Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2016, pp.

38–53

IDENTITY, AGENCY, AND

THERAPEUTIC CHANGE
JIMENA CASTRO
Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

This article compares and contrasts two different postmodern therapeutic

orientations in terms of the way they approach issues of identity, agency, and
therapeutic change. The author invited James Hibel, a narrative therapist, and
Douglas Flemons, a hypnotherapist and relationally oriented brief therapist,
to discuss differences and similarities in their respective approaches to these
issues. The article includes an edited transcript of portions of the dialogue.

My interest in what is common across relational models of therapy led me to set

up a conversation between two practitioners with different therapeutic orientations:
James Hibel, PhD, a narrative therapist, and Douglas Flemons, PhD, a hypnothera-
pist and relationally oriented brief therapist. They have been working collaboratively
for over two decades in the Department of Family Therapy at Nova Southeastern
University. As their student, interested in both of their approaches, I became curious
about what they considered their differences and commonalities.
Although the conversation was wide ranging, this article limits the scope of
this comparison to three issues: identity, agency, and therapeutic change. To set
the context for the conversation, however, I will first note some underlying as-
sumptions and practices of their respective approaches, Narrative Therapy and
Relational Brief Therapy.

NARRATIVE THERAPY

Narrative therapy is a non-normative psychotherapeutic approach that aims to

“decenter the voice of the therapist” (White, 2011, p. 3) while privileging the
voices of clients. Narrative therapy’s underlying assumptions and presuppositions
were inspired, initially, by White’s interpretation of Gregory Bateson’s commu-
nicational theory and, later on, by White’s reading of social constructionist and
post-structuralist ideas, mainly Foucault and Derrida. His collaboration with David

Address correspondence to Jimena Castro, 1162 Arthur St., Hollywood, FL 33019. E-mail: jimena@
nova.edu

38

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 39

Epston led to the contextualization of these ideas within a narrative or text metaphor
(White & Epston, 1990).
Some of the main tenets of narrative therapy are: language and meaning shape
and contextualize our experience because of the stories we tell and the ones we do
not tell (White & Epston, 1990); our stories are embedded in more encompassing
cultural and sociopolitical contexts that represent (or fail to represent) our lived
experience (White & Epston, 1990); power and knowledge are constitutive of
people’s lives through “constructed ideas that are accorded a truth status” (White
& Epston, 1990, p. 19); narrative practitioners challenge the discourses and prac-
tices “that propose and assert objective reality accounts of the human condition”
(White & Epston, 1990, p. 28); people who come to therapy have “knowledges and
skills that have been generated in the histories of . . . [their] lives” (White, 2011,
p. 3) that sometimes have been left out of their dominant narratives; and, because
“there is no such thing as an ‘essential’ self” (Freedman & Combs, 1996, p. 34),
it is possible to re-author a person’s identity.

Identity and the Narrative Approach

In tune with the post-structuralist worldview, narrative therapy approaches the
concept of identity in relation to intentionality and “the notion of ‘personal agency’
” (White, 2007, p. 103), and not in relation to “specific elements of a self that is
to be ‘found’ at the center of identity” (White, 2007, p. 101). According to White
(2011), narrative conversations are a way of “unpack[ing] the stories of people’s
lives and identities” (p. 8). This process has a dual intention: “the deconstruction
of the negative identity conclusions associated with these stories” and the bringing
out of “historical and cultural ways of being in the world and thinking about the
world” contained within these stories (White, 2011, p. 8).

Narrative Practices
The aforementioned theoretical underpinnings have originated a wide array of nar-
rative practices: externalizing conversations (White, 2007; White & Epston, 1990),
conversations that attend to unique outcomes (White, 2007), re-authoring conversa-
tions (White, 1995, 2007), the use of archival documents containing knowledges of
people who have experienced a particular problem (Maisel, Epston, & Borden, 2004),
and so on. All of these practices are usually interwoven throughout narrative conversa-
tions. To best illuminate the concepts of agency and identity, I will briefly elaborate
on two of these practices, externalizing conversations and re-authoring conversations.

Externalizing Conversations.  Assuming that “problems can be situated within the

context of ‘trends,’ . . . appearing to have a life of their own” (White & Epston, 1990,
p. 3), White developed the practice of externalizing conversation to help families
and individuals “separate from ‘problem-saturated’ descriptions of their lives and

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relationships” (White & Epston, 1990, p. 4). A post-structuralist view added to this
idea that persons have internalized problems as part of “their self or the selves of
others” (White, 2007, p. 9), and that externalizing conversations become helpful in
deconstructing “the objectification of the problem against cultural practices of objec-
tification of people” (White, 2007, p. 9). Through an externalizing conversation, it is
possible for people to “unravel some of the negative conclusions they have usually
reached about their identity under the influence of the problem” (White, 2007, p. 26).

