Ördögh, Csilla is a psychologist and perinatal consultant, and an assistant lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Department of Affective Psychology, where she is currently a PhD student. Her research is connected to mother-baby synchrony and its interdependence with the quality of the birth experience. Dr. Katalin Varga is her supervisor of the PhD studies.
Farkas, István is a psychology BA student at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Isván Farkas is a psychology BA student at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His interests are quite diverse, he started his studies studying physics, and is currently working on his bachelor thesis about analyzing galaxy spectra with artificial neural networks. Last year he published an article in health sociology, and is currently interested in hypnotherapy and existential therapy, among many other fields of psychology.
Tönkő, Márton is a psychology BA student at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His areas of interest are prosocial behavior and interpersonal relationships. His future plans are to work in intensive therapy units as a clinical psychologist.
Introduction
In therapy, words become pregnant with meaning. A story, may that be the story of the client(s), or a story that therapists use during therapy work, can be viewed as a so called narrative. There are therapies built on stories already existing like tale therapy, or therapies that use appropriate anecdotes as a therapeutic tool for healing. Narrative psychology gives us the framework to understand the underlying power of words becoming stories, and stories becoming powerful tools in therapy work. In this paper storytelling in therapy will be examined through looking at tale therapies and anecdotes used in therapy. Through observing fairytales’ and anecdotes’ suggestive qualities in relation to formal hypnosis, the hidden power of using stories as tools in therapy unfolds.
Why stories are so important
Narratives are deeply rooted in our way of thinking, in our way of constructing and understanding the world and ourselves. Narratives “… form psychological and philosophical perspectives, a narrative is treated as a human method of making sense of the world, including self, identity, personality, others, experience and time” (Akimoto, 2018, p.107). First, we have to know the circumstances where tales or anecdotes can be used in therapy. In order to get closer to understanding different modes of action, we have to examine narrative psychology, as its approach relates to how people elaborate their experiences through the creation of stories. The pioneer of this field of study is Dan P. McAdams (2001), who created the life story model of identity, ‘which asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self’ (p. 100). László János in his 2008 article also explains that scientific narrative psychology is based on the fact that people in their life story narratives draw up their own significant life events, similar to groups in their group story narratives. These stories describe the person’s relationship with the social world and explain how each constructs their identity. The article (László, 2008) states that the compositional properties and quality of these narratives reflect the boundaries of behavioral adaptation and coping mechanisms of the storyteller. In narrative therapy, therapists not only listen to the clients’ narrative in a conscious way but may also use stories. Fairytales and their protagonists help the client symbolize their experiences, thus providing a moral compass and a widened understanding (Ruini & Ottolini, 2013). Fairytales have always served as (other than for entertainment purposes) guides. These stories were told to children by the elders, by well-respected people, to prepare youngsters for the challenges of life, thus serving as psycho-educational guides. Anecdotes operate in a more direct manner, giving lessons in concrete situations, thus offering a more effective and meaningful option for narrative therapy. Tales and anecdotes can be used in therapy because of our universal tradition of telling and constructing our own stories. This is how incorporating tales and anecdotes into narrative psychology can be possible. Dallos (2005) explains a plot compositional description, invented by Vladimir Plopp, which uses a complex method to distinguish the functions of participants of Russian magical tales. This method – through narrative psychological content analysis – can be transferred into a meaning-creating psychological language, that is, in the narrative, instead of plot functions, it looks for psychologically meaningful roles and functions (László, 2008). The discovered constellations allow the narrator’s (the client in a therapeutic situation) psychological condition and characteristics to be revealed (László, 2008).
