Ben Yalom on Narrative Therapy, Theater, and Writing with my Father

Ben Yalom: I think I am “an” intellectual heir to my father [Irvin Yalom] to the extent that there are some things that I can do that he has done, and others that I can’t. I could never be my father’s full intellectual heir because I would have 40 or 50 years of reading to catch up on first!

But there are many things that we’ve experienced together, beginning when I was growing up. My parents were further along in their careers, and at that point, there was only one of me because my three siblings were already grown. So, I imagine that their dinner table conversations were a little different from the ones I had with my parents, which were definitely weighted towards their interests. So, almost by osmosis, I probably gathered a lot of knowledge in the humanities. I imagine my siblings did as well, but I think I probably was more exposed in many ways. That’s just in my DNA, or what might pass for my foundational upbringing.

I have done some thinking lately because I’m working on some essays and a book proposal, on what it would mean to sort of take up the mantle of some of my father’s and my mother’s intellectual work and writings. As I say, I don’t think I can ever really be my father’s heir or equal in the sense of having that deep wealth of knowledge about philosophy and therapy and the humanities that went into his writing.

But another very important aspect of his writing that resonates with therapists and students of therapy is that he’s extremely open and honest about himself and his flaws, as well as in the sharing of his ideas. And those are things I very much can do in my writing. In that regard I think I can deliver on his way of being and his way of sharing and his way of teaching.

I’ve certainly reached a place in my life which is quite relevant to the book we just completed, Hour of the Heart. I’ve reached a place in my life where I’m very willing to be quite transparent about most things in my life with my readers and with people who come to ask me for help, I am already finding that this is helpful, much in the way that my father describes in his work. One other aspect that I’m trying to bring into my work, both as a writer and a therapist, is my background in theater.

While that background and foundation does not come from mountains of books that I have not read, I do have something analogous to that in my 25 years in making theater. Particularly in doing types of theater that are deeply engaged in mining the richness of the actors' lives, rather than the psychology of characters that comes from a script written by someone else. My experience in theater centers around working with peoples’ experiences and psychologies and stories, and in understanding how the body can be used along with the connections between the bodies and emotions in storytelling for character development.

This knowledge is quite real and substantive and can be very powerful for a lot of people. It has taken me some time to understand how to use it therapeutically. I’ve been trying to find my way to weaving these things together in a deep and compelling way to help people, and I’m now starting to see real results, which is exciting.  

BY: I founded and led the company for most of its existence. I first went to the Iowa Writers Workshop for graduate school, to write fiction. But when I got out, I learned very quickly that I didn’t like sitting alone in a room writing. And all along I’d had a parallel passion which was doing theater.

But I found that I was not that interested, or satisfied, by the theater I was seeing produced. Even in a pretty interesting and experimental place like San Francisco, much of the mainstream work was very traditional American theater. That is, a script was given, people performed on a stage, and it was almost like in many ways, putting a movie on the stage. That’s a vast oversimplification, but to some extent it’s true.

I became really interested in ideas and concepts that could be expressed in metaphor and movement, and that tackled deep themes. I was much less interested in realism. What I really wanted to explore was “What could be unique about the experience of live theater?” which was completely different from trying to put realism on stage. So, I started exploring and meeting people in theater companies in the Bay area, trying to get them to hire me to direct plays. But I found quite quickly that people were interested in working with me, but nobody was going to hand over the keys of their theater company to let me create my sort of experimental vision. Finally, my mentor came to me and said, “Okay, well, I guess that means it’s time for you to start your own company.” So, I started a company to produce one play at the time, and when it came time to actually put it on stage, I was told I needed to have a company name.

You asked earlier about the name foolsFURY. I dreamt this up as a collision of fool - our absurd and comic human position in the universe - and fury at the injustices we do to one another. I meant only to do one or two plays in order to put my name on the map. Then it became a 20-year endeavor, because we got to do the things that I wanted to do artistically that nobody else was ever going to hire us to do––to raise complex questions and be deeply curious. It was a place of experimentation and research, and ultimately a place where we hosted many other companies and nurtured their creative visions, all working in this sort of space between somebody delivering a script versus the actors and the designers and the directors creating original plays.

What I wanted was people who could do powerful realist scenes but also explode the stage, do everything that was possible to create an experience that one had to be involved with live, and that could mean the type of immersive theater that we’re seeing very strongly now, 25 years later. It might mean acrobatics. It might mean dance. It might mean breaking out of realism into some sort of crazy imagination, stylized work, and then back into realism.

At the time, most of American theater, and definitely most of the mainstream theater that was happening in the Bay Area, as well as what all the major conservatories were teaching, were variations on realist acting and was psychologically driven from the top down. I had to become an expert in things that moved from the outside to enter the bottom up; start with the body, get to the mind as opposed to starting with the mind and getting to the body. So, my expertise is very much in a number of contemporary forms that are bodily-oriented, driven by impulses in the body, or understanding a feeling in the body and how that might come out, or how a certain use of the body might generate an emotion as opposed to the inverse.  