Re-authoring Conversations.  In order to create a self-narrative, “we prune, from

our experience, those events that do not fit with the dominant evolving stories that
we and others have about us” (White & Epston, 1990, pp. 11–12). According to
White (2007), those aspects of the experience that were not “registered or given
meaning to. . . . can be constituted as ‘unique outcomes’ or ‘exceptions’” (p. 219).
Narrative therapists invite clients to reflect on events or actions that could be
considered unique outcomes and to attribute meaning to those actions. Clients’ “sto-
ries are full of gaps which persons must fill in order for the story to be performed”
(White & Epston, 1990, p. 13). In re-authoring conversations, therapists help clients
to bridge those gaps through a process of scaffolding, by inviting them to move
back and forth between the landscape of action and the landscape of conscious-
ness across time, in a recursive “‘zig-zagging’ process” (White, 1995, p. 32). “The
landscape of action is constituted by experiences of events that are linked together
in sequences through time and according to specific plots” (White, 1995, p. 31;
emphasis in original removed). The landscape of consciousness, also referred to
as the landscape of meaning, is constituted “through reflection on events in the
landscape of action to determine what those events might say about the desires,
preferences, qualities, characteristics, motives, purposes, wants, goals, values,
beliefs, commitments, of various persons” (White, 1995, p. 31).
The continuous recursive process between action and meaning contributes to the
rooting of unique outcomes and the thickening of alternative storylines—stories
that have been subjugated (White, 1995, 2007). This creates a contextual fabric,
an alternative story that would make it possible for clients to renegotiate their
identities (White, 1995, 2007).

As people are invited by therapists to reflect on the events of these alternative themes
or counter-plots, there is new opportunity for them to form identity descriptions that
contradict the negative identity conclusions that are associated with what have been
the more dominant stories of their lives. (White, 2011, p. 6)

RELATIONAL BRIEF THERAPY

Douglas Flemons (1991, 2002; Flemons & Gralnik, 2013; Green & Flemons, 2004)
has developed a particular orientation to brief therapy informed by relational logic.
His relational approach to therapy has been influenced by Eastern traditions, such

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 41

as Taoism and Buddhism, as well as by Western postmodern cybernetic ideas (e.g.,

Gregory Bateson’s [2000] communicational theory) and by Milton Erickson’s ap-
proach to hypnosis (Erickson, 1959/1980).
Flemons (1991) juxtaposes the Taoist conception of the world as a relational unity
with Gregory Bateson’s conception of Mind as an interconnected web of relationships
“between the parts of a system and between systems” (p. 4) to underlie his premise
that whenever we use dissociative logic, we are establishing a relationship. Accord-
ing to Flemons (1991), “the moment it is acknowledged that distinctions join what
they divide, it becomes impossible to speak of anything in isolation” (pp. 31–32).
Applying relational logic to therapy, Flemons (2002) has suggested, among
others, the following therapeutic tenets: It is our attempts to get rid of problems
that experientially connect us to them—“the effort to negate creates a dissociative
relationship, a separated connection between a person and the problem he or she
despises” (Flemons, 2002, p. 11); therapeutic change happens at the level of clients’
orientation to themselves, their lives, and others (Flemons, 2002), which refers to
change in the client’s “perceptual predisposition” (Lankton & Lankton, 1983) or
expectancy. To think relationally means to think in context, and context refers to
internal and external patterns of relating; the logic of metaphoric thinking helps
therapists cross, momentarily, the distinctions between themselves and their clients,
in other words, to become “of one mind” (Flemons, 2002, p. 21) with them. Instead
of creating interventions from the vantage of an outside expert, therapists are better
off understanding their clients empathically, from the inside of their experience,
allowing them then to originate what Flemons (2002) would call intraventions.

Identity and the Relational Approach

The realization of our experiential reality connotes a self-reflecting process of dis-
tinguishing ourselves, and in this process we become oblivious of our connections.
“You sense that the part of you that is aware of itself perceiving—your conscious
self or ‘observing-I’—is somehow set apart, distinct from what you sense and think
and feel” (Green & Flemons, 2004, p. 128). There is no way around relationships,
however. “All experience is fundamentally relational” (Green & Flemons, 2004,
p. 128, emphasis in original).
Clients’ attempts to get rid of the problematic intrapersonal aspects of their
experience foster a dissociative context that further enhances a sense of alienation
from their own experience of themselves (Flemons & Gralnik, 2013). According
to Flemons and Gralnik (2013),
therapeutic change becomes possible when clients are freed up from attempting to
contain, negate, or otherwise separate from an alienated chunk of their own experi-
ence. We help them head in the opposite direction, facilitating their connecting to their
problem in such a way that they can respond to it resourcefully, creating opportunities
for choice and change. (pp. 42–43)

