Therapy in the Symbolic Context: The Role of Culture, Story and Symbols

"Our clients' personal stories and narratives about themselves are arguably the most important focus of all forms of therapy. These stories and narratives can trap our clients in emotional states that are seemingly ingrained, circular and permanent. Some stories are so powerful that even after insights and seemingly new learning and breakthroughs occur in session we often find that the stories and narratives have returned by the time of the very next session. The insights and discoveries from RFT have allowed us to understand how these stories develop for a person, why they have the power they do and what the factors are in a person's life that maintain them. With these insights, clinicians can use evidence based science driven approaches to identify what narratives to focus on in therapy and develop effective and precise therapeutic strategies on a case by case basis to foster and create new empowering personal stories and narratives that lead to personally meaningful psychological flexibility that will lead to lasting and ongoing development"

This workshop will be of assistance to Clinicians working with different populations in various ways;

For those Working with Children and Families
- How to promote functional development through the use of language and modelling in the home
- Identifying narratives that lead to harmful parenting practices and dysfunctional family systems
For those working with adolescents
- How to understand the role of social media and cultural processes that impact identity development
- How to understand the role of social group processes and evolving norms in creating the identity stories that
For those working with ACT (and other forms of CBT or interpersonal therapies)
- How to better inform your understanding of how and why various approaches work
- How to better understand the developmental processes that influenced out clients narratives
- How to identify the maintaining variables in your clients narratives and what to do about them
- How to utilise the various story creating 'tools' to guide your therapeutic approach based on your clients ways of learning
- How to capture and utilise the processes within the therapeutic relationship and space to create narratives that are meaningful and lasting for their clients

It is not known when exactly our ancestors discovered fire. We do know though that it was one of the greatest discoveries of humankind. Fire can provide energy to create, warmth to comfort and the means to burn and destroy. Being able to create, capture and use fire was a tremendous advantage to humans. It was not our greatest advantage though. Fire was to become just another tool in the enormous array of tools we were to discover, create and capture. Our actual first great achievement was our skill at passing information to each other. We could pass on information with intent and every generation watched and learned from the generation before it how to better build and use the technology of fire. Our gift from learning from another, whilst at a level never seen in any other species, was not unique to us though. Many mammals could do it. Then came our second gift. We developed the ability to share information in symbols. Words, gestures, pictures, icons and text. Symbols could bridge time and space. We could influence a person we had never met. We could leave symbols in the form of manuals, stories, parables, metaphors, idioms, poems, memes for every generations following to interpret. We began not just to model how to make fire but to discuss it, explore it, imagine its potential and theorise on ways we could learn more than just what an elder showed us. So effective was the symbolic process, we now we have 7-year-old children who understand concepts that were once considered the work of wise elders. This is the benefit of the social species becoming the social-symbolic species and we created a rich cultural tapestry to maintain this ability that is so automatic you may not realise you are using it right now.

Recently several fields ranging from Anthropology through to Neuroscience have converged in their study of symbolic learning. One of the key discoveries has been that the symbolic ability that gifted us the remarkable knowledge and reasoning capacity we now have is too much for our neurology itself to contain. It is now apparent that as we evolved the brain 'handed off' the bulk of the symbolic process to the social system. Due to this need we have created cultures to sustain our symbolic demands. It is now accepted that our minds are part of and contained in our culture through our drawings, stories, media, books, movies, ceremonies and teachings. Symbolic influence is everywhere. Once we learn to think and communicate symbolically, we are never really disconnected from the culture again and our thoughts are never really our own. Culture reflects our minds and our minds informed by our cultures. Even when physically alone we are never symbolically alone again - our culture and social influences are always in our 'mind'. This is the power of the symbolic world we live in.

We now see people more reliant on symbolic processes than ever before as we live through our social media and devices at an ever increasing rate. At the same time we see narratives used to deflect, confuse and create bias with greater skill and intention than ever before. Whilst control of the 'narrative' and seeking to influence through control of information is not new the amount and speed of information we must try to make sense of is something we as a species have never before encountered. Where once we may have needed to learn how to manage gossip and peer pressure from people we largely directly knew, we now find our identities almost completely disembodied onto social media and peer groups can seemingly be infinite and everywhere at once. Where once we could assess a speakers credibility through coherence and lines of evidence we are increasingly aware that those who seek to inform us have learned it is more profitable to play to our biases - or foster conflict - than tell us what they actually think or experienced. Our symbolic system is increasingly our greatest risk. It is apparent we are now in a world where we have never been more symbolically connected and informed and less attached to the experiences these symbols were meant to help us understand. So, just as we learned to understand fire so we could harness it and not be destroyed by it, we must now do the same with symbolic processes that gave us that ability in the first place – for the same reasons.

Therapy can be viewed as an intensive distilled and focussed version of the social-developmental processes that develop and shape humans (attachment, modelling, shared experience and a steady stream of symbols passing back and forth between the therapist and client). Given it is the ‘hothouse’ version of the social symbolic process it is apparent that we can and should understand how symbols work if we are to understand not just the human condition and functioning but the therapeutic process itself. By doing this we can better tailor our intervention approaches but also better develop approaches informed by the cultures we and our clients live within whilst reflecting what the latest science is telling us about human development and functioning.

In this workshop I will rely on various sources of research about how symbolic abilities develop and come to function and how they are then maintained throughout the lifespan. From this foundation I will then outline how these key discoveries and understanding of how symbols work can be used in clinical practice. This will include;

1. Understand the foundational and pivotal developmental processes that develop and maintain symbolic abilities.
2. Understanding symbolic ‘vehicles’ like story, metaphor and phrases and the roles they play in adaptive and maladaptive functioning.
3. Understand how culture influences mind at multiple levels of social functioning.
4. How to use these vehicles with precision and skill in therapy and assess efficacy of those vehicles.
5. Using symbolic 'enhancers' like writing, drawing and role play to ground but also increase the potency of symbolic processes.
6. Understanding how symbolic processes can be harmful both from internal symbolic processes (eg rumination, self criticism, cognitive bias) to external symbolic processes (the power of media, social media and other cultural influences)
7. Understand how symbols gain influence and power at the expense of experience and wellbeing.
8. Recognise the key symbolic processes for psychological flexibility and wellbeing and how to help your client create them.
9. Learn how to help our clients recognise negative and positive symbolic processes and use them to create healthy lifestyles and patterns of living.
10. The role of culture, group and identity as symbolic processes that therapy must consider for lasting change.

About Darin Cairns, M.A.: 

Darin Cairns is a Clinical Psychologist and has been working in private practice for the past 15 years after working for the Western Ausralian government for 7 years. In that time he has consistently worked in three domains of practice concurrently; Developmental Psychology, designing and implementing developmental programs for children with Autism and related domains, Clinical Psychology working with children, families and adults across an array of mental health fields and in the Forensic context assisting Courts in managing high conflict family systems. He is founder and co-director of the Charles St Clinic. He has presented over 250 workshops on child development, relational frame theory and applications of learning theory to clinical practice.