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Narrative Therapy's Relational Understanding of Identity

Article in Family Process · May 2016

DOI: 10.1111/famp.12216

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Narrative Therapy’s Relational Understanding of
Identity
GENE COMBS*
JILL FREEDMAN†

We describe how we think of identity as relational, distributed, performed, and fluid,

and we illustrate the use of this conceptualization within a narrative worldview. Drawing
on the work of Michael White, we describe how this relational view of identity leads to ther-
apeutic responses that give value to interconnection across multiple contexts and that focus
on becoming rather than on being. We show how a narrative worldview helps focus on the
relational, co-evolving perspective that was the basis of our early attraction to family ther-
apy. We offer detailed examples from our work of practices that help us stay firmly situated
in a relational worldview that is counter to the pervasive influence of individualism in our
contemporary culture.

Keywords: Narrative Therapy; Identity; Relationship; Individualism; Self

Fam Proc x:1–14, 2016

V aluing relationship and interdependence over individualism and independence is a

central feature of family therapy. During the thrilling period of family therapy that
made our younger selves want to call it home, we were drawn to Gregory Bateson’s (1980)
ideas about “mind in nature” and the “ecology of ideas.” Bateson reminded us not to “chop
up the ecology” into small cause-and-effect chains that distorted the complexities of inter-
relationship and change over time. He directed our attention toward “the pattern that con-
nects the starfish and the star,” and he warned of the often negative (even if unintended)
consequences of short-term reductionist thought. In a seminal article in this journal titled
“Thinking about thinking in family therapy,” Auerswald (1985) reminded us of the
ever-evolving, wide-ranging character of Bateson’s worldview:
If one constructs a four-dimensional holographic thought model of Batesonian evolution, any seg-
ment any size of that model turns out to be an ecosystem. A randomly selected segment will be an
open system.. . . The awareness that such a system is a segment of a larger field, however, pre-
cludes treating it permanently as a closed system. The family is such an ecosystem. An individual
is such an ecosystem. A community is such an ecosystem. A nation is such an ecosystem. You
name it.
Now, over the thirty years since that article was published, we see our treasured field
beset by influences that require therapists to narrow their focus, to center that focus on
short arcs of pathology, and to locate that pathology in individual bodies.

*Department of Family Medicine, University of Chicago/NorthShore University Health System Family

Medicine Residency Program, Evanston, IL.
†
Evanston Family Therapy Center, Evanston, IL.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gene Combs, 1212 Elmwood Ave.
Evanston, IL 60202. E-mail: [email protected].
We are grateful to Vicki Dickerson for her patience and generous editorial support in bringing this paper
to fruition; we could not have done it without her.

1
Family Process, Vol. x, No. x, 2016 © 2016 Family Process Institute
doi: 10.1111/famp.12216
2 / FAMILY PROCESS

Health insurers require a DSM diagnosis, and all the major, “legitimate” DSM diag-
noses are individually based. Even in a small private therapy practice, to be paid for our
work we must conceptualize people’s problems as disorders in individual bodies. We must
measure the families we see according to individualistic, biologically based norms. We are
pushed to diagnose people as though the labels derived from such norms define their iden-
tities, and to file pathology-based reports to justify each hour or portion thereof we spend
in following ever-more-rigidly defined practices. In an editorial in this journal, Jay Lebow
(2013, p. 156), referring to an article by Hoyt and Gurman (2012), summarized the
situation thusly:
. . .therapists and clients are put in a moral dilemma by a reimbursement system that more read-
ily approves claims for individual diagnoses than relational difficulties. The incentives for an indi-
vidual medical model view of human functioning have increased dramatically; to say a problem is
a family problem is often to say the clients will pay for their own care.
In the same editorial (p. 156), Lebow commented on how the pharmaceutical industry has
used its power and influence to keep the focus on medical pathology in individual bodies:
. . .proponents of medications have come to make claims for their effects across a very broad range
of human difficulties and processes. This applies to usage directly in relation to the syndromes
labeled by the DSM and to off-label uses that consumers actively seek out such as Cialis and
Viagra for better sex, Concerta for better concentration, and SSRIs for coping with overly
stressful job and family lives.
Funds for family services—especially in poor communities—have been cut back year by
year, and corporate values and management styles have grown; we are urged to value the
reductionist efficiency of one-size-fits-all therapy models over taking time to tailor our
work so that it fits with the complexities of local ecosystems. The experience of a woman
who is currently in our training program is an example: Her supervisor at the hospital
where she works as a psychologist told her she will now be required to provide 38 hours of
therapy every week. She told her supervisor that even at the 32 hours she currently pro-
vides, she doesn’t believe she can always do her best work. Her supervisor, never address-
ing what would support her best work, said that she could either do 38 hours of direct
service or choose to continue at 32 hours and become a part-time employee—which would
mean losing her benefit package, including her health insurance. This bright, dedicated
woman already works considerably more than 40 hours a week, but note writing, teaching
mindfulness classes, and attending required employee meetings do not count as “Relative
Value Units (RVUs),” and her organization gets paid by how many RVUs its employees
generate.
As we see it, these individualist, reductionist values and practices are in direct opposi-
tion to the relational, ecosystemic, co-evolutionary worldview that is at the heart of family
therapy. The individualism and reductionism that come as (perhaps unintended) conse-
quences when corporate management practices meet the medical model make it difficult
to stay centered in the relational, context-specific values that are so central to family
therapy.
Narrative therapy, our practical and theoretical home, provides us with a worldview
that is based in relationship rather than in individuality and in process rather than in
products. In this paper we will focus on how we and other narrative therapists view iden-
tity or “experience of self” as a relational, historically and culturally situated process that
changes through time and context and we will illustrate some of the ways we use this view
in working with individuals, couples, and families. We hope to illustrate how this rela-
tional, nonindividualist worldview helps us resist the individualism and reductionism that
threaten the vitality of our chosen professional home.