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Flemons (2002) considers that the boundaries we create by distinguishing our-

selves from others and/or from other aspects of our experience “configure . . . [our]
identity” (p. 138). According to Flemons, “when differences stop making a differ-
ence, when boundaries become irrelevant, the distinctiveness of the ‘thing’ they
create disappears” (p. 138). For Flemons, metaphoric thinking is essential to joining
with clients and to inviting therapeutic change. To think metaphorically implies
that you are crossing distinctions and “los[ing] track of the boundary separating
yourself—your [observing I or] insular i—from your body, from other people, from
your environment” (Flemons, 2002, p. 18). In this crossing, we come to experience
our environment and ourselves differently (Flemons, 2002).

Relational Brief Therapy Practices

Some relational brief therapy practices include: inviting clients to connect with their
problems through curiosity and learning; shifting the context by changing meaning
or by re-categorizing; attending to differences and introducing differences within
the strands of a problematic pattern; using relational language through metaphors
and stories; and shifting the perception of the mind-body division by hypnosis. As
in the narrative approach, all these practices can be interwoven in any therapeutic
conversation or hypnotherapy session. For the purpose of this article, I will illu-
minate three of them.

Metaphors and Stories.  Flemons’s relational orientation to therapy is infused with

metaphors and stories; he weaves them throughout both therapeutic conversations
and hypnotic trances. “Metaphor is . . . the main characteristic and organizing glue
of [the] world of mental process” (Bateson, cited in Flemons, 2002, p. 17). It refers
to patterns or relationships, as do stories. “In the connections between characters, in
the development of plot and the time of its telling . . . [story] weaves a pattern. Story
and thought are one and the same” (Flemons, 1991, p. 64). The use of metaphors
and stories elicits metaphoric thinking. “When you think metaphorically . . . you
give priority to the connection” (Flemons, 2002, p. 17).
Stories and metaphors are means to reorient clients towards having different
relationships with their problems. They do not bind clients to pursue solutions that
chop off the ecology of the relational context; they are a breeding ground in which
clients and therapists might encounter a variety of alternatives and possibilities
for change.

Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy.  Flemons (2002) considers that hypnotic experience

allows clients and therapists to better cross boundaries or distinctions. According
to Flemons, “the etymology of the word trance is identical to that of transit (trans,
across + ire, to go), which the O.E.D. [Oxford English Dictionary] defines as ‘the
action or fact of passing across or through’” (p. 21; emphasis in original). In the
process of recrossing boundaries, clients reorient, without conscious effort, to new

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 43

ways of relating. Flemons does not “consider hypnosis a special state. Rather, [he]
view[s] it as the creation and maintenance of a special relationship, a relationship
that bridges the mind-body division, altering, while it continues, the everyday
boundaries of the conscious ‘self’” (p. xvi).
According to Flemons (2002), trance experience allows for the introduction of
freedom in different relationships, such as between therapists and clients, between
clients and themselves, between clients and others, and between clients and their
problem. When clients and therapists are more in concordance, being of one mind,
between each other and within themselves, new ideas and possibilities are gener-
ated from within the relationship between them and the relationship between their
awareness and their experience. Trance allows for a shift in perception, for the
introduction of relational freedom. This freedom opens up possibilities for find-
ing new connections and/or losing others (such as the separated connection with
the problem).

Shifting the Relationship Between Clients and Their Problems.  Flemons suggests
that it is possible to shift a client’s sense of agency “from a helpless victim . . . to
an active researcher in pursuit of knowledge” (Flemons & Gralnik, 2013, p. 44)
by inviting him or her to become curious and to gather information about his or
her problem.

When you’re curious about something—when you want to learn more about it—you
tend to lean toward or into it, both physically and attitudinally. This shift, from separa-
tion to connection, from frightened withdrawal to fascinated engagement, is sometimes
all it takes to occasion a significant change in the problem itself. (Flemons & Gralnik,
2013, p. 43)

EDITED AND ANNOTATED CONVERSATION

On October 13, 2014, I invited Jim Hibel and Douglas Flemons to participate in
a recorded conversation, during which I asked them to compare and contrast their
respective therapeutic orientations. In response to my request, each shared a case
that illuminated his therapeutic assumptions and choices. The conversation took
us through a variety of topics, including a discussion of the volitional and nonvo-
litional aspects of therapy and their relationship to shifts in identity and agency.
The following is an annotated and edited transcript of the discussion that day; all
quotations below (unless otherwise specified as from a publication) are personal
communications transcribed from the recording.
In searching for a common language between his and Hibel’s ideas about iden-
tity, Flemons suggested a definition of identity as “an unfolding story, rather than
as a reified entity located within an isolated, individual self” (i.e., what Bateson
[2000] would call a “dormitive principle”). Flemons also laid down the idea that

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if you think of identity as a thing that is then, somehow, carried within, then you’ve
got to go out and try to do something to that thing. But if you are thinking of identity
as a story, . . . that story might unfold differently into the future.

