Jeffrey Zimmerman - Neuro-Narrative Therapy: New Possibilities for Emotion-Filled Conversations

Neuro
Narrative
Therapy

New Possibilities for
Emotion-Filled Conversations

Jeffrey Zimmerman

Foreword by Karl Tomm

A Norton Professional Book

Histories of the Present Revisited

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

Carlos Santana

When I was presenting Neuro-Narrative work at a Family Therapy conference, a number of audience members said they love Narrative work but the lack of focus on affect was extremely problematic for them. Back in the day when I would get a comment like Narrative work is very cognitive, I immediately became defensive, pointing to the emphasis on lived experience. But I get it now. We dont talk emotions, affect, or feelings. We dont write about them, either. And much of the time we dont take care to make sure they are present in the room with us. My hope is that this book will begin to remediate this state of affairs, to shift the direction toward a more emotionally full Narrative Therapy.

How did we end up here? What can neuroscience contribute that might provide a foundation of understanding from which we can develop new Narrative ideas and practices? For me personally, neuroscience has made it clear why affect needs to be privileged, and how other aspects of the ways our brain and body work need to be addressed by Narrative Therapy. The proof is that combining Neuro and Narrative has made my work more effective, efficient, and useful to a wider variety of Problems. Furthermore, given the way our culture is evolving, ideas from neuroscience might be especially helpful at this time. For example, later you will read about the growing emphasis on the right brain in the therapy world, perhaps a response to the way our left brain appears to be exerting more influence on us in our technology-based world (see Zimmerman, 2017, for a discussion about a right shift in psychotherapy practices). Perhaps these developments in neuroscience and the possibilities they offer are necessary to provide us balance in our lives. Might a Neuro-Narrative Therapy contribute in a similar manner?

What Is the Decade of the Brain, and What Controversies Does It Involve?

President George H. W. Bush designated 19901999 as the Decade of the Brain, to make the public aware of the benefits of brain research. It seems important to note that Allan Schore (2012) marked the actual decade as 19952005. Despite all the attention and fanfare, initiatives derived from brain research have not been without their critics. Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached, for example, cautioned against a neuromolecular gaze (2013, p. 38). They questioned the claims made by various authors (although they shockingly did not refer to Dan Siegels work) that through this lens human beings will know better how to achieve social and political goals (p. 162). These authors traced the history of modern neuroscience back to 1962 and traced the prefix neuro to its first use in the late seventeenth century, with neurons being described in the late nineteenth century. The story goes that Freud wanted to situate his ideas in the developing brain science of his day, but this idea was rejected by dominant scientific ideology.

Michael White once said that there were no enmeshed families until the 1970s, a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that not until then did this description of a particular kind of family organization develop and gain use in describing families. Once brought forth, this view had real effects on the way we looked at families and was embedded in normative judgments about how families should be. At the time, was enmeshed families a useful construction? To what extent are, for example, neurons and synapses* useful constructs? What are the real effects of these constructs? How did the question of real effects even come about?

In a 2007 Family Process article, Mona Fishbane brought many neurobiological concepts into the Family Therapy literature including (as she described them): the relational brain, the way neurons wire together when fire together, neuroplasticity, amygdala hijacking the way our cortex has evolved for social behavior and communication, unconscious emotional operating systems, mirror neurons, mindsight, attunement, and the chemical mediation of connection. She ended her article by suggesting that we increase our focus on clients emotional experience, given the clear importance of emotional life emerging from neuroscience (2007, p. 410). Has this call been met or even responded to by Narrative or Family Therapies?

In my opinion, not really. But it is important to understand why not. Like all forms of psychotherapy, Narrative Therapy arrived at a particular point both in the evolution of ideas informing psychotherapeutic work and in terms of what was happening in the larger culture.

What Contributed to the Evolution From Emotional Focus to Meaning Focus?

In the early 1980s, most soon-to-be Narrative Therapists were Family Therapists, reading and publishing in Family Therapy journals. Most of the early Family Therapy leaders had a background in Psychoanalysis and tended to think of family problems from that lens (Beels, 2009). In his 2009 Family Process article, Chris Beels pointed out that the influence of Psychoanalysis was to encourage the development of theories of family function and dysfunction. These theories are structural: they hypothesize various ways to understand how families worked. One effect of structural points of view is that they construct categories of normal and assign pathology to families that do not fit the normative structure. Nevertheless, very few of the early Family Therapists focused on emotion in their work. Indeed, Matthew Suarez Pace and Jonathan Sandberg suggested that, traditionally, emotion has played a marginal role in the theoretical, empirical, and clinical aspects of MFT [Marriage and Family Therapy] (2012, p. 4). They suggested that the only prominent founding Family Therapists to be emotionally focused were Murray Bowen and Virginia Satir.

In the larger therapeutic world, Psychoanalytical and Psychodynamic therapies were one of the dominant groups, with a focus that included unconscious processes and emotions. Even then, some of us critiqued their practice, suggesting that these feelings were elusive, that they sometimes required expert help to uncover, and we wondered if talking about them resulted in much change anyway. In general, in these approaches the therapist was constructed as being someone who knew more about what creates the clients experience than the client did; this was especially true with anything deemed unconscious. The complicated issue of nonconscious influences (I prefer this term to unconscious, as do many writers today) is addressed later in the book. In retrospect, at the very least, these seemed to be unhelpful metaphors to describe clinical work.

A very different dominant trend, particularly in American psychological work, was Behaviorism. Over time thoughts came to the forefront, with the idea that these thoughts produced feelings. Eventually, the cognitive movement supplanted Behaviorism as the dominant psychological paradigm. Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990), whose ideas were central to Michael Whites early work, focused on the kind of meaning-making processes that people engaged in when responding to life events.

How Did the Evolution of the Cybernetic/Systems Model Change the Question From How Families Work to What Are the Real Effects of Our Work?