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 3
THE NARRATIVE SELF: IDENTITY AS A RELATIONAL PROJECT
We treat identity as a relational project (Combs & Freedman, 1999; Weingarten, 2013).
In so doing, we intentionally oppose the discourses of reductionist individualism which,
even when focusing on strengths, suggest treating that strength as if it were a preexisting
treasure just waiting to be dug up inside a skin-bound body. Individualist discourses focus
more on what we are than on who we are becoming (Walther & Carey, 2009). Such models
orient our attention toward what qualities or resources we possess as individuals. They
metaphorically propose self as a container filled with relatively fixed qualities. We choose
to think about self not as a noun referring to a container filled with resources, but as a
verb referring to a project we are pursuing in active, ongoing relationship with other
people across a wide variety of contexts.
We view identity as relational, distributed, performed, and fluid. By relational, we
mean that our stories of who we have been and who we can be would not exist outside of
our relationships with other people; they are shaped by our experiences with others and
our sense of how those others perceive us and respond to us. We are shaped by their
responses and expectations. Our notions of how we can act in a given event are influenced
by our memories of how people have responded in similar past events, by which particular
people are present in the current episode, and by our understandings of what others
expect us to do. We hear, remember, and learn the stories of who we have been and who
we are expected to be as those stories are recounted in our relationships with others.
Narrative therapists are, of course, not the sole defenders of a relational view of iden-
tity. A task force of family therapists and researchers from various theoretical models
managed to get a few key relationship patterns embedded in an appendix of the DSM 5
(Wamboldt, 2013). Karl Tomm and his associates at the University of Calgary have
devised a diagnostic system based on interpersonal patterns rather than on individual
characteristics (Tomm, St. George, Wulff, & Strong, 2014). Their research shows that the
relationship patterns they described had good inter-rater reliability and correlated with
the length of therapy required, and they were able to get their local government to use
their relationship-focused system instead of DSM 5. This gives us hope that further efforts
might have effects outside a single province of Canada.
By distributed (Tomm, Hoyt, & Madigan, 1998) we mean that the stories and experi-
ences that shape our moment-by-moment sense of “self” are located in different places—in
other people’s memories, in hospital records, in anecdotes that get told and retold over
family dinners, in our participation in cultural practices and rituals, in the Facebook
pages of high school friends, in formally awarded certificates and degrees, and many other
places. At times stories from several of these places can come together to solidify a particu-
lar sense of identity. At other times, stories from different sources can come together to
give a sense of multiple possible identities. One’s associates at work may describe a differ-
ent person than would the members of that same person’s once-a-month poker game, and
the members of the prison writing group the person advises may describe yet a different
character. Focusing on the various identities people experience in different contexts helps
us resist the totalizing, isolating, and pathologizing currents of individualism.
When we say that our sense of self is performed (Combs & Freedman, 1999; Goffman,
1959; Turner, 1986) we mean that we are all performers in each other’s ongoing dramas.
Each of us is always performer and audience at the same time. We become who we enact,
and we do not do the acting in isolation. We constitute ourselves through the actions we
take in each other’s presence. Rather than focusing on each individual as an assemblage
of relatively fixed attributes that are measurable and stable over time, we take the view
that we are literally making each other up moment-by-moment as we move through our
interlocked lives.

