About My Approach
Many Stories Therapy brings a keen and critical awareness to many of the approaches that make up the field of therapy. I will work closely with you to tailor a conversation that fits with your interests and goals.
I am most inspired by approaches that are informed by narrative therapy, story-telling, 'just' therapy, feminism, cultural humility, and 'de-colonializing therapy' ideas. I am committed to the idea that there are many paths one can take that lead towards greater self-understanding, clarity, restoration and/or healing - and also that therapy must try, as best it can, to 'do some justice' to the people and stories that are brought into the therapy room.
The trouble with crafting the right stories for ourselves, as we are all called to do, is that we are constantly being invited into powerful cultural stories that over-simplify, de-contextualize, medicalize and/or pathologize all of our personal struggles and distress. These stories view struggle as a personal 'disorder', something that needs to be gotten rid of and speaks poorly of us, rather than something that is unavoidable in our world and requires understanding.
These stories place “problems” inside individual people’s heads and hearts and not in our real life contexts where problems (like stigma, silence, discrimination, homophobia, abuse, racism, sexism, etc, etc) actually exist. These stories make people into the problem, even children. And in these stories where ‘we’ are the problem, often lies frustration and shame.
The trouble with stories is that we never make up our own stories entirely by ourselves.
To 'do some justice' in therapy means to create relationships of dignity and respect. It means to join with others collaboratively and in a spirit of 'putting our heads and hearts together'. It means to resist seeing 'problems' as existing solely within the person who experiences them while ignoring the much larger context in which problems live.
To 'do some justice' in therapy means to focus on much more than negative conclusions, but to see people as being made up of many stories - so many beyond any struggles that bring people to therapy in the first place.