On Trauma, Courage, and the Telling of Stories: Working With Narrative in Chairwork Psychotherapy
Scott Kellogg, PhD, and Amanda Garcia Torres, LMHC
“People enter therapy because their life story is no longer working; they also come because the burden of stories has become too great. These may be stories of mistreatment, grief, or guilt; they may include dreams that were lost or never pursued. The re-telling and re-working of these stories can bring about profound healing” (Kellogg, October, 2019, p. 19).
Working with traumatic experiences and painful memories has been a core component of Chairwork Psychotherapy from the beginning (Kellogg, 2004), and Telling the Story is one of the core components of this approach (Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2021). We were first inspired to develop it through a trauma psychotherapy study done by Richard Bryant and colleagues (Bryant et al., 2008). In this study, the patients who received a prolonged exposure treatment did better than those who received a cognitive restructuring intervention. The prolonged exposure intervention asked patients to repeatedly read first-person, present tense narratives of their traumatic experiences. We adapted this strategy and initially created a Chairwork-centered, trauma-based, first-person, past tense storytelling framework (Kellogg, October, 2019).
First-Person Storytelling
This is a dialogue that involves two chairs. The patient starts in “Center,” which is the chair where they will choose the traumatic or difficult memory that they would like to work with. The second chair is the “storytelling chair”; they will then be invited to move to this chair and tell the story of what happened. In terms of arranging these chairs, there are some things to consider. The first is that the patient’s storytelling chair should be situated in such a way that they can be, at least in part, “alone with themselves.” It is our sense that when patients have shared their traumatic or disturbing experiences with others in the past, they may have done so with an acute awareness of the “audience.” This means that there was a chance that they curated the story—emphasizing some parts and downplaying or eliminating others—to meet the needs and concerns of the listeners. In our work, we want them to recount the experience for themselves. In a related vein, the therapist should not only situate themselves near the patient so that they can be an engaging presence, but also a bit behind them and out of their immediate line of sight so as to allow them to be in their own space.
In first-person storytelling, the patient speaks from the “I” perspective. For example, if one were working with a patient named Harper who had been in a car accident, they would be invited to say things like: “I was in a car accident, and these are some of the things that happened to me.” After they had gone through the account once—with all the details that they are ready to share—they would be encouraged to get up, move around, shake it off, and then sit down and repeat the process again. After another break to move around and shake it off, they would be asked to sit down and do it a third time. Three rounds are usually the minimum amount of exposure—with a fourth and fifth round commonly included (Kellogg, October, 2019). After this, they would move back to Center and debrief the experience with the therapist.
To be clear, the patients who are doing this work are those who have expressed a desire to work through and resolve the difficult experiences that are still living inside of them; no one is pressured to do this. For some, telling the story once—let alone repeatedly—can be quite challenging. If they feel that they can only share the memory once, that is fine; if they feel that they can only say one sentence about it, that is fine as well (Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2024). We can build on that.
The first time that patients go through a traumatic narrative, it is often a bare-bones rendition; with the second round, more details begin to emerge. This is a good sign as it means that integration is beginning to take place—which is a crucial part of the healing process. Possibly during the second, but usually during the third round, the therapist will want to begin editing or curating the story not only by amplifying those aspects of the narrative that would increase the intensity of the emotions and the patient’s sense of empowerment, but also by expressing compassion for the suffering that the patient went through. This can be done using such deepening techniques as: (1) encouraging them to repeat certain phrases with greater intensity or volume; (2) providing them with language to “try on” to see if it resonates; and (3) making statements that affirm their courage and character (Kellogg, 2014; Passons, 1975).
Erving Polster (1987) provided a compelling example of the effectiveness of: (a) getting the details; (b) amplifying certain parts of the narrative; and (c) making positive reflections. Marilyn Blank, a therapist and a participant in one of his month-long Gestalt Therapy training courses, worked with another group member named Clara. Clara was a 40-year-old Italian woman who had been raped in the woods by an American soldier as a child in Italy. This experience was deeply and profoundly disturbing to her: “She had been unable to encompass the horror of this event; it was so alien to her sense of being that she had not even brought it up in a previous psychoanalysis” (p. 73). She did, however, sense that Marilyn had the skills and empathy necessary to do this work, and she volunteered to go through the memory with her.