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4 / FAMILY PROCESS

This relational, distributed, performed identity is also fluid, a process, not a possession.
With each action we take, we establish a scaffold from which other actions are possible.
Through our decisions as to what action to take, we are always stepping into new identi-
ties. One implication of this fluid sense of self is that change is practically impossible to
avoid.
Rather than trying to help people be “true to themselves,” we can focus on bringing
forth different experiences of self, and help people either choose the relationships, con-
texts, commitments, and actions that support their preferred ways of being or help them,
with the help of others, bring new versions of self into contexts where a current version is
experiencing problems. In our view, regardless of what insurance companies and the phar-
maceutical industry may say, identity is not amenable to pigeonholes; it is a process that
goes on among people and it is always changing.

Contrasting Experiences of Identity

Iris’s adult daughter, Ellen, came with her for therapy because she saw her mother
seeming to shrink and grow less interested in the world around her. Iris described herself
as depressed. She was already consulting a psychiatrist who had prescribed antidepres-
sants. When I (JF) asked Iris what experiences she was thinking of when she said “de-
pressed” she said, “You know. . . no energy, a feeling of hopelessness, just sleeping all the
time. . .”
After talking a bit more I asked, “What do you think made you vulnerable to these feel-
ings of hopelessness and lack of energy?”
Iris told me that she had worked for a small nonprofit organization that supported
research and treatment for people who suffered from a rare form of cancer. Starting as a
secretary, she had been repeatedly promoted until she became assistant director of the
organization. Then, eight months before I met Iris and Ellen, the board discovered that
the director, the person Iris reported to, had embezzled a very large sum of money. In the
wake of his termination the organization struggled to continue within the their now-very-
diminished budget. To her shock, the board fired Iris. A co-worker later told her that the
board thought she she must have been involved in, or at least aware of, her boss’s indiscre-
tions.
After the shock, Iris experienced anger, then grief. Her family urged her to get another
job. They were surprised when her efforts in that direction were fruitless. Even though
she had been in a position of great responsibility, her education (some college but not a
degree) did not qualify her for a job at all similar to the one she had lost.
“Then I became depressed,” Iris said.
“Can you see how to me, it would seem that this whole series of events could challenge your sense
of self?” I asked.
Iris paused and I said, “I just wonder what it meant to your sense of self to have that level of
responsibility. And to be part of a team and feel respected by your co-workers.”
Iris said, “Yeah.”
“And the work that you did, would you say it fits with with what is important to you?”
Iris nodded.
“And being recognized for doing those things?”
She nodded again.
Ellen added, “And also the relationship with people who have this disease. They love Mom and
kept in touch all the time.”

