"Our world and our lives have become increasingly interdependent, so when our neighbour is harmed, it affects us too. Therefore, we have to abandon outdated notions of 'them' and 'us' and think of our world much more in terms of a great 'US', a greater human family." ~ Dalai Lama |
Hello Everyone: Welcome back.
If you’re like me, it’s difficult to describe the music we choose to fit with any particular task at hand – for example - writing this newsletter. I know what I usually prefer but still, it remains a mystery, of sorts. Since the enigmatic puzzle surrounding musical preference is of course not only shaped by the task itself.
This newsletter was surely inspired by events of the past couple of weeks including – reflections on Canada’s national truth and reconciliation day, fears felt with the upcoming US election, and re-reading my favourite journalist’s (Robert Fisk) books on the Middle East.
This politic of living was running alongside interwoven hilarious and heartfelt conversations with my daughters, loads of walks among the giants of the rain forest, finding brilliant homegrown heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers market, and a range of other relational symphonies shaping and influencing the music chosen.
Remarkably, the streaming service Spotify offers over a thousand musical genres (I know this as my close friend and CEO of Canada’s independent music association was off to Bucharest last week to discuss this very thing and other issues about the state of the independent music scene across the world).
When I survey friends, family, and colleagues about musical preferences they present a wide swath of answers regarding their preferences for road trips, sex, dinner parties, morning coffee, exercise, etc.
When the category turns specifically to writing, reading, and studying, a popular choice is often between complete silence or Classical. The people remaining list electronic, something more upbeat as in Hip-hop, R&B and Motown and, one swears by Miles Davis. How about you?
At the moment, I’m listening to Arooj Artab’s 2021 haunting album, Vulture Prince. Seems to fit my mood and, if you haven’t yet tuned into her music, she’s a Pakistani American singer, composer, producer, and 2022 Grammy award winner for best global music performance.
Hurricane Helen
Helene hit landfall with a climate change bang on Thursday September 27th – carving an abnormal path of destruction through six south eastern states in America and killing more than 230 people (with hundreds more unaccounted for), in one of the deadliest storms the US has experienced in modern times.
The toll is especially high in the western mountains of North Carolina. The Gov. Roy Cooper (D) stated that 68 people had been killed in the state, and most around the city of Asheville.
Our close friend and VSNT resident philosopher Todd May happens to live in Asheville.
He woke up early on the morning of Friday September 28th – and looked out at the River Front Arts district where some 300 artists and designers work out of 26 buildings along the banks of the nearby French Broad River.
Todd describes hearing the sound of a super-amped up locomotive train. Imagine. The noise was coming from the French Broad River, he could see, close by, just down the way.
As the hurricane travelled inland and towards where he stood, it had dumped an unfathomable 30.7 inches of rain on his county. Unable to soak into the saturated soil, water flowed downhill. Along the way, it picked up dirt, boulders, trees and eventually cars, tractor-trailers, homes, slabs of asphalt and, people. Solid ground became liquid and slid away.
With no emergency public warning to speak of, Todd and his partner (along with their daughter + 2 cats living a few miles away), evacuated, as fast as they could. Three of the four highway exists leading out of town were ruined. They took the only one remaining.
For at least the coming next 3 weeks they’ve booked an Air B&B 130 miles away. No one seems to know when they will be able to return.
The college where Todd works, Warren Wilson, has been hard hit by the hurricane. He describes it as a “wonderful place, and a refuge for progressive and LGBTQ students with a caring faculty and administration”.
And like most of Asheville, the College finds itself without power, water, and other basic resources. Warren Wilson College has set up a fund in case anyone wants to contribute to the college's restoration efforts.
As a narrative community I’m inviting you to help out – in any small way you can. Thanks.
Here is the website:
Staying with Todd May, he was recently interviewed by Matt Galloway on Canada’s National Public Radio Station about his latest book for the public – Shall We Go Extinct.
Such a Todd interview. Fabulous. Well done. Enjoy.
Speaking Truth to Power
Setting aside the idea that such a thing as ‘truth’ exists, the concept of speaking truth to power is considered an integral part of the receiving and responding political ecology that shapes the practice of a narrative therapists daily interviewing.
By no means does our therapeutic community hold the truth (about anything) however, we do believe that some ideas seem to be better than others. All is not equal, nothing inside the therapy room is neutral, and so we have to decide - where do we stand and what do we stand for.
In classical Greece speaking truth to power was known as parrhesia. The tactic is similar to what is known as satyagraha (literally, "truth-force") that Mahatma Gandhi took up in the Indian independence movement that brought an end to British colonial rule.
