Listen to thisIn this article we look at how narrative ideas commonly used in therapy sessions with youth can be adapted to the work done by youth workers in non-office based settings. Our discussion is based on our efforts to share narrative ideas with staff at Phoenix Youth Programs (PYP) which provides residential, educational and prevention programming for street youth in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We review the key ideas behind narrative practice and how they have come to inform the intentional day-to-day work of PYP staff. We conclude with strategies staff supervisors can use to promote the use of narrative ideas throughout a youth serving agency.
When Jenny’s youth worker met her for the first time in the drop-in centre for street youth, Jenny described herself as a “lazy” and “stupid” young woman, identity conclusions reinforced by her mother and her teachers at school. When her youth worker pointed out how ‘thin’ these identity conclusions were, Jenny became curious about other ways she and others have described her over the years. Seeking exceptions to these negative descriptions with her primary worker, Jenny remembered that there were many times when she had tried very hard to get her homework done, and had even asked for extra help from her teachers. Far from being a lazy or stupid young woman, Jenny and her worker began to appreciate that Jenny had a very different story to tell about herself. She is a young woman struggling with learning challenges and ADHD, a resilient individual who has had to find ways to adapt to her school failure. In fact, Jenny had clearly been trying harder than many of her peers within a system that didn’t accommodate her learning needs. With this alternative narrative, it became clear to both Jenny and her primary worker that her school had let her down. It had failed to provide her with the specialized services she needed to succeed. Strengthened by this understanding, Jenny and her worker planned a strategy to help her complete high school in a more supportive environment.
As the above example illustrates, many youth care workers work in ways that honour a young person’s complex personal story. As therapists working alongside youth workers in a community organization serving homeless youth and youth at risk of becoming homeless, we wondered whether the narrative therapy approach we took in our office-based work could also be used by youth care workers in other settings across the organization to augment an intentionally strengths-focused approach to work with young people. How could an emerging trend in therapy towards ‘narrative practice’ that integrates ideas borrowed from postmodernism, social constructionism and other abstract theories help youth workers practice in a more client-centred, non-pathologizing way with youth who carry numerous labels? In this brief report, we will survey some of the important concepts that narrative therapy offers youth workers and how this approach can be integrated into everyday practices in youth care settings.
Our agency, Phoenix Youth Programs (PYP), is a non-profit community organization offering a continuum of care that includes: an emergency shelter, long term residential care, health care, advocacy, school-based preventions, youth development, therapeutic recreation, career counseling, remedial education, and individual and family therapy. The organization employs over 70 staff, the majority of whom have some background in youth care or a related discipline.
A brief overview of narrative approaches to counseling
We knew from our work as therapists providing office-based counseling that stories told about youth by others have great power and influence over how these young people define themselves. We noticed that these self-definitions subsequently shape the way these youth behave.
Youth often come to us believing the stories told about them by their families, communities and schools (that they are violent, disrespectful, etc.). Over time, these stories grow into detailed narratives about the youth. Therapeutically speaking, these narratives carry with them totalizing labels, meaning a youth becomes known to others in one way and only one way.
Others see the young person as a ‘delinquent’ or ‘street youth’ forgetting that this youth may have other stories that could be told about who she is and why she behaves as she does. How different our perception might be if we saw beyond the thin stereotype of the “tough street youth.” What we might see instead is youth who are: survivors, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters; youth who are hopeful, funny, caring, and ingenious; and youth who are busy at the business of taking care of themselves in the face of great odds.
Though narrative practices with youth who are deeply entrenched in problem stories are complex (see for example Freedman & Combs, 1996; Morgan, 2000; Ungar, 2004, 2006), we have found the general practices of our office-based work adapt very well to settings such as residential care, outreach, and educational programming. A quick primer on narrative practice introduced PYP staff to the following narrative-based ideas: truth is negotiable; people are not their problems; from unique outcomes come new stories; and we need a powerful audience to help turn the volume up on the new stories we want to tell about ourselves. Specifically:
Truth is something that is negotiated: Those labels we assign youth are nothing but stories we tell. Like all stories, they can be changed when people start to tell different stories. With the right supports and opportunities, a youth can re-author a problem story, replacing it with a story that details strengths and resilience.
