Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Chariot by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In it, a person is conjoined with a vehicle, the cart of a chariot where their legs might be. They’re wearing a crown, armor, and there are black and white sphinxes laying down in front of the vehicle. On the front of the cart is an emblem of what is often interpreted as a representation of the lingam and yoni, but which looks too, like a wheel and axle. There are wings above it.
I’ve thought a lot about analogy this year. In my recent talk on The Magician, I imagined the character as being to do with analogy, and analogy as a connective force that makes a bridge between worlds. As I wade deeper into narrative therapy, I’ve continued to think about the unseen narratives and analogies that have affected my thinking and work. I’ve written a lot on this already, but it’s been scary to see some of the threads that are woven into the foundations of my work and worldview.
When stuff is that deep in there, any amount of excavation is going to be destabilizing. And I guess destabilizing is what learning is about for me, right now. I’ve made many a small, cozy world of the things that I’ve known. Worlds whose walls the time came to tear down and whose amenities I’ve had to relinquish. I guess this is part of why I experience learning as spiritual, it’s the opening up of a small sliver of world into one that’s much vaster.
Thankfully, that often looks like finding a community of people who have been far out past the walls of your own little world, thinking things through that you’re just now asking about. And what’s cool is, scary as it can be to tread uncharted waters, there’s a sense of belonging there too. Because no matter how new we might be to an area or subject, I think it’s everyone’s right to participate in the naming of our worlds. Plus a good thing about being a newcomer is you tend to have one foot in another world still. That can come in handy for things like bridging, and bringing in names that had not been considered.
A big and welcome adjustment for me in learning narrative therapy—as someone coming from more dominant therapeutic models—is the way narrative work de-emphasizes a cure or a fix in favor of re-storying. One of the ways this manifests, and something I’ve been butting up against as I attempt to bring the ideas into my own work with people, has to do with what many of us call emotional processing.
Emotional processing, from what I can tell, is not a big part of narrative work, per se, but it is something I’ve historically believed to be a significant part of therapy. In narrative work, as one of the instructors pointed out last month, emotions are not privileged. In other words, feelings are not seen as any more or less important than other aspects of human experience.
This de-centering of emotions and the need to “process” them got me wondering about how this concept of emotional processing came to be in the first place, and how it got to be so central in clinical settings. I started to think back on some of the beliefs I’ve encountered about emotions and processing.