The popularizing of the phrase speaking truth to power in America is attributed to civil rights organizer and peace activist Bayard Rustin who adapted and condensed this concept as part of co-writing the pamphlet Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, published in 1955.
Public advisories from America’s Surgeon Generals are infrequent, but when they surface, they arouse a certain kind of speaking of truth to power. For example, in 1964 Dr. Luther L. Terry, top doc under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, went toe-to-toe with Big Tobacco by issuing a landmark report/public warning on the health hazards and consequences of smoking.
Recently, the current U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek M. Murthy, said out loud, what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful. Murthy’s warning makes pubic how parental stress has become a dangerous mental health issue.
I read Dr. Murthy’s report from top to bottom. His public health advisory about modern parenting cited 48 per cent of parents, with kids under 18, feeling completely overwhelmed by ‘their’ stress, and 41 per cent feel completely numb by the stress.
The report writes how financial worries continue to be a top stressor among parents. In a 2022 review of 108 studies (n=250,553 parents) researchers found a significant association between food insecurity and symptoms of parental depression, anxiety, and stress. Making the case of how economic instability, and poverty makes it difficult for many families to meet their children's basic needs, pay for childcare costs, and provide for children’s health and education expenses.
All in all, I was pleased how the American Surgeon General’s public advisory recognized the deep-rooted relational influence of culture, socioeconomics, structural inequalities and context had on shaping every aspect of parenting life.
The report states that “increases in time spent on work commitments and family responsibilities significantly contribute to work-family conflict, ‘burnout’ (quotations are mine), and stress. And “cultural expectations, societal norms, pressure to meet perceived parenting standards as well as factors of discrimination and racism”, also underwrote all aspects of parental stress.
To state the obvious, without resolute solutions by way of significant policy change across all relational categories of living and expectation parents are interconnected with - this national mental health crisis will remain squarely on the backs of the individual parents themselves.
Parents will blame, shame, and berate themselves, book individual therapy to figure out why they’re not coping/measuring up/feeling like personal failures, ingest medications, and fight vociferously with their partners.
Sadly, and as we well know, living within an individualizing neoliberal pull-yourselves-up-by-your boot-straps context - parents will inevitably individualize their experience.
Even though Dr. Murthy’s report argues that raising children should be a “collective responsibility” buttressed by “societal support through policies—such as those that invest in the health, education, and safety of children—and community involvement through friendship, practical assistance, and emotional support are vital to the well-being of parents and caregivers and beneficial for children as well”.
OK so - if the U.S. Surgeon General’s public advisory resonated for you because it had the ethical and theoretical savvy to recognize the inherent relational influence culture, socioeconomics, structural inequalities and context had on shaping every aspect of parenting life, another important question may be lurking in the wings.
Where is a similar U.S. Surgeon General’s public advisory on the crisis of modern-day intimate couple relationships?
If we use the Surgeon General’s public advisory as a backdrop/template, it may help us contextually explain, and argue on behalf of, the ginormous amounts of overtired, fatigued, no time for sex, busy to the max, and highly conflicted intimate relationship phenomenon we witness in our therapy rooms.
Could the Surgeon General help couple therapists contextually illuminate some of the non-individualist relationally interconnected reasons why 2023 divorce rates were 48% in Canada and 45% in the USA? Hmmm.
Could a Surgeon General health advisory assist the vast majority of popular modern-day methods of couple therapy to seriously re-think and question dominant practices of individualizing couple conflict and relational difficulties? Hmmm.
Could a Surgeon General health advisory begin to move this field of mental health away from viewing intimate couple relationships as dis-embodied-from-culture-socioeconomics-context?
Hmmm. I do take pause to wonder.
Seriously, I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I saw a couple relationship in therapy that didn’t describe their lives as extremely busy. Demanding, tiring, hectic, over-worked, exhausting, harried.
Leaving their intimate relationship to feel, as one couple described this past week – “unreachable, lost, foreign, and sad”. So, my guess is that issuing date nights as a catch all solution - just isn’t going to cut it kids.
As we find in Dr. Murthy’s report, to simply focus on the individual parent’s history/family of origin, deficit attachments, trauma etc. to explain and quantify our current parental public crisis would be grossly limiting.
Likewise, to simply focus on an individual’s history/family of origin/attachments and/or the decontextualized individual couple relationship as the primary site and cause of couple conflict, resentment, arguing, lack of intimacy, divorce, etc. etc., is, equally dehumanizing, degrading, brutalizing and, debasing.
