How is Narrative Sand Therapy relevant for global cultures, immigrant populations, cultural crisis, and social-cultural trauma? Isn’t culture covered when we refer to symbols as archetypes and rely on the client’s descriptions?
Narrative Sand Therapy emerged from two theories that center culture: social construction and existential psychotherapy. For narrative see for example Gergen, 2023; McNamee, Rasera & Martins, 2023; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006; Richert, 2010; White & Epston, 1990. For existential see books by Irvin Yalom, Rollo May, Mick Copper, Kirk Schneider; Emmy van Deurzen & Martin Adams.
Social construction through the lens of narrative therapy, grounds clinical process as inseparable from the cultural worlds of the client and the therapist. Symbols also have cultural worlds, and those meanings include client unique imaginings, historical and institutional designations, and media and marketing inventions. Therapy, its theories and associations, is a multifaceted culture. Existential psychology and psychotherapy bring our attention to universal human experience as we grapple with mortality, identity, connection, freedom, meaning and responsibility. An integration of narrative therapy and existential psychology allows for representation, exploration, and validation at a pace and depth appropriate for the client. Narrative Sand therapists study cultural meanings from diverse sources and practice engagement through the lens of these multi-layered cultural phenomena.
A central focus in Narrative Sand Therapy is multi-layered narrative. Stories are our way of explaining everything. Stories are threads of constructed reality, perception, imagination, experience, emotion, memory, and sensibilities of which we are not aware. These threads weave together, come apart and re-weave back together, repeating throughout life, iterations that explain to us who we are, what we must do to survive, to thrive, to find meaning. Stories we tell ourselves, and that others tell us, shape perception, trust, who all those other people and creatures are out there. These stories, conscious and unconscious, make up our cultural worlds. Stories may be damaging or uplifting; they guide our life journey.
Myths, symbols, and rituals hold our cultural stories – ways to represent and express our experience. These acts of narrative connect us with others, define identity, determine meaning, and set limits to power, freedom, and life. Stories are nested in our brains, in our body, in cultures, and now in AI. How might we externalize this complex experience? To be witnessed, validated, discover hidden alienated parts, and reclaim integrity, identity, authentic connection, and meaning? How might we represent and explore the stories that shape our lives and communities without judgment, the rush to change behavior, the pressure of external socio-cultural-political expectations?
Through Narrative Sand Therapy, this metaphoric weave, its unraveling, and reweaving, are an evolving, continuously emerging, re-integration of lived experience — represented, engaged, and validated. When it isn’t we are stuck, blocked, shamed, and threatened. Narrative Sand Therapists listen to the cultural other, reflect deeply on their own otherness, and read and stretch their cultural knowledge beyond our professions’ texts on culture. They are familiar with the writings by authors from original cultures, from cultural worlds beyond their knowing. We practice like the patient cultural anthropologist that does not enter the client’s world with assumptions; the careful paleontologist that sifts and cautiously seeks the next precious bone – the part of the story we cannot yet see or understand. We wait. We are invited and we invite. We collaborate. We stay in the question with wonderment. We respect that depth comes with trust, safety, and pacing. We prepare our own imagination to resonate with the depth of human experience, the cultural nuance, the suffering, and humor, and discoveries — the weave of the stories, symbol voices and silent process. Narrative Sand Therapy is a practice of intersubjectivity, for the layers deep within, expressed and explored through the symbols in sand. In this way we bridge cultural worlds with individual and collective imagination.
Resources
Cooper, M. (2015). Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling: Contributions to a Pluralistic Practice (1st ed.). Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Cooper, M. (2017). Existential Therapies (2nd ed.). Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Gergen, K. (2023). An invitation to social construction: Co-Creating the future (4th ed.). Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Heath, T., Stone Carlson, T., & Epston, D. (Eds.). (2022). Reimagining Narrative Therapy through practice stories and autoethnography. Routledge, NY.
McAdams, D. P., Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (Eds.). (2006). Identity and story: Creating self in narrative. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/11414-000
May, R. (1984). The discovery of being. W.W. Norton and Company, NY.
McNamee, S., & Gergen, K. J. (1992). Inquiries in social construction: Therapy as social construction. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
McNamee, S., Rasera, E. F., & Martins, P. (2023). Practicing therapy as social construction. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA..
Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities: Narrative repair. Cornell University Press.
Ogden, T. (2022). Coming to life in the consulting room: Toward a new analytic sensibility. Routledge, NY.
Richert, R. J. (2010). Integrating existential and narrative therapy: A theoretical base for eclectic practice. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA.
Schneider, K. J., & Krug, O. T. (2017). Existential-Humanistic therapy. Theories of psychotherapy series. Second edition. American Psychological Association, DC.
Van Deurzen, E. (2012). Existential counselling and psychotherapy in practice. Third edition. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA..
Van Deurzen, E., & Adams, M. (2016). Skills in existential counseling and psychotherapy. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA..
White, M. and Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. Dulwich Center, Adelaide, South Australia.
Yalom, I. D. (2017). The gift of therapy: An open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients. Harper Perennial, NY.