Framework used in Hypnosis and in Storytelling
Therapy work usually happens in a time and space different from everyday life. The client enters the therapy room and the session starts. If it is not his/her first time there, he/she knows to expect something different from everyday experience. Therapies working with altered states of mind put a special emphasis on framing the sessions, making sure that when the session is over, the client is clear-headed and alert, ready to meet the outside world once again. It is important because in hypnosis, the client enters his/her inner world, where time and space may feel different. Trust built between client and therapist can help the client go deeper in his/her inner world. Formal hypnosis usually starts with rapport building, which does not directly lead to hypnotic trance, but builds a good communicational bridge and a strengthening connection necessary between the client/patient and the hypnotist. After this step, the hypnotic induction begins. Through the hypnotic induction, the client enters an altered state of mind. In the altered state, the client is usually relaxed, his/her attention is selective, his/her imagination is more vivid, and is more susceptible to suggestions (Loftus, Nolen-Hoeksema & Fredrickson, 2009). In the end, the hypnotist ends the hypnotic trance by gradually bringing the client back to his/her normal state. The framework of storytelling comes with special phrases universally known, signifying beginning and end: fairytales usually start with “Once upon a time..” and end with “The End”. These phrases are essential parts of the tales, giving a strong, characteristic frame, distinguishing it from the everyday world. The exact time when telling tales to adults and children first appeared in human history is unknown, but it is surely one of the oldest traditions. Fairytales always have a typical structure, universally known to humankind. Not only is the content typical, the event of storytelling also has its unique elements. The traditional and mostly accurate depiction of adults telling fairytales to other adults is that they gather round at night, when everything is calm and serene, probably sitting around the fire, and switch on the listening mode. With children the typical scene includes the adult (usually the parent) sitting next to the child, who is calmly listening to the story before going to sleep. Experience has shown that there is more to stories then the overall calming effect of listening. Stories always have a message to tell that will stay with the listener, find a way to resonate with his/her current state and thus have a long-term effect on thoughts and behavior. The positive aspects can be used in everyday life as well as therapy sessions, working with children or adults. As for anecdotes, they are short, thoughtprovoking or often even humorous stories, usually describing an individual person or an incident. Despite their sometimes comical nature these stories main purpose is to give a so-called moral compass, or to tell a general truth, by which the reader can understand a person (the protagonists are usually known or even popular historical figures), a group or even an abstract idea (Epstein, 1995). The stories typically operate with implicit messages, which have a suggestive nature. This way, it is easier for the reader (or listener) to adopt the meanings, as implicit messages tend to require more active processing. Given the nature of anecdotes, they appear to be useful in therapeutic situations helping the therapist create a frame, a structure for the whole therapy, and also in helping the client to heal.
Rapport building and towards regression
It is important to have rapport built before hypnosis or story telling happens, but it is also good to know that both processes deepen trust between client/therapist and listener/storyteller. Parents usually have a deep bond with their children already, and fairytales build an even closer connection. For the duration of the story, the storyteller uses the fairytale’s symbolic thinking and language, which is much closer to children, making it easier for them to understand (Bettleheim, 1988). Since fairytales are suitable for indirectly communicating complex meaning through their underlying symbolic structure, they can be used efficiently in therapy, not exclusively for children but for adults as well (Dieckmann 1997). In order to understand why fairytales are – 28 – 2018, Volume 42, No. 3 such an effective means of communication, we need to observe the models of long-term explicit memory: the conscious recollection of data (Graf & Sachter 1985). Among conscious memories, we can differentiate between learned facts, taken out of context (semantic), and memories of actual events (episodic) (Zager, Medin & Smith 1984). By examining episodic memory, it appears that people need to create stories, that is, build narratives: contexts in which they can place their memories of past, their current situation and the future, connecting the individual events. Besides episodic memory, we also strongly rely on our semantic memory. One of its commonly used models is the so-called prototype theory. According to this theory, people categorize things around prototypes, based on how close they are to a generally accepted, central member of the given concept (Eysenc & Keane 1990). This approach to semantic memory brings a resemblance to symbolic thinking. Symbols usually carry some of the most decisive characteristics of the symbolized, often archetypes, yet the symbol and the symbolized object are not the same. Symbolism appearing in tales and dreams carry strong similarities, probably because the symbols of both of those come from nature. The structural similarities between the structures of our memories and tales, the connection to child-like thinking and dreams suggest that tales might have a strong relation to the subconscious, which makes it appealing to use in adult therapy as well (Dieckmann, 1997). Regression is an important element of tales and dreams that may be in everyday life or in therapy work and is also an essential element of hypnosis.