According to Flemons, our identities condition the choices we make because our
presuppositions and assumptions orient us to “automatically make choices here,
and . . . [to not] consider choices over there because after all that is what my identity
would tell me to do.” For him, a main distinction between both approaches is that
narrative therapists address identity in “a sort of a politically informed way,” that
is, they say to their clients, essentially, “Let’s talk about . . . the way the dominant
discourse constrains your assumptions of what it means to be you and then let’s
explore the alternatives to that.” Flemons considers that in narrative therapy, the
therapeutic process involves some kind of “conscious intent,” and he suggests an
alternative, in which shifts in identity might be “inductively discovered.” To illu-
minate the process of how a client comes to the point of saying, “Jeez, I thought
this would have to happen, but here I’m doing something I never dreamed of,”
Flemons shared the following case.

I’ve seen this teenager four or five times: two or three meetings over a year ago, just
before she turned 17, and then two meetings more recently, since she turned 18 . . . Her
parents were always opposed to the whole idea of vaccinations, and because she’s
homeschooled, she got by without ever getting a shot. And she never needed any
medication or fluids delivered intravenously, so she’s never been on the receiving end
of a hypodermic needle. But now she wants to go to college, and the one she wants
to attend requires her to be current on several vaccinations. And she hopes to travel
internationally, which will mean additional shots. She herself is not worried about
any supposed dangers associated with inoculations themselves, but when she came to
see me, she was so afraid of needles and doctors, she would faint at the sight—even
on TV or in a movie—of a needle or of blood, or even in response to talking about
needles or getting blood taken.
Her parents wanted her to go to university and to travel, so they supported her do-
ing whatever was necessary. My client’s presupposition was, “Jeez, I’d love to go to
college and travel, but it’s just not going to be possible because I’ll need to get shots
and blood work done, and I’ll faint and not be able to go through with it.” Everything
to do with getting medical clearance is going to involve blood, needles, and doctors,
so therefore it’s not possible.
So then she comes to me and wants to know, “Is it possible for me and my reaction
to be different than this?” What I don’t do is to set [her up to be] against fainting. What
I set up through trance is also a lot of expectation on her part. I invite the expectation.
How could you discover that something could be different?

Through trance or relational logic, Flemons attended to physiological, psy-

chological, interpersonal, and behavioral details around the client’s process of
fainting. He invited the client to be curious about how it happened, while setting
the expectation for something to be different in some way. The direction of the

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 45

shift, however, did not organize the therapeutic process. Flemons considers that
by bringing curiosity to the specifics of how the problem becomes problematic,
clients are already beginning to reorient to it. They establish “a connection of
curiosity . . . [that] shifts . . . [their] agency.” Continuing with his description of
the case, Flemons said,

So, initial change after we had two meetings: . . . She said she was talking to some
friends and they were all talking about blood or something, and instead of her getting
faint, she got flushed. So to my mind this is a good example of . . . “Wait, the blood
went in the opposite direction of what it usually does!” When you faint, blood pres-
sure in your head decreases because blood flows [down], and here we have blood
bubbling in the other direction. . . . She [also] said she was able to go to the doctor’s
for a checkup, and at the appointment, when she was talking to the doctor by herself,
she got an idea: “I know, I’m going to surprise my parents and get my first inoculation.
I’m going to get it.” And the nurse asked her to lie down, and she said, “No, I’m going
to sit up.” She did it [got the shot], and she went out to the waiting room and told her
mother, and everybody celebrated.