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 5
“I miss that,” Iris said.
I asked Iris what the experience of lack of energy and feelings of hopelessness had talked her into
about herself.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Well,” I answered, “At one point at least, they seem to have talked you into an idea that you are
depressed. I just wondered if they had given you other ideas about yourself.”
“Yes,” Iris said, “I had begun to think I was actually dumb and it was just circumstance that got
me that job.”
“Oh Mom,” Ellen said. “You’ve always been smart.”
I continued to ask questions to unpack the sets of changing relationships and contexts
that contributed to the loss of energy and feelings of hopelessness that Iris had described.
Near the end of this conversation, by way of summary, I asked Iris if it would be fair to say
that this awful series of events at work had robbed her of important relationships and
meaningful work and that this theft was resulting in a sense of herself as hopeless.
She agreed with this description.
I wondered if, instead of seeing herself as depressed, this description had her seeing her situation
differently.
She nodded and said, “It puts it in context.”
I wondered if putting it in context gave Iris room to see herself differently.
Again she nodded and said, “Yes. It is not about me. The whole thing was really awful and
unfair.”
Thinking of identity as relational allowed me to wonder about the effects of Iris’s col-
leagues, who had previously held her in esteem, now mistrusting her and even rejecting
her. My questions allowed her to see that for the most part she was cut off from relation-
ships with them, as well as from the people she had served for many years.
Thinking of identity as distributed allowed me to wonder about the effects on Iris of los-
ing her work context, which included a number of places and people in which her identity
had been distributed, and of not being able to find a replacement.
Thinking of identity as performed allowed me to wonder about the effects on Iris of
being robbed of the position that let her enact the many responsibilities and functions that
had made up her position as assistant director of the organization.
Thinking of identity as fluid allowed me to wonder about Iris’s changing sense of self,
and to see it as resulting from the loss of relationship, context, and professional role—a
change that had been described to her as “depressed.” It also allowed me to easily envision
her life flowing in a more hopeful direction.
The next time we met, Iris said that she had an idea about something she could do in
response to her unjust firing, but that Ellen was trying to stop her. Iris had slowly come to
the realization that the embezzlement had received no publicity. She had decided to tell
her story to the press. She was sure that when donors found out about the embezzlement
they would stop making contributions. It would ruin the organization, and that would
serve them right. She had already told the psychiatrist she was seeing about her plan, and
he had encouraged her, saying he was glad to see that she was in touch with her anger
and her right to be angry. We could think about this as Iris striking a blow for social jus-
tice, but that would have been individually focused and risked leaving her isolated and
even less employable.
Ellen was alarmed with Iris’s determination to get in touch with the media. She had
begged her mother not to act until they could discuss it further with me.

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6 / FAMILY PROCESS

I asked Ellen if she could tell me what she found alarming in her mother’s plan. Ellen
said, “This organization is for people struggling with a rare disease. Mom had long
relationships with those people. They count on this organization for help. She would be
betraying them.”
I asked questions to invite Iris to consider the possible effects of her plan. I wondered
what engendering this kind of publicity—possibly shutting down the organization—would
mean about the purposes to which she had devoted most of her working life. I wondered
what that would mean to her about her identity. What sort of self would she be enacting if
she set these effects in motion?
Iris held on to the idea that the organization deserved it.
Ellen said, “This isn’t like you, Mom. I think if you do it, you will look back and be sorry.”
I asked Iris what Ellen knew about her that led her to believe that Iris would regret this
kind of action.
She shook her head.
“What kind of action would it be?” I asked.
“Revenge,” she answered.
“What do you think Ellen values about you that doesn’t fit with revenge?” I asked.
She looked at Ellen who said, “That you care about these people, Mom!” Ellen told some stories
about the relationships her mother had with her co-workers and with some of the people the orga-
nization served.
Before our next meeting Iris did call a reporter and give the details about the embezzle-
ment. To her initial disappointment, this only resulted in a small article which was buried
on the inside pages of a local newspaper. As far as she could tell, it had no impact on the
organization.
In a later session, Iris said, “I’m so glad that my talk to the reporter didn’t harm the organization.
I don’t think I could forgive myself if I had hurt those people. What would they think of me?”
“What would you have thought of yourself?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Iris said. “Yeah. . .. I wasn’t myself.”
We then had a conversation about the “self” that Iris preferred and the actions that fit
with that self and her understanding about why the “self” who called the press was not
“herself.” The questions I asked in that conversation were guided by our understanding
that identity is relational, distributed, performed, and fluid. I asked, and bore witness
to, Iris’s answers to questions about who the organization as she originally knew it
served and about what had drawn her to wanting to serve those people. We revivified
stories of her conversations with particular donors and board members and things
those people had valued in Iris’s approach to her work. This led to stories of other
experiences that weren’t directly work related, in which Iris had performed acts of
kindness and celebrated the special joys that come when one’s interests are shared and
appreciated in a wider community. I also asked, and Iris and Ellen told me, about con-
tributions they had made over the years to each other’s sense of purpose and commit-
ment in the world.
Ellen knew that her mother cared about relationships and that she cared about the pur-
poses to which she had devoted her career. Our therapy conversations that focused on
relationships and on long arcs of reciprocal effects helped Iris enact and lay claim to a
vibrant, evolving self that she felt much better calling “myself.”

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 7
NARRATIVE PRACTICES THAT COUNTER INDIVIDUALISM’S INFLUENCE
Narrative therapy’s radically relational, nonessentialist worldview affects all of our
practices. We have touched on how we unpack identity conclusions and focus on identity
as a relational project that unfolds through time. We now want to give examples of narra-
tive therapy practices that are informed by each of the aspects of identity that we have
named.