The similarities to hypnosis: entering an altered world
As mentioned above, fairytales tend to have a typical framework, and are strongly symbolic in nature. Both of these characteristics carry a dissociative trait in them. Furthermore, they tend to be exaggerated, which encourages us to distinguish tales and reality even more. Studies have shown that when parents take out the cruel episodes of the story, it actually makes the story more believable, more like it has been taken out of everyday life, thus confusing and frightening the children even more than the original version (Danilewitz, 1991). Given how these traits, the symbolic structure of tales allow a dissociative, objective analysis separated from everyday life, and a very personal, subconscious understanding of the underlying meaning, it seems that a good way to observe the suggestive aspects of tales is by comparing fairytales and hypnosis. In traditional (formal or classic) hypnosis the client is in a mainly passive, relaxed state, focusing his/her attention on the hypnotist, while the hypnotist communicates the suggestions toward the client. This is quite similar to the case of tale telling. The story teller tells the story, while the listener listens to it calmly, in a relaxed state. Experiments show that children listen to fairytales in a much quieter way, and afterwards tend to act in a less active way for a while, seemingly more absorbed within their thoughts, compared to children who watch a film, or listen to a trivial story beforehand (Crain, 1983). One of the seemingly problematic traits of tales in regard to hypnotic suggestion is that while suggestions tend to depend very strongly on the actual words used, tales are kept alive mostly by oral tradition, which makes it almost impossible for the words to remain in their original form. However, it has been shown by J. A. Bargh and his colleagues (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996) that words associated with a specific concept, when repeatedly appearing in the surrounding of the client, might induce a behavior usually associated with the given concept. In one of their experiments (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996), the subjects had to fill in a test, where they were told to order the mixed-up words of sentences. Some of these tests contained words associated with old age (e.g.: worried, Florida, old, lonely, grey, selfish, careful, sentimental, wise, stubborn, courteous, bingo, withdraw, forgetful, retired, wrinkle, rigid, traditional, bitter, obedient, conservative, knits, dependent, ancient, helpless, gullible, cautious, alone). In the neutral version, the words related to the elderly were replaced by words unrelated to them (eg., thirsty, clean, private). The subjects who had to fill in the tests containing the words associated with old age left the room after the experiment was over in a significantly slower – 29 – 2018, Volume 42, No. 3 manner compared to those who did not have such words in their test, even though no reference to being slow appeared in these tests directly (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996). This, combined with the symbolic nature of tales, and their relation to the subconscious shows how tales can preserve their suggestive traits despite the fact that they were kept by oral tradition.
The suggestive power of stories in therapy
Narrative therapy implies the above mentioned elements in a way where therapists help clients reconstruct their own life stories by deleting and rewriting faulty elements, thereby reconstructing their identities. MacAdams (2010) states that clients often tell confused, even disorganized life stories, which contribute to their symptoms and bad mental health. Clarifying these stories using emotional focus while naming and linking emotions to certain experiences can serve as a base methodological background (Beaudoin and Zimmerman, 2011, cited in Mezőfi, 2015). Furthermore, we have to know with what kind of mechanism narrative therapy works. From a narrative therapeutic perspective, the client’s problems come from the storyline of their narratives. The main goal is to separate the clients’ identity from reliving their problems (externalization) and to give an opportunity to access desirable self-experiences (Mezőfi, 2015). Through repetition and naming emotions, and bonding those to certain plot elements, life stories can be restructured to be pleasant and selfaffirmational. It is not surprising that interest in transformation stories, in various fields of both media and science are high, as these healing stories inspire us, and become an instrument of healing at the same time (Mezőfi, 2015). Therefore, these can serve as the previously mentioned anecdotes of personal self-story reconstruction. Other than healing stories, different forms of art can serve as non-self-narratives, stories which are not lived by, but experienced by the client, such as plays, books, movies, as they provide us a chance to engage in a story. First, maybe by upsetting us, then by experiencing a cathartic moment, which might create a certain personality state, making an impact on our way of thinking (John, 2010). In therapy, talking about these experiences is crucial, in my opinion. Their emotional impact can be useful in the integration of personal situations where these – consciously or unconsciously – serve as guidance in selfinvolved-narratives. Making the client become aware of the non-selfnarratives’ helping background mechanisms is also important, so he/she can separate harmful and healing external source experiences. Another interesting narrative therapeutic method is naming diffuse psychological content. Bojti István (2015) explains in detail how naming these emotions help the client cope with them in his/her everyday life. In Bojti’s (2015) opinion it becomes an entity, which is separated from the person; it can become a so-called scapegoat, carrying the responsibility so the person becomes free from it. In this way, externalization of the problem becomes possible, thus enabling the person to take control and change important aspects of it. Eventually the responsibility returns to the client, the scapegoat works as a temporary solution, to help the client through the earlier, more difficult part of the therapy, realizing his/her emotions, and becoming more aware of clarified life-stories and the related emotions. This may work through creating an anecdote-like experience, where the client can refer to these diffuse emotions as some tale characters previously heard or seen, using the coping methods within the story, therefore integrating those leading to a successful therapeutic outcome.