In the session, Marilyn walked Clara through the story of the rape in the first person. Her basic strategy was to repeatedly ask her for specific details while affirming her strength and goodness: “Do you remember what happened next? You were sitting on the bridge alone with your feet dangling off the edge into the brook, and…” “Can you remember what you were feeling?” (p. 75). “You were such a proud little girl. How helpless and scared you must have felt.” (p. 77). One thing that stood out during the narrative was that the young Clara remained centrally concerned that neither her dress, nor her underwear get dirty because that would be deeply upsetting to her mother: “I was scared of him and scared of ruining my underpants and dress” (p. 77). Marilyn reflected on all of this—both during the narrative: “You were both so proud and so scared and so able to take care of yourself, even in a crisis” (p. 79), and at end of session: “You were such a lovely child, so brave, so special” (p. 80). With this last reflection on and affirmation of the amazing spirit of this girl, they both smiled.
The case of Clara is a striking example of first-person storytelling as a way of processing traumatic experiences and memories. In addition to what Marilyn Blank did, we would have invited Clara to go through the story of the rape two or three more times.
Third-Person Storytelling
Inspired by the three-person storytelling model of Roediger, Stevens, and Brockman (2018), we began to work with a third person approach. For example, in the case of Harper, they would be invited to start in Center, choose a memory they wished to work on—in this case the car accident—and then move to another chair and share their experience as if it were being told by someone else: “Harper was in a car accident, and these are some of things that happened to them.”
Kellogg and Garcia Torres (2024) presented an imaginal case with a man named James. James had been the victim of a carjacking, and he had crashed his car as a way to escape. He came to therapy because he was suffering from depression and nightmares; he was also afraid to drive. This is an example of how we might treat this using third-person storytelling.
James started in Center, and he and the therapist agreed that he would go through the story of the carjacking while telling it in the third person.
Therapist: “James, I would like you to move to this chair and tell the story of what happened. I want you to tell it in the third person—as if someone else were talking about you.”
James moved to the storytelling chair and began this way:
“There was a man named James, and one night when he was leaving work to drive home, a man threatened him with a weapon and forced himself into James’ car. After driving for a while, James realized that he had to do something. He decided to crash the car as he thought that he might be able to escape if he did that. He saw some yellow water barriers on the highway, and he drove into them. He was hurt and he was able to get away.”
After this, both James and the therapist got up, moved around, and shook it off. They both sat down and James, again sitting in the storytelling chair, went through the memory another time. While keeping to the basic narrative, two new themes began to emerge:
“James was distressed that night because he wanted to get home to his wife who needed his help. He was trying to be a good husband.”
“James also felt ashamed that he had let someone carjack him—that he did not fight him off from the start.”
During the next round, the therapist began to suggest some things for James to consider saying.
Therapist: “I would like you to try these words.”
James: “Okay.”
Therapist: “James was preoccupied—he was trying to get home to his wife. He knew she need him to help her.”
James: “James wanted to get home to his wife—this was on his mind.”
Therapist: “Carjackers are criminals, and they look for people who are preoccupied, distracted, or vulnerable, and then they move in. They are skilled at this.”
James: “Yes, true. The carjacker was a criminal, and he moved in on James at just the right moment. James was thinking about his wife—not about his surroundings.”
Therapist: “After the initial shock, James began to pull it together; he started to develop an escape plan.”
James: “Even though he was scared, he started think about what he could do to escape and get back to his wife.”
Therapist: “James made the incredibly brave decision to crash the car. He knew he could be killed or injured, but he loved his wife so much that he was willing to take the risk.”
James: “Yes, he did do that. He drove the car into the barriers so that he would have a chance to escape.”
Therapist: “James was very brave.”
James: “Yes, he was very brave.”
Therapist: “He was very brave, and he loved his wife.”
James: “He was very brave, and he loved his wife, That is good. That is true” (adapted from Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2024).
This is an example of how the therapist can work with the patient to co-create a narrative that can be more compassionate and more empowering.