Practices Supported by Relational Notions of Identity

White (1988) brought the notion of relational identity to life in a practice he called
“re-membering.” He first described it in a paper entitled “Saying Hullo Again” (see also
Hedtke, 2001; Hedtke & Winslade, 2004; White, 2007). Michael had noticed that in
responding to the death of a loved one or the loss of a relationship people often lost an
important part of their experience of self. Without the other person’s physical presence,
they could not maintain lived, experienced awareness of what the lost person had known
about them and appreciated in them. In the practice of re-membering, narrative thera-
pists invite people to see themselves through the eyes of those loved ones, to feel the feel-
ings the now-absent people felt toward them and, recognizing that relationships are not
unidirectional, to also tell about the meaning they brought to the loved ones’ lives and to
the world they both inhabited. In a re-membering interview, people have the opportunity
to hold close the member who could have been lost and to reclaim the sense of self that
they first experienced or came to know through the now-physically-absent relationship.
Aside from its use at times of loss and bereavement, the idea of identity as relational
and “membered” inspires what we call “relational identity questions” (Freedman &
Combs, 2004, 2015). Relational identity questions are those that give people the opportu-
nity to see themselves through another’s eyes or to recognize how another person or a rela-
tionship that they are part of has contributed to their sense of self. Examples of this kind
of question are:

• How have you become different since you have been in the relationship with Jerry?
What about the relationship has contributed to that?
• When you look at yourself through your mother’s loving eyes, what do you recognize
about yourself that is important?
• What contributions do you think that your partner made to the steps you have just
described taking? What has that made possible in your relationship with yourself?
• What would you say your father most appreciates about you? What difference has it
made for your sense of self to experience that appreciation?

If the father in a family talks about an experience in which his daughter did something
that he appreciated, we might ask the daughter, “Did you know that your father recog-
nized that you had accomplished that? What is it like to hear him describe you that way?
Does it put you in touch with something important about yourself that you might not have
been in touch with otherwise?” These questions are based on the idea that identity is a
project that unfolds in relationship with others. Rather than the individualist notion that
our primary responsibility is to manage our own internal resources, these questions
assume that self is a project to be lived out in our co-evolving relationships with others.
Sometimes relational identity questions are at the heart of the therapy, as in the follow-
ing example (Freedman & Combs, 2004).
Betty and Ron came to couple therapy because of the many misunderstandings that
came between them. They described a growing distance from each other, which was a

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8 / FAMILY PROCESS

concern for both of them. In our early conversations it emerged that a difference in social
class supported the misunderstandings and perhaps the distance, as well.
Betty worked as a university professor and Ron as a carpenter. Betty said that Ron did
not respect her work or maybe did not even care to try to understand it. She said that she
tried to include Ron in social events that were part of university life but that this had been
quite awkward. Ron said that when Betty introduced him to her colleagues she acted as if
he were some kind of artist or craftsperson. “I’m a carpenter, is all,” he said. He concluded
that she was ashamed of him.
Before Betty and Ron married, when she was working on her doctorate, they had talked
about Ron’s turn being next. Now Betty felt tricked because Ron had not initiated any fur-
ther education. He no longer talked about career aspirations. For Ron, hearing that Betty
was feeling tricked was proof that she wanted to change him. He felt anger about this and
said that the main thing that kept him at a distance was Betty’s dissatisfaction.
Since we are all exposed to individualistic ideas of people as units or products, it is not
unusual for members of a couple to locate problems in each other and also to have clear
ideas of what qualities they would like their partners to possess. In contrast, as narrative
therapists we orient to the idea that one’s sense of identity occurs in a relational process,
constantly being shaped by how one is experienced by one’s partner, or by what is brought
forth in the relationship, or by how being part of a relationship changes how one experi-
ences oneself, or by all of these.
One thing that interested me (JF) in Ron and Betty’s story was that Betty was a student
when she and Ron met, and that during the course of their relationship she became a pro-
fessor. I was interested in how her sense of self had changed in the process and also how
these changes had changed Ron’s perception of her.
To Betty’s surprise, when I asked Ron about how Betty’s becoming a professor changed
his perception, he talked on and on about how he appreciated Betty’s accomplishments.
He spoke with pride about some of the work that she was doing.
I asked Betty what it was like to hear Ron speak so warmly about her work, and she
said that it was really good to hear. Hearing his appreciation had her thinking about how
he made room for her work without complaining—how he made the meals and took on the
chores when she had a deadline.
I asked whether Betty thought that Ron could continue doing that if he went back to
school and pursued the kind of career she had expected him to pursue.
After a pause, Betty shook her head no and said that she hadn’t realized how much
room there was for her and how much flexibility they had because Ron had a nine-to-five
job.
I asked a series of questions about this, and she told several stories about the ways Ron
took over tasks that had originally been hers and made space for her to do her work. One
story was about working all night to finish a paper, then in the morning stumbling into
the kitchen for a cup of coffee and finding the table covered with glowing candles. As Betty
sat down, Ron took a tray of cinnamon rolls out of the oven.
I asked Betty how experiences like this made a difference in her life and sense of iden-
tity.
She said that she got to be “the one with important work” and that was very exciting to
her. She said thinking about herself this way was luxurious. She was able to inhabit the
identity of “professor” not just because of the students gathered for her lectures, but
because at times Ron honored the importance of her work. She saddened a little as she
said it had not happened as much lately. She then looked over at Ron and said that she
also realized how much she admired his work, although the distance between them had
made her lose track of that.

