How can words change what can’t be changed? How does talking help us shift our relationship to things?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, especially in counselling, where the social conditions or contexts of someone’s life often contribute deeply to their emotional experience. Sometimes what’s causing the pain isn’t something a person can change through insight or effort. It’s just the reality of what they’re living.

I first began wondering about this during my internship for my master’s degree in counselling. I was meeting weekly with a teenager who was in foster care. Things at home were beyond their control, and not much was going well in this young person’s life. I spent a lot of time wondering how words, how talking, could possibly fix that, and I realized that they can’t.

What words can do, though, is open a new view. They can make space for perspective, for seeing what’s ours and what isn’t. Through talking, we might begin to recognize the ways we’ve resisted, survived, or done the best we could with what we knew at the time, even if that resistance didn’t change the outcome. Speaking gives shape to our knowing. And once it’s spoken, we can begin to hear it, to hear ourselves, and meaning begins to form from there.

I began to feel as if words, and the questions they allow us to ask in therapy when used with intention, were portals to new worlds. I felt like I wasn’t a therapist anymore. I was an explorer, looking for clues about what we might speak about that could create a preferred story, one that offered hope, and a willingness to go on.

Questions asked one way might create one story. Other questions could create an entirely new one. How could I ask questions that were compelling? Questions that might allow the person I was speaking with to marvel at how they had resisted, survived, or endured? How might they begin to see themselves in ways they preferred, ways that might better reflect their hopes and dreams? A well asked question can offer folks a space to give voice to what they already know. To hear their own words echo in the room and realize they are no longer living in alignment with their values.

Near the end of a session once, a client told me they were no longer in communication with any of their family members. They would not be spending any time with their children over the holidays. Things were really hard.

Then they said, “I’m not going to wrap this up with a bow and tell you everything is fine, because it’s not.”

This person needed the hardness of their situation at that moment to be seen and witnessed. They weren’t willing to put a bow on things to make either of us feel better. I learned a lot in that session, that there is power in sitting with someone, in bearing witness to someone else’s pain so they don’t have to carry it alone.

Another time, I was speaking with a woman who was recounting a conversation she had with her partner about something we had discussed in counselling. As she was speaking, she recognized something in the moment, that counselling had supported her in hearing more clearly the knowing of her heart and putting words to what she already knew.

As people hear themselves speak, they often begin to understand what they have long known. They reconnect with the hopes, longings, and values that formed the foundation of that knowing. And sometimes, in that reconnection, something shifts. And then they begin to tell stories, stories of the past that they may have forgotten, and then new stories that are linked in time to those older stories connecting them to a newly imagined future.

A through line begins to emerge, a quiet consistency that has been there all along, sometimes since childhood. Reconnecting with that thread can bring a sense of hope and direction, not because life’s circumstances have changed, but because we have changed how we’re in relationship with them.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that therapy isn’t about changing the facts of someone’s life. Often those facts remain exactly as they are. What can change is the story someone has told themselves about what those facts mean about who they are. And when that story shifts, even slightly, people often find a different way of standing inside their lives. Some stories get to be put down, other stories of ourselves and our lives get to be told louder, and we choose which stories we wish to continue to tell. And begin to tell a different story.

Maybe this is what narrative therapy really offers: a space where talking doesn’t fix what’s broken, but helps us remember that even in the hardest stories, we’ve always been the author.

I’m curious about this in other people’s lives too.

Are there things you’ve always known, but only recently found words for?

Can you trace a thread, a quality, a value, or a longing, that has been with you since childhood?

How might that thread offer direction or steadiness into new and preferred stories that you might begin to tell about yourself? For example, a thread of courageousness, or perhaps of wonder.

I’d love to hear what comes to mind for you.