Although Flemons does not foster clients’ conscious intent, he endorses thera-
pists’ commitment to intentionally setting the context to facilitate nonvolitional
change. Some time after the success in the doctor’s office, the client was at a movie
with her friends, and when blood was spilled on the screen in a gruesome way, she
fainted in the theater. She and her family all considered this to be a setback. Worried
there was something medically wrong with her, the parents unilaterally decided she
needed to get blood work done, and they went ahead and made the appointment for
her, telling her only after the fact. In response to this information being shared in
a therapy session with the daughter and the mother, Flemons facilitated a shift in
his client’s sense of agency by offering possibilities, choices, or avenues she could
take, within the constraints of the defined context. He suggested the possibility of
something different happening, with the teenager discovering the particulars of
what it would be. Using metaphoric language and playfulness, in a conversation
with the daughter and her mother, Flemons “facilitated her, rather than her mother
or father, getting to make the decisions, the choices.” Flemons set the context for
the young woman to “call the shots,” rather than her parents:

Because she had had a setback, and she had fainted in the movie, her parents had
decided there was something wrong. . . . [They said to her,] “You need to go to the
doctor and get your blood taken, . . . and we have made this appointment for you at
this time on this day, and because we don’t want you to be anxious, we also have
obtained a benzodiazepine that you can take ahead of time, so you’ll be chill.” And
while she [the daughter] is talking about this, she’s clearly not cool with it. . . . I said
[to her mother], “So at this point you and your husband’s love for your daughter has
resulted in your [having her go to the doctor to get blood work done] as the best way
to make sure that she’s okay.” . . . She agreed, so I said, “Would it be possible, would
it be okay with you and your husband if this [appointment] happens, but your daughter

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calls the shots for how it happens?” She said, “Yes, I guess so.” And I used the phrase
“call the shots” purposefully, of course. . . . [And then I said to the daughter,] “I can
see three different ways of your being able to call the shots. One is you delay when the
appointment is, and you say [to your parents], ‘You are not making the appointment
for me. I’m 18 now, and I’m going to make the appointment.’ And then you make
it [at a later time or on a later date].” And I see her relax, because I just offered this
alternative, [and she can think,] “I am not getting dictated by somebody else, I get to
call the shots and I can delay.” [And then I say:] “Of course there is another way to
call the shots and that will be to say, ‘Forget it, I’m going to make the appointment
before the originally scheduled time, but it’s me making it, not you.’ [And it is yours]
because you go before [they wanted you to go]. And there is a third way: You do it at
exactly the same time they scheduled it, but you make sure that you are going because
that’s the time you chose. Not after, not before, just . . . you choosing that time, and I
guess then you want to also decide, ‘Am I taking the medication or not?’ because that
would certainly, if you take it, that can certainly help. But . . . ,” and then I turn back
to the mother, “Would it be okay if she were to decide whether it’s okay to take the
medication or not?” [Mom agrees,] “Yes, yes, it’s fine.” . . . By the end of the session,
before they left, the daughter said, “I have decided that I’m going to do it at the same
time, and I’m probably not going to take the medication.”

Flemons later got an e-mail from his young client, saying that she had gone to
the appointment and had “called the shots,” and she had noticed a shift from an
anxious state of thinking and worrying to herself that she was going to faint, to an
eager and exciting sense of agency. For Flemons this is an example of

a profound shift in identity, . . . a shift that is connected to presuppositions about, who

I am, what I am capable of. . . . Here I am not fainting, eager, doing it because it’s my
decision, keeping my parents away from all the decision making.

Flemons explains this process as “a shift in orientation, basically offering her a

different identity,” the identity of a young woman who is not a fragile victim but
a woman who discovers herself being capable.
Hibel expressed appreciation for Flemons’s work, and he also found a point of
connection to aspects of his own work and narrative practices that highlights the
importance of listening for alternatives that are already there, in clients’ life stories.
These alternatives generally referred to clients’ sense of having agency. Talking
about Flemons’s case, Hibel said,

It’s a beautiful piece of work and I don’t know that I would’ve been able to do the
same thing, because I work with a different set of practices, but I think there are
some places where my presuppositions overlap with Douglas’s. . . . One is, among
the things I love is the way that Douglas has, has what I would call inspiration. It’s
about what is important to her based on what he’s hearing. From the narrative per-
spective, calling this a problem, it’s a protest against something that doesn’t work for
her. And . . . Douglas . . . picks up on [the fact that] she has issues around not calling
the shots, that she’s not calling the shots, that she’s a victim of all of this. . . . It has

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something to do with the needles, but Douglas, by working on her relationships, sees
that . . . she’s not calling the shots maybe with her parents [and] she’s not calling the
shots in her own life. So [he] presents her with this beautiful metaphor that the shots
are doing something to her and she’s going to now call the shots. And she has three
ways of doing this so she cannot not call the shots.
Furthermore, she can always say to Douglas, “I’m not interested in your suggesting
that I call the shots.” In which case, she [would] still be calling the shots, in that [it would
be] a protest against not having agency. She almost cannot not demonstrate agency.
It’s beautiful, very appreciative. What I would see as similar . . . is this presupposition
that the alternative is in there somewhere. When presented with the opportunity to have
agency, . . . her issue around not having agency suggests that given the opportunity,
she would. And [when she’s] presented with a variety of ways of doing that, it’s her
way of having agency.