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 9
Ron said that the distance had kept him from showing his appreciation in the ways he
used to as well.
A few days after this conversation, Betty invited Ron to join her at a university recep-
tion. When we met again Betty said that Ron was different at that function than he had
been other times. I asked what was different, and she said that in the past it was as
though he went out of his way to wear his grubbiest work clothes and sit by himself, not
responding to other people’s attempts to engage him in conversation. This time, she said,
he dressed nicely, he talked to people, and he seemed to just fit in.
Ron was puzzled by Betty’s surprise. For him, this all had to do with feeling appreciated
and wanted, which he said he had not felt for a long time. Her appreciation meant that he
was acceptable, even as a carpenter. And perhaps more importantly, Betty’s stories about
the effects of his appreciation helped him be in touch with his identity as a husband and
supporter.
There were other chapters in the story of their therapy, but for Betty, the conversation
about who she got to be in relationship with Ron was the turning point. Rather than want-
ing Ron to be a particular kind of person, her focus shifted to who she was able to become
in the relationship and how Ron contributed to that. For Ron, it was not so much that his
identity changed as that it seemed to expand. His experience of the relationship and of
Betty’s appreciation of him felt like a very big change that made room for this bigger sense
of self.
Even when relational identity questions are not at the center of the therapy, we rou-
tinely ask about the important relationships in people’s lives, and we often facilitate new
relationships through inviting others into the therapy (both actually and virtually)
through a focus on linking lives through shared purposes (Behan, 1999; White, 1995).

Practices Supported by Distributed Notions of Identity

The idea that identity is distributed helps us see beyond the problematic identity con-
clusions that a person might relay when telling their story. For example, in the story of
Iris and Ellen, Iris was feeling distress about her lost workplace and the support of her
identity that she had derived from that context. Ellen, though, knew about other contexts
with different stories that supported different conclusions about Iris’s identity. Even if
Ellen had not accompanied Iris to the therapy, we would have assumed that, through
appropriate inquiry, we could help Iris be in touch with other experiences of her sense of
self that were distributed in other contexts.
Another illustration comes from my (GC) work with a heterosexual couple. LeeAnn
believed that too much of the domestic work fell to her. Arnie claimed that LeeAnn was
more organized and therefore better suited to keep their clothes and kitchen in good order,
pay bills, track items that needed to be purchased, and manage the general running of
their household. Knowing that Arnie is a university professor who had published several
books, I asked him about the skills he used in organizing that work. He gave a clear, suc-
cinct description of how he prepared for lectures, then went into a detailed explanation of
how he sequenced and tracked ideas for a book. It was obvious that at work he knew him-
self to be an organized person. Through our discussion he began to see how these skills
could be applied at home, and he agreed to take on more domestic responsibilities. I don’t
believe that Arnie misrepresented himself in our earlier conversations. Since identity is
distributed, we can sometimes be out of touch with important aspects of our sense of self
in one context or relationship that are readily available in others. With the right sort of
questions, we can help people use knowledge and skills in multiple locations.
Therapy itself is a relational context, a place and a collection of particular moments,
in which new aspects of identity come to be known. It is not unusual for people to refer

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back to particular therapy sessions as the place or time they experienced important
learnings.
Narrative therapists use documents to proclaim, memorialize, and make tangible the
new knowledge that therapy brings forth. Every document can be thought of as a storage
site for valued aspects of a person’s or a family’s identity. These documents take a variety
of forms (Fox, 2003) including letters, certificates, lists, and artistic reflections. They may
summarize a therapy conversation and thicken and extend its impact through questions
or they may document positions, accomplishments, and turning points in the narrative
that emerges as therapy progresses. In re-reading documents, people often have the expe-
rience of remaking and re-experiencing the meaning that is located in them. They serve as
places where important aspects of a relational, complex, nonreductionist identity are
distributed.