People become the stories that are told about them: Problems are really just stories we tell about our lives. Problems are not people. I may have a diagnosable condition like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but I am not ADHD. The disorder is just one aspect of a complex individual. However, these stories can be influential in determining how we see ourselves and what we do. For this reason, narrative-oriented counselors talk about separating people from their problems. As Michael White (1995; White & Epston, 1990), one of the originators of narrative therapy points out, the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.
New stories can be developed when we find unique outcomes: Not everything a young person does will reflect their problem-saturated story. There are always aspects of a youth’s life that show the young person to be competent, caring or a contributor to the welfare of others.
New stories can be told and their volume increased so that others come to know the youth differently. To get new stories heard they must have a loud and powerful audience: An audience is there to applaud a youth and give power to the new story he tells about himself. Stories become powerful to the extent that others believe and repeat them. The more people who hear us proclaim an alternative narrative about our lives, and support us through the telling, the more likely our new story is to stick. The goal of narrative-based interventions by youth workers becomes very similar to that of counselors: noticing moments of triumph when a youth is doing something that contradicts a problem identity story.
Adapting narrative ideas to the practice of youth work
Working closely with the youth care staff at PYP, and building on our own backgrounds in community-based settings, we began to work collaboratively with staff to develop approaches to working with youth grounded in concepts borrowed from narrative therapy. We provided the theory; the workers helped us find ways to adapt the approach to their work settings. In particular, we were very interested in the role that youth workers could play as an audience to young people’s new identity stories as they emerged. We wondered, given the intensity of their relationships with the youth, if staff could seek and find new identity stories and provide opportunities for these new stories to be performed for the youth’s family and community. We felt that the close proximity of youth workers to youth and their social networks made them uniquely positioned to help argue for new stories to be told. We were certain that these ideas would provide a good fit for the kind of youth-centered work already being done by PYP staff.
To demonstrate how narrative ideas have been used by staff, we can provide a few examples. This list is far from exhaustive. The more familiar workers have become with the approach, the more ways they have found to enhance their practice. These examples were shared with us by participants of the Narrative Learning Series which was a series of seven workshops held to share narrative ideas with PYP supervisors. Supervisors have subsequently assisted as co-facilitators in an on-going learning series provided to front line staff.
A residential dilemma: how to find the time to notice exceptions
Residential programs offer many challenges to staff in regards to consistently noticing when a youth is acting or thinking in ways that are different from her problem-saturated story. Staff on a busy residential shift are often so preoccupied with ensuring that everyone is safe, and that all of the daily functions of a group living facility are being fulfilled, such as chores, meals and curfews, that there is little time left for noticing anything but the “squeaky wheel,” the youth who is acting out and getting needed attention for her problems.
PYP supervisors have become more focused on training staff to not only put out the “brush fires” as they arise, but also to get good at noticing and encouraging youth who are engaged in behaviors that set them apart from the problem stories they come to programming with. The more these alternative stories are found embedded in everyday living tasks the easier they are to notice. For example, a typical residential scene involves youth and staff sharing a meal together. A youth who has been struggling with the problem of anger might show a small amount of patience (she doesn’t react right away as she might have at other times when teased by another youth at the table). Because youth care staff are present round-the-clock, they are at a particular advantage when it comes to noticing these exceptional moments. As such, they can bear witness and engage youth in conversations about these exceptions. Supervisors have shown us that youth care staff have opportunities to contribute to widening the audience for these new identity stories by exchanging accounts of exceptional behaviour between workers at shift changes, in the daily logs, through case notes in the resident’s file and during case conferences with the youth’s family and community present.
A magic moment at the walk-in centre: embracing the unexpected
Since PYP is a not-for-profit agency, we often receive generous donations at the door to our programs. One such donation at our walk-in centre was a bag of wool and some knitting needles. While this might seem like an odd donation given the context of a bustling centre filled with street involved youth, the opportunity the donation presented gave many of the young people the chance to show a different side of themselves. Shortly after the donation, workers placed the knitting material in the common area of the walk-in space so the material could be shared.