And I think I have a case to argue that, so too is the ever popular and ever-growing expert knowledge couple therapy practice of just simply telling couples not only what to do but – what they should do. Offering up the 1-2-3 steps of how to best communicate, live, love, and disagree. Trying their unaccountable therapeutic best to advance exceptionally normative, middle class (and usually white) – generalized advice, to all couple relationships.
Regretfully, I’m not sure we are anywhere close to dignifying the relational complexities modern couple relationships are experiencing, nor adequately explaining the intimate relationships you, me, and everyone we know are engaged with.
OH my-oh-my I need a drink (:
Supporting the Surgeon General health advisory with Couple Relationships
Imagine all of us in this narrative community, committed to a central focus and thrust of a relational form of therapy – that sincerely and relationally connects the couple relationships relationship to contexts of culture, race, gender, sexualities, as well as work, children, children’s friends and activities, extended families, personal illness, friendships, finances, colleagues, dying parents, fitness, sports, housework, religion, social media, leisure, travel ~ along with the full-on never-ending list of expected expectations and obligations. Imagine.
Imagine working alongside a sense of values and compassion that both recognizes and interconnects all the time (+ exhaustion) it takes couple relationships to live up to these never-ending responsibilities – that go on and on and on, with no end in sight.
I often wonder what a considerate narrative therapy informed relational practice might collectively produce. And what this relationally felt collective experience and acknowledgement may mean to the social contract living between couples, therapists, and communities.
New Ideas in Narrative Therapy are waiting ~ What are you waiting for?
VSNT faculty are fully and completely moving and reshaping their work towards narrative therapy informed relational interviewing practice ideas. Come have a taste (:
NIRI: Narrative Therapy Informed Relational Interviewing
A common sense practice with highly conflicted couple relationships
February 1-2, 2025
Therapeutic Conversations 22 Conference
November 7th-9th, 2024
Vancouver, Canada
Live ~ In person event!
Hosted by VSNT
in Supernatural Vancouver, BC
November 7th-9th, 2024
(80% sold)
A Quick Guide to the Therapeutic Conversations 22 Conference
Keynote & Workshop Presenters:
Rosa Arteaga (Mexico/Canada), Christine Dennstedt (Canada), Jan Ewing (USA), Julia Gerlitz (Canada), Helene Grau Kristensen (Denmark), Sharon Leung (Hong Kong/UK), Shannon Macintosh (Canada), Stephen Madigan (Canada), David Marsten (USA), David Nylund (USA), Karl Tomm (Canada), Jennifer White (Canada),Tamara Wilson (Canada), Angel Yuen (Canada).
The TC22 title and conference theme ~ “When the World Walks into the Therapy Room” ~ was chosen for (what we hope are) obvious relational, non-individualist reasons.
Primary TC22 conference intentions/motivations/inspirations are to get to know, care for, discuss with, and stand behind our Next Generation of talented narrative practitioners.
TC22 showcases a wide variety of world class narrative therapists - in action.
Each (and every single) TC22 Practice workshop is taught and demonstrated through Live Interviewing, Therapy Session Videos, and/or Client Transcripts.
TC22 presenters have met all together on 4 different occasions prior to the conference.
TC22 Presenters meet as a collective group to discuss, shape/reshape, and assist each other’s workshop/keynote presentations – before they ever see you Live in Vancouver.
Participants have a delicious menu of skill-based workshop topics + cool social events to choose from.
See you soon
On other fronts:
There are a lot more narrative happenings and bits of news to report, and here are just a few:
October: VSNT faculty member Helene Grau Kristensen (Denmark) is keynoting in Spain for the Spanish Narrative Therapy Association. Please contact Carlos at: carchimpen@hotmail.com
October: Karl Tomm recently sent me a draft of a brilliant new paper that is certain to knock your socks off. Hopefully the publication will reach you in the upcoming months.
November: The new CEO and Director for the Psychotherapy Networker was kind enough to track me down, find out what I was currently up to in narrative therapy – then offered up an invitation to present at the Networkers (massive) upcoming Couple Therapy Conference ~ November 14-15 (Live Online).
Below is the link
Foundations of Narrative Therapy Online 5-day
Certificate Training
February 20th-22nd, 2025
&
February 28th-March 1st, 2025
Thanks again to all of you who hung around all the way to the bottom.
If you would like to respond directly, please email me at: yft@telus.net
Until next time.
Stephen x
PS: Quick peak of the next one.
In the final stages - having a wonderful time with the
remarkable APA Editorial and Marketing/Acquisitions
Teams - before this 3rd Edition goes
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