Robert Landy (2008), in his Drama Therapy model, provided an important variant to this approach that can be helpful for patients who find the third-person process to be too challenging. Instead of asking the patient to bring up a difficult memory of their own, he would invite them to talk about an imagined person who went through a similar experience. With his Tell-A-Story approach, he would say to a patient: “Rather than tell me the issue, could you think of it as a story and give the story a title? . . . You can go wherever you want to with it but make it somewhat of a fairy tale. Would you start: ‘Once upon a time there was . . .’” (p. 116). This story can also be told in a repetitive fashion—with more details and emotional release taking place with each round. This strategy can be quite effective with patients who are hesitant to talk about what happened to them—either because of the disturbing nature of the narrative or out of fear of the emotions that the work might evoke. For example, Clara could talk about a girl named Ginevra who was raped, and James could create a narrative about Caleb who went through a carjacking experience. Lastly, for patients who have repressed or who cannot remember what happened to them, they can work with a “made-up” story as a method for engaging with difficult material. Patients can also rescript the story and create a better ending (Simpson & Arntz, 2020).
The Benefits of Third-Person Storytelling
The first- and third-person approaches are both forms of exposure therapy, and they each facilitate the integration of dissociated or warded off stories. Third-person storytelling, however, does have some unique qualities that make it an especially powerful form of healing. Re-traumatization is a major concern of many therapists, and the possibility of being flooded with painful and disturbing feelings and memories is feared by some patients. The telling of a story in the third person creates “space” between the patient and the narrative that they are recounting—which is beneficial. With the distance provided through this method, the repetitive process certainly remains an intense experience, but the reduced level of emotional activation serves to not only facilitate integration, but also decrease the likelihood of emotional flooding or re-traumatization.
Traumatic experiences can be quite complex, and patients may have played complicated roles in the events that took place (Elbert, Schauer, & Neuner, 2015; Kellogg & Triffleman, 1998). Whether appropriate or not, patients may be experiencing feelings of guilt, shame, and/or embarrassment about the things that they did or did not do during this event or in an ongoing relationship. Again, talking about oneself and telling one’s story in the third person provides space between the patient and the things that happened. In a sense, they are talking about the experiences of “someone else.” The patient can also dialogue with the therapist about their younger self and the therapist can use this as a vehicle for saying compassionate things about the patient such as: “he was just a kid… he was just a kid.” As was clear in the case with James, it also allows the therapist to emphasize and reframe different aspects of the narrative.
Second-Person Storytelling
Second-Person Storytelling is a dialogue structure that we recommend doing after the patient has done some work in either the third- or first-person. It is a blend of Telling the Story and extending compassion to oneself. This dialogue uses three chairs – Center, the Compassionate Self chair, and the Traumatized Self chair. This time, the patient begins in Center, with the other two chairs facing each other nearby. In the Compassionate Self chair, we will want the patient to embody an affirming and compassionate witnessing stance. In layperson’s terms, this would be the energy of someone who really loved and cared for the patient and who felt great distress about the suffering and pain that they had been through. When the patient is in the Compassionate Self chair, they will imagine the Traumatized Self in the chair opposite, and recount to them, in detail, the story of the trauma. For example, Harper, sitting in the Compassionate Self chair, would imagine themselves in the Traumatized Self chair opposite, and say: “Harper, you were in a car accident, and these are some of the things that happened to you.” The therapist can support the patient in their efforts to not only get into the details of what happened, but also to actively defend and affirm the Traumatized Self. After this, the patient switches chairs and embodies the Traumatized Self; here, they are encouraged to take in and respond to what was said. This structure is more “conversational”—which means that the patient can go back and forth between the two chairs with each side sharing their thoughts, feelings, memories, and perspectives. One reason that they are talking to their current self, rather than to themselves at the time of the trauma, is, again, to get more “space” from the events, which may allow for a fuller range of emotions to be released—including anger.
Not surprisingly, this form of Chairwork has a strikingly different feel than the other two. There are several dimensions to be considered when the patient is in the Compassionate Self chair. The first is self-witnessing: “I am here. I am with you, and I know what you have been through. You are not alone.” The second is that of empathic connectedness. The patient speaks to themselves in a way that: (1) energetically blames the abusers: “This was definitely not your fault. You were a child, they were adults, it was totally their responsibility”; (2) affirms the goodness of themselves: “Of course you wanted to fight back—that is because there is a good spirit in you; however, you were completely outnumbered—that’s what bullies and cowards do”; and (3) expresses compassion for themselves: “Talking to you now, I feel so much distress about what you went through” (Gilbert, 2010; Kellogg, December, 2019; Neff, 2011). After several rounds, the patient can return to Center and debrief the experience with the therapist.
