Diversity Narrative

I attended a workshop titled Journey’s in Identity: Diversity Narrative that was put on by the Asian Pacific Islander Social Work Association (APISWA) at San Diego State University. The event was held on campus on Friday, March 4^th. I decided to participate in this professional growth opportunity because of the ties I saw to the Narrative Therapy technique I learned about last semester in CSP 600. After our initial introduction to Narrative therapy in this program, we were introduced to Motivational Interviewing and Solution Focused Brief Counseling (SFBC). I have adopted aspects of the second two styles in my personal counseling work and I have been looking for ways to incorporate the Narrative therapy framework that I believe has a lot of potential in schools. Narrative therapy is typically used in the context of 30-45 minute regularly scheduled sessions that can continue for an indefinite amount of time. This is not feasible in schools so I was excited by this opportunity to learn about its use in a more condensed timeframe and format that I feel can be transferrable to my work.

This workshop was formatted to give individuals working in the helping fields an introduction to Narrative therapy and the use of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR). It began with a short lecture on the importance of knowing our own stories. People in the helping professions are constantly thinking about the identities of their clients, but many times not of our own. Each of our narratives are strong and weave together. Understanding the stories that shape our lives can allow us to develop awareness and reflecting on them enables us to build off them rather than be driven by them. Awareness opens us to the possibility of re-authoring our lives to create a new narrative for ourselves. They emphasized that our stories begin with our first relationships and that the human mind learns without conscious awareness. This influences how we see ourselves and interact with others throughout our lives. The workshop took us through a booklet with a series of small-group activities to reflect on our own identities. We examined the impact of the messages we receive and our own ideas about our identities.

I would like to use Narrative Therapy techniques with youth in middle school and high school where they are at a critical age for developing their sense of self. I think these techniques could help them develop security in their identities as well as give them the power and autonomy to take on the role of ‘author’ of their lives. I believe time for reflection of this kind could be effective in helping students understand the importance of their relationships in shaping patterns of how they relate to others. I think this work could be particularly beneficial if done in groups to allow students to ‘humanize’ others that may seem very different from them. An exercise such as this would give them a voice to communicate their frustrations with the messages they are constantly being told. This can bring awareness to students of the impact they have on others to lessen the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes and to ultimately improve a school’s social climate.

Towards the end of the workshop we were introduced to the use of EMDR in concordance with Narrative Therapy. Both techniques are evidence-based practices. EMDR focuses on changing how your story is stored within you. It is based on information-processing theory and combines the use of stimuli to reflect eye movements found in REM sleep to bring up memories and to reprocess and integrate the occurrences back into your memory in a healthier way. It has been found to be particularly effective with individuals experiencing PTSD symptoms but is also used to ‘edit’ ones story and process smaller traumas. Although I will not be able to incorporate EDMR into my work in schools, I may be able to refer students struggling with trauma symptoms to outside help. Narrative therapy is more feasible in schools and I could use it with individuals and small groups. If implementing in a small group, I will want to be sure that the group is a safe place for individuals to be vulnerable with each other in order to learn as a group. One method of measuring it’s effectiveness may be through the use of self-rating scales to look at students sense of identity and the way they view and treat others based on these factors. My hope is that through the use of Narrative therapy techniques and workshops students (and even staff!) could develop more understanding of their identity to bring mindfulness to the effect they have on those around them and to be empowered to re-author their stories.

Hannah Swanson