Practices Supported by Performed Notions of Identity

The anthropologist Turner (1986, p. 37), describing how an ethos is perpetuated and
refreshed, said “. . . the hard-won meanings should be said, painted, danced, dramatized,
put into circulation.” White (1995) took inspiration from the work of Turner and of his col-
league Barbra Myerhoff in the modification of reflecting team practice that he called “out-
sider witness groups.” He took this term, as well as the notion of “definitional ceremonies”
from Myerhoff’s (1982, 1986) work with poor, displaced, elderly Jews in Venice, California,
in which she documented their efforts as a community to make their traditions and their
lives visible, memorable, and meaningful to others. By conceptualizing the reflecting team
as a definitional ceremony, White drew attention to its performative and relational
aspects. In Myerhoff’s (1986, p. 267) words:
Definitional ceremonies deal with the problems of invisibility and marginality; they are strategies
that provide opportunities for being seen and in one’s own terms, garnering witnesses to one’s
worth, vitality, and being.
Even when there is no team of witnesses present, when people tell (and, in the telling,
experience) the stories of their lives in therapy they are performing. Quoting Myerhoff
(1982, p. 100) again:
They are then knowing actors in a historical drama they script, rather than subjects of someone
else’s study. They “make” themselves, sometimes even “make themselves up. . . .”
In narrative therapy, we ask questions to trace the contribution of people’s choices and
actions through time. We invite them to retell and re-experience those steps that have con-
tributed to their current sense of identity. We ask questions that focus on action and
agency to emphasize how they are performing their identities:

• What did you do in preparation for taking that step?

• How did you decide to take that action?
• Can you describe to me how you accomplished that?
• If we think of these steps as actions you took on a path from one place to another, how
would you describe the difference in this new place and the old one?

These kinds of questions can then be paired with questions about identity, such as:

• What did you learn about yourself in taking that step?

• If you were standing for something in making that decision, what would you say you
were standing for? What does that say about you?

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 11
Drama therapists, such as our colleague Christine Novy, are more directly addressing the
performance of identity, exploring ways of combining narrative therapy and the dramatic
arts. Describing her work with the Biography Laboratory project, Novy (2002, p. 217)
says:
. . .we work with a number of dramatic and narrative structures adapted to our setting and
designed to support the storyteller in the creation of their story. Each week one team member will
self-select to work on a story or theme of their choice. The remaining team members become an
audience to her story as well as supportive and active participants in its co-creation. . .. [T]he story
is witnessed, acknowledged, and enriched as the storyteller moves through the different stages of
story creation.
Thinking of identity as a process that unfolds as it is performed in the presence of others
powerfully counteracts the individualizing influences so pervasive in contemporary
culture.

Practices Supported by Fluid Notions of Identity

John Winslade (2009), drawing on the work of Giles Deleuze (1988, 1993, 1994, 1995),
describes narrative therapy as always being about becoming-other (becoming other than
what we have been, rather than becoming more true to who we are). Similarly Walther
and Carey (2009) describe identity as fluid, always in the process of becoming something
else. Michael White often used the metaphor of transport, suggesting, among other things,
that as we interact with someone or hear their stories we are taken somewhere new, we
become other. This fluid notion of identity implies that, instead of following the dictates of
structuralist individualism, we can work with people to “become other.” In practice, we
weave between questions asking about the landscape of action (what happened) and the
landscape of identity (the meaning of what happened) (White, 2007). These questions
about the landscape of identity and the landscape of action can be paired as follows:

• Can you tell me about that step that you took? What kind of a step would you say it was?
• What does it put you in touch with about yourself, that you would take that kind of
step?
• There were several choices and you picked this one. What would you say you aligned
with in doing that?
• How does this alignment contribute to your sense of self?
• Now that you have accomplished this, are there things that seem possible that did not
seem possible before?
• Does this contribute to your sense of self, to experience these possibilities?