Second-person storytelling can serve to deepen the work that was done in the third- or first-person dialogues. We believe that it may be difficult for some patients to talk about these experiences with themselves in a compassionate manner when they have not yet exposed the story to “the light of day”—which is why we suggest that it be done at a later point in the healing journey. However, this is not a fixed rule, and therapists and patients can make their own decisions as to whether and when to utilize this approach.
Therapeutic Alliance and Therapist Countertransference
To be clear, no method of therapy—regardless of its power or intensity—can be effective unless there is a strong therapeutic alliance between the patient and the therapist (Safran & Kraus, 2015). While this is true for psychotherapy in general, it is particularly true when working with the difficult or traumatic memories that are haunting the patient. It is worth noting that the intense emotions that are evoked in the Chairwork Psychotherapy setting can actually serve to facilitate the building of the therapeutic alliance.
We have sometimes encountered patients with trauma histories who have been in treatment before. When we inquired as to whether the trauma had been a focus of the work, they reported that they had shared their experience with the therapist once but had not returned to it after that. In some ways this is understandable. Listening to stories of violence, cruelty, mistreatment, accidents, and crime can be profoundly disturbing. One of the unexpected gifts of repetitive storytelling is that as the patient goes through the difficult memory three, four, or five times, the therapist begins to habituate to the narrative; that is, it becomes less horrifying and triggering, and they begin to become more familiar and comfortable with it. This gives them the freedom to actually engage with the story—including with what may be very intimate details. In this way, both the therapist and the patient can benefit from this form of exposure work (Kellogg, July, 2018; Spring, 2023).
Next Steps
This essay has focused on the power of Chairwork-based storytelling in the treatment of traumatic and difficult memories and experiences. For some patients, this form of narrative exposure therapy may be sufficient to help them resolve and release this burden of memory; others, however, may need more. In these cases, we often move to two other Chairwork structures: Relationships and Encounters—which is a way to confront and share feelings with all the parties involved—and Internal Dialogues—which is a way of challenging trauma-based cognitions and maladaptive coping mechanisms that may have developed as a result of the trauma. These forms of Chairwork dialogue have been explored at length in other writings (Kellogg, 2004; Kellogg, 2023; Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2021; Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2024). Briefly, Relationships and Encounters dialogues would include inviting the patient to: (1) put the various participants in the memory in different chairs; (2) review what had happened between them; and (3) express their emotions—whether love, anger, fear, or sorrow and grief—to each of them as appropriate. That is, they can express anger at those who hurt them, anger and grief at those who were supposed to be their caregivers and who did not take steps to protect them, and love and sorrow to themselves as children, adolescents, or themselves at a younger age (Goulding & Goulding, 1997). For example, the adult Clara could confront the American soldier and express her anger and hatred at him for what he did to her. She could also put her child self—Little Clara—on a chair next to her and comfort her and affirm her courage (Dayton, 2023; Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2024).
Using the Internal Dialogues structure, trauma- or abuse-based cognitions could be put in one chair and healthier or more adaptive ways of thinking could be put in another; the patient would start in Center and then then be invited to shuttle between two other chairs—giving voice to each perspective. When done with sufficient energy and emotion, cognitive restructuring can take place (Goldfried, 2013). This could be considered if James continued to blame himself for getting carjacked in the first place. One chair could hold the idea that he should be criticized for “allowing” a criminal to carjack him and his car, and the other chair could embody the belief that criminals are skilled at what they do and that James was very courageous in the way that he fought back so that he could see his wife again. James would then go back and forth between the two chairs until he came to some kind of resolution (Kellogg, Trapp, & Rizzon, in press).
Conclusion
Glenn Close, the actor, has been centrally focused on mental health issues throughout her career. She wrote: “In our stories lies our salvation. Finding the courage to tell our stories will save lives” (Close in Cowan, 2013, p. viii). We have found the integration of Chairwork and the various forms of repetitive storytelling to be a potent and liberating healing process for those who are trapped in the prison of memory; we hope others will find this form of dialogue work to be profoundly healing as well.
Citation: Kellogg, S., & Garcia Torres, A., (2024). On trauma, courage, and the telling of stories: Working with narrative in Chairwork Psychotherapy. New York: Chairwork Psychotherapy Initiative.
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