Jeffrey Kottler - Stories Weve Heard, Stories Weve Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy and Everyday Life

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ID LIKE TO tell you a story. The action begins at a point in my life, and my career, when I felt empty. I had nothing left to give. I was bored with my work, feeling that after so many decades I was just reliving the same experiences over and over again. I felt like I wasnt learning anything new. I was tired of being assailed with supposedly new improvements in therapeutic technique, admonished to abandon whatever I thought was working to try the next best thing. I was frustrated with the way the field had been evolving over the years, moving on from those aspects of therapeutic work that I cherished the most in favor of supposedly new, groundbreaking, evidence-based, empirically validated treatments. Sure, I was grateful for advances in diagnostic accuracy and precision in matching best practices, but it felt like therapy had lost its soul.

I originally got into this field, like so many others, because I most value relational factors in helping and healing. As a teenager, my life was floundering and I was frequently depressed and anxious. It was my school counselor who saved me, largely as a result of her mentoring relationship. In college, it was more of the same: I felt lost and discouraged, wondering whether I would ever climb out of my despair. Again it was through a relationship with a therapist on campus that helped me through this difficult time.

As I look back on my experiences as a student, a supervisee, and a client in therapy, what I remember about the professionals who influenced me the most were the stories they told. I cant remember what my school counselor looked like, but I vividly recall her talking about her own struggles with taking tests (at the time I was in jeopardy of flunking out of school). I think about the half dozen different therapists Ive consulted during my life, and although I cant remember much about their offices, their appearances, their advice, or their admonishments, I do remember a few of their seminal stories. In fact, I still tell some of them to others.

After writing dozens of books about therapy during the past 35 years, covering almost every nuance of the craft, including a focus on ethical issues, group settings, relational factors, difficult clients, interpersonal conflicts, emotional overload, secrets and paradoxes, serendipitous change, unfulfilled desire, passion and commitment, social justice and advocacy, failures and negative outcomes, successes and triumphs, unusual cases, self-supervision, indigenous healing, reciprocal influence, creative breakthroughs, deception and lies, burnout and self-care, expertise and mastery, I justifiably wondered what could possibly be left to cover. I felt particularly stumped because as much investigation, research, and writing that Id done about therapy, I still hadnt found the essential element of what we do as therapists that appears to make the most difference.

I was thinking about all of this, and my frustration with the Holy Grail still eluding me, when I decided to get back to my reading. Even with my busy schedule and compulsive productivity, I still manage to read a novel each week, most of them in the genre of escape fiction. I am totally transported into different worlds, forgetting about whatever else that is going on in my life.

The particular book resting on my lap had been skeptically borrowed from a friend; it was a best-selling thriller about a zombie apocalypse, but with a subtext of political commentary (I suppose Im being a little defensive). I completely and totally entered this imagined future in which a virus had wiped out most of the human race, changing them into voracious, brainless monsters whose only goal was to feed on the few living survivors. It was a world so vividly created and described that I found myself living there during idle moments and dreams, imagining how I would function with all the challenges and obstacles I would likely face. While I imagined myself as a protagonist in the story, I wondered whether I would have the fortitude and resilience, not to mention the skills, to survive in such a dangerous world.

When I finished the last of the pages, delighted with the whole rollercoaster ride, I decided to go for a run outside to get some exercise. As I was just finding my stride, reliving one of the more memorable scenes from the tense finale of the book, I noticed another runner coming toward me. As the guy approached me with a huge grin, the runner offered his hand as a high five, one runner to another, as if to say, Way to go. Runners are notorious for their introspective, pained faces, so it was especially surprising to find someone gregarious and overtly friendly.

Beautiful day! I answered as I slapped hands while we passed one another. I thought to myself that such interactions on a run almost never happen, and I wondered why people couldnt be friendlier to one another. But then I started thinking to myself, What if...?

No, I interrupted the thought. Thats just crazy. And so I continued along my way.

But what if...?

Against my will I found myself thinking, I know this is really weird and all, but what if this guy has some kind of virus and he is deliberately passing it on to people? What if when I touched his hand he gave me some kind of disease?

As I considered the idea, I realized how ridiculous it sounded. Here was one of those rare times when someone was being nice and all I could do was imagine the worst. I castigated myself for such paranoid suspicions, but as I did so I noticed that I was rubbing my hand on my shirt, as if to wipe away the imaginary germs. I couldnt help giggling to myself about how silly I was acting.

I tried to put the whole incident behind me, but during the past weeks I had been so absorbed in the zombie novel that I couldnt seem to escape back into so-called reality. I just kept shaking my head in wonderment at how stupidly I was behaving. But what if I really