Examples of Tale therapy
We have established that fairytales are a medium suitable for communicating more complex thoughts. There are several different approaches on how to use fairytales in therapy. One of the main distinguishing features can be whether we use fairytales in their original form, or construct our own narratives, using the symbolic and structural tools of fairytales (Vachkov, 2016). When using the original stories, the therapist might analyze what the favorite tale of the patient is, or suggest a story related to the current situation of the patient (Dieckmann, 1997). Analyzing what kind of – 30 – 2018, Volume 42, No. 3 story a child asks for can also be helpful in therapy, yet according to Bettleheim (1988) in the case of a child it might be better not to make the subconscious thoughts conscious by sharing the supposed reason for why a given story was chosen. In creating fairytales, there are different approaches. One option is when the therapist, considering the needs of the patient, creates a story (Levine, 1980), while the other approach is to let the patient create the story as a narrative that can help them deal with their current situation (Ruini, Masoni, Ottolini, & Ferrari, 2014). An example of how fairytales in their original form can be used in therapy is the case mentioned in Dieckmann’s 1997 article: a woman, brought up with very strict parenting, developed a severe neurosis due to her restricted impulse for individuation. She also had a distinct animal phobia. One day she dreamt about a white snake, which at first frightened her, but then started to talk to her, and calmed her down. Next day she was able to go to work with less anxiety. After telling her dream to Dieckmann, the therapist suggested she read “The White Snake” by the Grimm brothers. This story is about a trusted servant of a king, who has to bring a bowl to the king each night in secret, but was forbidden to look into the bowl. One day, despite the orders of the king, he looks into the bowl, and finds a white snake in it. He cannot resist the snakes’ good smell, secretly eats from the bowl, and thus starts to understand the speech of animals. He then goes away from the castle, and during his journey he helps some animals, who return the favor, and help him, when in need, in order to get the hand of a princess. This story helped the patient to start to think about animals differently, understanding how helpful animals can be. Furthermore, Dieckmann (1997) suggests in his article that the ethical problem in the beginning of the story is the very thing that helped the client. In the beginning the trusted servant of the king acts against the orders and eats from the snake and thus gains the ability to speak with animals. This aspect of the story, according to Dieckmann (1997), has helped the client to stop repressing the non-rigid, timeless animal aspects of her persona. Tales can be therapeutic for children as well. Children usually have strongly polarized thinking, it might be therefore difficult for them to deal with ambivalent feelings. Danilewitz (1991) writes about dealing with ambivalent feelings in her article as well. She observes it using the well-known tale “Little Red Riding Hood”:
“In Little Red Riding Hood the kindly grandma undergoes a sudden replacement by the wolf who threatens to destroy the child. If in reality grandma humiliates the child for wetting his pants she no longer is the person she was before, she has become a witch. Unable to see any congruence between the different manifestations the child truly experiences — grandma is seen as a separate entity, the loving and the threatening. She is indeed grandma and the wolf. By dividing her up, by splitting, the child can preserve his image of the good grandmother, if she changes into a wolf it is scary but he does not compromise his vision of her kindness.” (Danilewitz, 1991, p.88)
In another example Levine (1980) creates a story instead of using a fairytale in its original form in order to treat an 8-year-old girl with insomnia. This girl was sexually assaulted by her uncle, and so she carried hatred towards him inside her. However, she loved her father. A recording of the personalized story was given to the parents, with the instruction to play it for her before she goes to sleep. The story included things that she liked to make her more open to the story. It was about good and bad bears, it served as a tool to help her dissolve her ambivalent feelings toward men.
Modern challenges in creating and working with narrative
Base theory is simple, but applying it into our current social situation is far more difficult than it looks (Beaudoin and Zimmerman, 2011, cited in Mezőfi, 2015). The informational society brought a number of new obstacles to look out for; people’s lives are more complex than a few decades – 31 – 2018, Volume 42, No. 3 ago. We have to adapt to various new situations, consider our online identities, our career life, etc. Implying anecdotes into life stories used to be easier, because people had a more general way of living, the fact that one’s life was bonded to a certain company, certain profession, certain ideologies provided a simpler solution for the therapeutic approach (Kondor et al., 2018). Nowadays, people have to adapt to new environments, new situations more frequently. Therefore, it is more difficult to find their personal life ‘anecdotes’ (displayed in books, movies, etc., or through oral tradition), which carry the proper massage, have personalized moral guides, and through their life stories help integrate these into their identity.
Conclusion
The act of storytelling has been used since the earliest times of human history to calm and educate. The structure and use of symbols in fairytales and anecdotes show many similarities to the models of human memory, making it a very efficient tool for communicating more complex thoughts to children and adults alike in everyday life as well as therapy work. Using tales, stories and anecdotes in various methods in narrative therapy can have a positive suggestive impact in the reconstruction of clients’ life story and identity. Although, it still needs further research regarding its direct impact and advantages, it has already been in use by many therapists, and the field continues to grow.
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