Hibel also commented on how, within the narrative perspective, “clients’ ex-
pressions of discomfort indicate a preference”; their protest against the problem
implies that they have “a vision . . . of themselves without a problem; otherwise,
it wouldn’t be a problem.” Hibel shared the following case:

[I have a client,] a woman that I’ve been working with for a while. [She was in] a
long-term marriage that she hadn’t realized how difficult it was until . . . her kids were
grown up. And she had come to a place where . . .  every day her husband would come
home, and she would greet him at the door with a tray with hors d’oeuvres and a drink
on it. And that’s what her life had become, that kind of life—serving a man. And she
had become involved in his business and had given up her own profession in order to
do that. For years, it was constantly being reinforced that she was less than. . . . The
marriage dissolved, but her husband had been telling her, “You are not as smart as
me.” And that was a problem for her. I looked at that as a protest. “Why,” [I asked],
“is that a problem for you, that he would say that you are not as smart as him?” And
she said, “Because I really don’t believe that,” which was an important moment for
her. So I think I said back to her something like, “You know, I agree. I don’t think you
are as smart as him.” And I said, “Is it possible that you are smarter?” And she was
able to agree with that. That “it’s possible that I’m smarter than him.” So he got to be
right but in the wrong way.

Narrative therapists are usually committed to explicitly questioning the social

practices that marginalize people and that prevent them from living their preferred
selves. In this process, they address different elements of the client’s larger context,
such as gender, culture, age, religiosity, and so on. In this case, Hibel explored how
his client made sense of what it meant for her to be in the context of a woman’s
body, at the particular time in which she grew up, and within the context of her
religious ideas.
While carefully listening to his client’s accounts, Hibel was listening for unique
outcomes. For instance, Hibel’s client had issues with her health and her husband
had been insisting that she take specific steps to address her condition, but she had
not done anything about it. Exploring this part of the story in more detail, Hibel and

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his client found out that she had not responded to her husband’s request because,
according to her, she did not want to agree with his definition of the problem. Once
the client reclaimed her sense of agency by reclaiming her profession, however,
she did something about her health. Hibel explained,

[My client] was driving past a gym, when the angel at her shoulder said, “Grab the
steering wheel and turn into that gym.” She went into the gym and set an appointment
with a trainer. She asked for the toughest personal trainer they had, somebody that
really would give her a hard time. [I asked,] “Is that a matter of pride for you that you
were able to listen this time to the angel on your shoulder instead of whatever other
voices?” And she said, “Yeah.” . . . I said, “Holy shit, it now occurs to me that you’ve
known something all along that nobody else has known. Tell me if this is correct.” She
said, “What?” I continued, “That you were not going to do anything to change your
body until you’d gotten your brain back.” . . . She explained to me that she actually
thought that it was true but that she hadn’t thought about it exactly that way. But that
for her to change her body would’ve been to change it for him, but now that she got
her brain back and her profession back, it was okay to change her body because she
wasn’t doing it for the wrong reasons.

In response to Hibel’s work, Flemons pointed out some of the connections be-
tween the two stories. Similarly to his own client, Hibel’s client “was able to do
it [i.e., make a change] when she wasn’t doing it for somebody else.” In addition,
Flemons emphasized the nonvolitional aspects of the process of shifting identity
and the resulting choices.

The element that stands out for me, out of the “holy shit,” [laughs] [is] that she found
[herself doing something different]. I would describe it [as], “She found herself turning
in [to the gym].” She didn’t decide, “I’m going to make myself.” She found herself
listening to herself. Now, that commitment is a very different kind of commitment.

In contrast to Flemons inviting nonvolitional shifts, Hibel’s narrative approach

entails underscoring the client’s purposeful and overt commitment to a sense of
agency. By highlighting alternative outcomes in the client’s story, Hibel helped
his client to re-author the narrative of her own life, doing it for the right reasons.
Hibel said, “She knew that, but she didn’t know it verbally until we were able to
kind of take it apart.”
Flemons also commented on another distinction between the two approaches:

In both cases, [we were addressing the issue of] agency in these women’s situa-
tions, . . . [ensuring] that the relationship with significant others was taken care of in
some way—in your case, through separation and divorce; in my case, through making
it possible for her parents not to be pushy in their efforts to help.

