bob, speak up.” He talked about two new employees at his job who were gay and another who was very open in her hatred of them, and how he was trying to deal with the situation himself, without involving his boss.
Cindy then asked if Bob were beginning to define himself as “a man who opens his mouth,” and Bob said yes, that he was beginning to speak up to people who were being discriminating or vicious, “otherwise nothing would change.” Cindy remarked to Chris that the idea of Bob being “giving” was larger than it looked. Chris answered that he was hearing how Bob kept Mark alive by standing up against discrimination and homophobia. Something else that kept Mark alive was the idea that being a caring person was not just being gentle and sweet but strong and powerful too.
Chris then asked what effect, if any, the team had on their immediate relationships. Bob said that the team had helped Mark to be more open with his mother and to express his feelings about the people in his family who couldn’t accept his being gay. As for the two of them, it had drawn them more closely together and helped them talk about hard issues like religion. Chris asked about Mark’s allowing Bob to touch him in public, and Bob said that Mark had let Bob nurse him during the final days. Finally, Cindy asked Bob about his reaction to the entire process, and he said he thought that on the whole it was a good idea, as long as the people involved were comfortable with each other. He said that sometimes, at the end of a session, a team member would ask if there were any more things they wanted to comment on, and they would say no, but as soon as they got outside they would talk non-stop.
Bob had one criticism about the reflecting team, which was that he wished they would have met more often. He said that Mark missed the group when he was in the hospital. The team was an important social contact for him, because toward the end his connections had dwindled down to only his mother and Bob. Cindy turned to Chris and asked for his final comments too. Chris said that even though he was proud to have been involved in this experience, part of it didn’t feel real to him. He didn’t know whether that was because Mark wasn’t there anymore, but there was a dreamlike quality to it. Cindy asked if that might be because when they stopped working with Bob and Mark, the AIDS project stopped too. Chris said, “So then I woke up?” and everyone laughed.
This story, with a color photograph of Bob and Mark smiling in front of their Christmas tree village, was published privately in January 1999 by a group of generous sponsors who wished to support Bob and Mark and Chris. Many copies went out and I shall always treasure mine. But before I end this chapter, here are two afterthoughts. First, Bob’s objection to being complimented was an important message for me. White has criticized the “culture of applause,” as he calls it, and its unfortunate influence on the comments of reflecting teams. An unthinking addiction to the positive has dogged many therapy approaches, raising suspicions of insincerity and manipulation. Even though I have been one of the addicts, I was glad that White came up with such a useful alternative, the move to “thick description.”
Second, I want to say something about the concept of “saying hello.” This is one of White’s most gifted understandings, not only for dealing with situations of loss and grief, but for challenging psychological dogma. First, it feels intuitively correct (think of all the cultures that vivify the spirits of the dead). Second, it offers an alternative to the idea that people must free themselves from negative feelings by “working through them” with a trained professional. I thought that the way Chris described “saying hello” in his eulogy was profound. Here was yet another example of a way of thinking that sees each dilemma as an opportunity for community. I believe more and more that effective therapy is not individual but communal, even when the individual is the focus of the work.
This might also be the place to note that “saying hello again” may come in many shapes and sizes. Remember, reader, when I told you that my dream was someday to be on the same stage with Haley at an important conference? That dream came true, but not in the way I imagined. In 1995, Haley and I were invited to be on the faculty of a conference organized by the Milton H. Erickson Foundation called The Evolution of Psychotherapy. Present were legendary figures like Thomas Szasz, Joseph Wolpe, and James Hillman, and some of the stars of family therapy as well. As the conference was attended by thousands and was held in a vast barn of a place, I only glimpsed Haley in passing. Then the time came for a faculty picture. I was shown to a room where a series of rising platforms had been set up. Haley had been placed on the top platform on the left and I was directed to the bottom platform on the right. The picture was taken. I had to leave quickly, but when the picture came to me a few weeks later, I was surprised. Haley and I were standing next to each other on the top row, shoulder to shoulder. When I asked Jeffrey Zeig, the organizer of the conference, how this could be, he merely told me, “Computer Magic.”