What ensued was a memorable event where, two street-involved young men dressed head to toe in “street garb,” sporting Mohawks, studs, and safety pin piercings, were noticed sitting side-by-side on a couch in the centre, knitting. As one youth explained to the other how not to “drop a stitch,” and “My Granny taught me how to knit,” staff took note of the incongruity between the youth’s dominant identity story and this other more connected prosocial behaviour.
In cases like this, a serendipitous event can provide youth like these an opportunity to display other truths about themselves beyond the confines of the reputations they carry as “tough and hardened” street youth. While those identity stories are adaptive and protective for life on the street, the Centre’s staff seek ways to offer opportunities for broader self-definitions for the young people who attend. Staff are coming to understand their role as one of creating an atmosphere where it is okay for youth to “come as they are” and dare to try on “other ways of being” while they are there.
The Special Initiative Program: A place for youth to revisit hidden aspects of their identity
PYP ‘s Special Initiative Program encourages youth to participate in a variety of activities that assist them in expressing themselves creatively. These activities include art, photography, writing, and music, and therapeutic recreational activities that provide opportunities for self-expression and personal reflection. There are also activities that develop youth leadership.
Engagement in public speaking provides a forum for the youth to share their life stories with their communities. Over the past few years, Special Initiatives have carried out a number of public showings of the young people’s art, photography and music. In one recent example, the youth captured their life stories through video, art, drama and music. A showcase of these self-expressions were shown to a wide audience. In addition to this public showcase a video documentary that captured the youths’ participation in a recent study about their experiences within the social welfare system was shown to a group of social workers at the Regional Office of the Department of Community Services.
Through their work, the youth were able to re-story themselves as informed critics of the social welfare system. They challenged the notion that they were merely passive recipients of government handouts. Since learning of narrative concepts, staff facilitators with Special Initiatives have come to view their work as more intentional. More than a series of self-esteem building exercises, these creative efforts are understood as providing youth with powerful alternative narratives that elevate their status among members of their communities. Through the telling of the youths’ experiences in the first person, young people are being given the opportunity to move from the label “problem youth” to that of ‘artist,’ ‘musician,’ and ‘contributor to social change.’
Incorporating narrative concepts into youth worker training and supervision
Management staff at PYP have suggested a number of ways they have found useful promoting this model of narrative youth work. Supervisors are being encouraged to:
Bringing a narrative focus to youth work
Though not every situation encountered by PYP staff is an opportunity to build a new story (for example, in cases where a youth threatens violence against staff or other PYP participants), youth workers are expanding the scope of their intentional use of narrative practice concepts. Structures and systems are being reviewed. Forms, intake processes, discharge criteria, agreements with youth and time away/limit setting processes are all being influenced by narrative approaches to intervention. Staff are less likely to impose consequences on youth, such as ‘time out’ or discharge from a program without turning the disciplinary measure into an opportunity for the young person to reflect on his dominant story and propose a plan to co-author an alternative.
Youth plans have replaced contracts, with their taint of control. Discharges are no longer seen as a sign of failure, but instead an opportunity to look closely at whether the program is well suited to the youth rather than vice-versa. In all these ways, PYP staff are engaging in processes of youth work that have become less about judging young people and more about acknowledging where they are at and the multiple stories they may tell about themselves with the right supports. By affording youth opportunities to get to know and experience themselves in new ways, PYP staff have been helping the youth to forge identities that stand in opposition to the problematic identities they have been burdened with.
References
Freedman, J & Combs, G. (1996). Narrative Therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hartman, L., Little, A. & Ungar, M. (in press). Narrative inspired youth care work within a community agency. Journal of Systemic Therapies.
Little, A., Hartman, L. & Ungar, M. (in press). Introducing the ‘narrative construal of reality’ and ‘the club of life.’ International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work.
Morgan, A. (2000). What is narrative therapy? Adelaide, AU: Dulwich Centre Publications
Ungar, M. (2004). Nurturing hidden resilience in troubled youth. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Ungar, M. (2006). Strengths-based counseling with at-risk youth. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
White, M. (1995). Re-authoring lives: Interviews and essays. Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Centre.
White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W.W. Norton.
This feature: Alison Little, Lesley Hartman and Michael Ungar: Practical applications of narrative ideas to youth care. Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, Volume 20 Number 4, pp. 37-41