When someone takes a new action, they are in a position to draw new meaning about their
identity. From this new identity platform, they are in a position to take new actions, from
which they can derive further new identity claims. This process of new actions supporting
new identity claims which then support new actions treats identity as a flow, an interac-
tional process. When we work with someone in the process of making a decision we can
ask how that decision and its associated actions might contribute to that person’s identity
or sense of self. Will their decision be in line with becoming the person that they want to
be, or will it take their life in a less desired direction?
Another example of this fluid aspect of self-concept is White’s (1995) use of the meta-
phor “migration of identity.” In an interview about working with women who have experi-
enced abuse, White (p. 97) writes, “One’s sense of identity is very significantly determined
by one’s experience of other people’s experiences of who one is.” He goes on to describe how

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women’s experiences of their identity have been imposed by those who have abused them,
and that in separating from an abusive relationship they are not only separating from a
person, but are embarking on a migration of identity. He (p. 99) writes:
. . . in this migration, there is always some distance between the point of separation from the abu-
sive context and the point of arrival at some preferred location in life, and at some alternative and
preferred account of one’s identity.
This metaphor is particularly useful in working with people separating from the effects of
abuse, but it also applies to others. All of us can think of change as involving a migration
of identity, a process in which sense of self flows through time and space.

Yet Another Lens: Intentional State Understandings

Following both Bateson and Deleuze, we believe that it is useful, appropriate, and accu-
rate to describe experience as multiple rather than singular, as taking different forms
when seen from diverse points of view, so before we close we will review yet another way
that narrative therapists look at questions of identity. White (2000) proposed two different
questions that can be thought of as possible guides for therapy. One, which fits with the
resource management and self-cultivation that go with an individualistic, reductionist
worldview, is “Who am I?” This question assumes an essential, stable, individual self. The
other question, which fits with narrative therapy’s poststructuralist values, is “How are
we becoming other than we have already been?” This question assumes change through
time (fluidity) and in using “we” assumes a relational process. The “how” can be seen as
referring to the distributed and performative aspects of identity.
White (2007) has also written of the difference between “internal state understandings”
and “intentional state understandings.” Internal state understandings of identity are
those associated with essentialist, individualist understandings of self. Such understand-
ings produce answers to “Who am I?” and those answers tend to come in the form of nouns:
personal qualities or resources.
Intentional state understandings have to do with people’s intentions—their hopes,
dreams, and commitments. They produce answers to the question “How are we becoming
other than we have already been?” They highlight how people’s thoughts and actions fit in
some way with the sort of larger world they give value to, and they emphasize process.
We put these distinctions into action by unpacking internal state understandings to
make visible the history, relationships, and commitments that have allowed a person to be
described as possessing a particular quality. For example, these are some possibilities we
can consider in unpacking the internal state understanding of “being creative:”

• We can ask where the person learned to respond in creative ways.

• We can ask who has modeled the actions associated with creativity.
• We can identify the particular knowledge and skills involved in creativity.
• We can trace the relationships in which the knowledge and skills have been transmitted
or shared.
• We can trace stories of mutual support and alliances that made each creative response
possible.

These histories then can be used to scaffold the possibility of creative actions in the pre-
sent.
Intentional state understandings help us to resist the internalizing, essentializing pull
of the discourses of individualism so that we can help people in the couples and families
we work with experience and enact each other’s values in the co-evolutionary, long-arc
way that we originally found so attractive in family therapy.

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COMBS & FREEDMAN / 13
CONCLUSION
Even before narrative therapy existed as a named approach, we were attracted to gath-
erings of family therapists because community, connection, and compassion for the plight
of others were celebrated there. We think it is more important than ever to reclaim the
relational, long-view, co-evolutionary ethos that so many of us found in Gregory Bateson’s
ideas. Especially when we have to work with constraints that require the use of individu-
alizing practices such as DSM diagnoses and medical-model-derived “evidence-based-prac-
tices,” it is important to support each other in projects that resist those constraints.
We have highlighted a few narrative practices here, focusing especially on how we
invite people to experience and expand a relational, distributed, performed, and fluid
sense of each other’s identity. However, as we worked on this article we had a growing
awareness of how the narrative worldview—apart from the practices it has engendered—
can counter the negative influences of overweening individualism. There is a sense of
openness, of possibility, and of generous interconnection in this work that resonates with
the relational ideas that have always been at the heart of family therapy.

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