When asked about his view of context, Flemons underscored the importance
of thinking in terms of pattern; to facilitate such an understanding, he introduced

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 49

the metaphor of a melody. “Think in terms of a melody: . . . each note within the

melody is contextualized by the melody [as a whole], . . . [and yet each note] is also
contributing to the context, so, it is, in a sense, contextualizing itself.” For Flemons,
Hibel’s client altered the context by doing something different, by “steering into
the gym . . . instead of ‘here is your hors d’oeuvre, sweetheart’ . . . [Following this
unexpected shift], she starts shifting what her body does, alter[ing] the context
[relationship with her body], which is in part defining her identity.” Flemons is
oriented towards altering the context through what happens within and between
people, and not so much towards challenging the larger cultural context, except in
recognizing the ways racism, sexism, and other forms of othering influence choices,
expectancies, and other experiences of identity.
Hibel’s way of inviting a re-authoring conversation is through opening the space
for the client to fill in the gaps of alternative stories that are being co-constructed.
By doing so, he is helping the client to shift the image that she has of herself for
an image that better suits the new story that is unfolding. Hibel orients his client
to assert her preferred identity by eliciting a conversation that connects the client
to what she values, to what has been meaningful to her.

So [recently] we had this conversation, and all of a sudden, she stops, and I said, “What’s
going on?” and she said, “I just had a picture of myself in my 20s.” . . . This was when
she was a professional before . . . and she said, . . . “I’m wearing a business suit and
good shoes.” So we talked about that image and what that image means to her, but
it’s an image that’s very much in contrast to the woman standing with the tray. And,
so we had an extensive conversation about that. That was connected to then, where
she sees herself going. Having reclaimed that [identity], where would she like to go?

For Flemons, inspired by Taoist thinking, inviting change is about juxtaposing

without creating opposition. The client does not need to strive to make a choice;
she only needs to be able to hold different possibilities, identities, at the same time
and be curious about what “bubbles up” from them. Allowing his imagination to
flow, Flemons commented on how he would have probably played with the image
of the woman and the tray.

I might find myself saying, “Go ahead and take that [college] diploma that you [earned]
and why not use it as an absorbing serviette underneath the drinks and the hors d’oeuvres
on the tray? So you, when you look down at the drinks and the hors d’oeuvres that
you are going to be offering, the diploma is there helping to absorb any spills, and
as you do that, let’s discover what happens.” Or “Why don’t you take [your] framed
diploma [off the wall and] . . . use [the whole thing] as a tray . . . cause the glass is a
nice surface, . . . flat and strong. And so . . . use that diploma in a frame [as a serving
tray] and put each of the items—your husband’s drinks, . . . [his] food—and I don’t
know if it will be your right hand or your left hand that will be holding [the framed
diploma as a serving tray,] but if you bring it forward into offering to him [food and
beverages], and you are able to look at him, and look at the frame, and look at your
certificate there underneath [the food and the drink], I wonder what you found just

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 50 Castro

happened.” So there is a juxtaposition of the different identities right there, and then I
would be curious to [discover] what bubbles up as a result of the juxtaposition.

For many narrative therapists, externalization is of primary importance in their

therapeutic work. Although he is a narrative practitioner, Hibel does not consider
or use externalization as a main practice; however, he believes that externalization
can be considered useful for putting into perspective and challenging negative
identity conclusions. For Flemons, this is one of the main distinctions between his
work and that of narrative therapists:

Some narrative people . . . would [use] . . . externalization as a way of creating agen-

cy. . . . I wouldn’t go there because of my concerns of how that could end up [inadver-
tently creating] a substantial reified Other that then requires you to stay in relationship
with it on an ongoing basis to protect yourself from it. . . . [This] could end up taking
so much energy. . . . I’m more interested in finding a way [to invite change that doesn’t
require clients to] protect [themselves] from a power[ful, reified opponent.] . . . [I
would rather they] forget that [the problem] is even relevant.

Hibel commented that although some narrative therapists might characterize ex-
ternalization with metaphors of opposition, others, approaching externalization more
generally as a means of altering relationships between clients and their problems,
use less confrontational metaphors. He mentioned White’s (2007) suggestion that
clients could educate the problem “by asking ‘What would you teach the problem?’
or ‘What would you like the problem to know about you?’” White (2007), like
Flemons, was concerned about “the dualistic, either/or habits of thought . . . in West-
ern culture . . . and its associated hazards” (p. 35), such as totalizing descriptions.
In Table 1, I have distilled from my conversation with Hibel and Flemons some
of the commonalities and differences between narrative and relational brief therapy
in terms of the three main points of this article—identity, agency, and therapeutic
change.

COMMENTARY

When I first approached Hibel and Flemons about this discussion, I thought of
their therapeutic approaches in terms of dichotomies, such as unconscious versus
conscious, behaviors versus meaning, trance logic versus narrative logic, and so
on. As a student trying to figure out my epistemological ground, I had the sense
that I needed to make stark contrasts. During their conversation, however, I real-
ized that although they were idiosyncratically and ideologically distinct from each
other, these approaches share a common relational ground and a deep respect for
different contextual levels, whether these are addressed explicitly or implicitly.
Flemons and Hibel both consider identity relational. For Flemons, the therapeutic
process involves a shift or a reorientation in how clients relate to themselves and

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 Identity, Agency, and Therapeutic Change 51

TABLE 1. Commonalities and Differences in Narrative Therapy and

Relational Brief Therapy
Narrative Therapy Relational Brief Therapy
Identity Dominant discourse constrains our Boundaries configure our identity—
identity. inter- and intra-personally.
Unexamined assumptions restrain us Unexamined assumptions orient us
from living alternative stories, towards making some choices
identities. instead of others. Identity conditions
the choices we make, and the choices
we make contribute to defining
identity.
Identity is re-authored through a Identity changes when clients find
process of inviting clients to reflect themselves thinking, feeling, or act-
on unique outcomes, so they can ing outside their presuppositions of
build new identity descriptions that who they are and/or what they are
challenge the negative identity capable of, thereby altering the
conclusions derived from dominant boundaries defining their sense of
stories that do not fit with their self.
preferred identity.
Agency Clients’ sense of agency is related to Clients’ sense of agency comes out
their ability to influence the problem of their discovery that they are
and to move towards alternative capable of responding resourcefully
stories that fit with their preferred to problematic experiences or cir-
identity. cumstances that previously con-
strained or undermined them.
Therapeutic Therapists invite clients to externalize Therapists invite clients to connect
Change their problem, to make a distinction to their problem (e.g., through
between them and their problem, to curiosity regarding its patterned
elicit conversations about the unfolding) and/or to connect to
problem’s influence on the client and other aspects of their experience,
the client’s influence on the problem. creating a context for the problem to
loosen its hold and to lose
signifcance—to become irrelevant.
Therapists help clients separate Therapists invite expectancy for
themselves from problem-saturated nonvolitional, associational
stories of their lives and move towards change—a shift in one area of expe-
alternative (preferred) ones. rience can occasion a shift in another.

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 52 Castro

their surroundings. He is interested in inviting a shift in their sense of agency, which

leads to different kinds of choices. The process, however, is largely nonvolitional.
The therapist’s intent is not to involve clients in purposefully trying to get rid of
whatever is getting in the way of their experiencing agency; rather, it is to introduce
expectancy about the possibility that clients can actually surprise themselves by
doing something different. For Hibel, the sought-after shift is in terms of clients’
meaning-making process, as reflected in their abilities to make choices that are in
accord with their preferred image of themselves. A narrative therapeutic process
invites or fosters clients’ positioning of themselves or standing up in reference to
the problems or the stories that limit them from becoming who they prefer to be.
Hibel and Flemons attend to a significant amount of detail in their clients’ sto-
ries. Hibel looks for those elements that would highlight clients’ values and unique
outcomes, and fill in the gaps of the alternative story that is being created. His ap-
preciation and special kind of listening for alternative storylines within the client’s
historical context evoke a client’s connection to meaningful moments that would
help scaffold the re-authoring process. Flemons considers this an evocative pro-
cess, similar to what he himself does when he invites clients into trance and offers
possibilities that would lead to a shift in their experience of their problem. In both
of their approaches, the therapist is involved in creating a change in how clients
relate to their experience. With narrative, there is an emphasis on the commitment
to make explicit to clients that they are agents in the change. In relational brief
therapy, the emphasis is on the nonvolitional aspects of change, as the therapist
wants to protect clients from inadvertently creating a dissociative relationship with
their own experience.
Researchers have used statistical analysis of outcome studies to identify common
factors of change across psychotherapeutic models (Duncan, Miller, Wampold, &
Hubble, 2010; Hubble, Duncan, & Miller, 1999), including, more specifically, the
field of family therapy (Sprenkle, Blow, & Dickey, 1999). The conversation be-
tween Hibel and Flemons accomplishes something similar. Two clinicians, steeped
in different therapeutic orientations, used therapeutic stories and mutual curiosity
to find intriguing connections between their ideas and practices. Their unique
idiosyncrasies preserved, they nevertheless found important commonalities in the
ways they conceptualize and respond to clients’ predicaments. They both respect
ecologies of relationships as they help clients find freedom of response and a
heightened sense of agency.

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