BY: I am trying to bring this “bottom up” orientation into some of my therapeutic work. This means developing ways of getting people to find or explore—if we think about Narrative Therapy—stories of self, not verbally, but through exercises that are more physically oriented. And my feeling is that one of the challenges of traditional talk therapy is that it’s so talk heavy; this works really well for some people, but not for others. The discursive, rational language that we use isn’t the easiest way for some clients to explore themselves, or to express what they find when they do. So, I’m trying to build some tools that go with narrative and existential therapies, but which help people explore and express themselves in a less language-centered way.

BY: I’m not going to disagree, but I’d say it’s more a different angle than an anti-intellectual one. The first thing that comes to mind when I’m asked about my theory of change is that peoples’ living understanding of what is meaningful for them is critical. That might look like identifying their “quest in life” or their search for meaning in the universe, and then living in ways that are more aligned with those meanings or ethics. To me, that’s a very existentialist approach through which I’m saying, “What do you find truly important in your life at a deep level?” This is inherent in my father’s work, but I don’t know that all people can answer that solely through thought and language. I think meaning exists within the framework of all the other existential questions, but I don't think that peoples’ understanding of what is meaningful for them is always easy to articulate verbally. 

BY: I’m doing it based on many, many years of experience with certain theatrical forms. I also have a great network of mentors that I’ve met over the decades that have guided me in explorations or exercises that allow people to go to deeper places within themselves both individually or within a group. Often, they come out with words on the other end, but the theatrical and dramatic and dance work is usually inspired by the internal work they’ve done or are doing.

Over the decades I’ve watched some of the best theater makers and dance makers I know do this kind of deep work, and I’m constantly reminded how powerful their experiences have been. My goal has been to use these highly developed skills and expertise to help therapy clients reach those deeper, meaningful places within themselves, and between themselves and others.   

BY: Right now I'm doing this work in groups. Maybe someday we'll get to a point where I'll bring it into individual sessions.

One person I was working with lived with a great deal of shame. She was a Middle Eastern woman battling the shaming cultural practices that came from being a woman and from her parents. Her constant pattern in life was to hide from her parents and then dig her way out and do the things that her parents then disapproved of. None of them were particularly bad things, but those things didn’t fit the culture.

Sometimes before group sessions, I will do what I call a “mission interview.” This is a format Tom Carlson, Garret Rutz, and I are working on which is basically a very short, intense, Narrative Therapy-based re-authoring exercise, in which I would say something like, “How did you decide that you wanted to become a therapist?” or, “Can you tell me a story about a moment where you made that decision by going down one path?” or, “What were the things you were fighting against in your life that then led you to take up the mantle of fighting against that?” The mission that she developed, should she become a therapist, was to provide a place where people could come to put down their shame and be treated with love, and that she would be the person to greet them with love and offer them a place of safety. So essentially, what I created in that hour for her was the opportunity to think about a story about where she came from, the practices she was up against in her life, what she was doing to combat those practices, and the solution or power or passion that she pursued to fight against those shame-inducing practices.

She understood the mission you jointly articulated for her, at which point I said something like, “We can do this verbally, or we can do it non-verbally where you can get into their body.” She picked, and we continued working together. I offered her some guidance, asking “As you reflect on what you’re really up against in your life, see what that feels like in your body? What is the power, the thing that’s driven you to keep fighting on it against this?” So, we work either way. We identify where they came from, what her big challenges in life are, and hopefully determine what are the strengths and skills or hopes and dreams that she has to fight against this.  

Okay, that’s the conceptual background. Then I’ll get them into their bodies and teach them quickly what it is to make a gesture, because it’s the smallest building block of a dance. That seems to be much easier for people to instead of me saying, “go make a dance,” which can be very intimidating. For example , I can say, “Larry, make three gestures, and then let’s put them together.” You just created a little dance!

So then we’d do an exercise where they really get into a meditative space where they spend about 15 minutes just letting their body move, really articulating it and that becomes a bit of a meditation in its own right. I’ll ask them to follow one part of their body which may have begun as an impulse, and I ask them to start paying attention, trying to let their mind and body work together. At that point, I start to bring in the image of the thing that they’re up against in their life. I’ll ask, “How does that feel when you bring that into your story, into your body? Where does it go?” Usually, they’ll go on a little internal journey that’s physical and emotional.

From there, I’ll ask them to bring in the thing that they use to fight against that or to overcome that which takes the meditation in a different direction. I might ask them to just notice at some point and pull a couple of gestures that come up out of those two sides—the thing they’re up against and how they stand up to it. So here they are building a little vocabulary of movement related to their specific stories

Two more steps! They can then do something that’s called a “container exercise” where I ask them what it feels like if they’re inside a container or something that’s holding them in and feeling what that’s like. At some point I’ll say, “I want you to start finding your way out using your specific strengths and skills. And then go back into the container and force your way out again. Then I might say, “The thing that you identified as your challenge in life is that container...that’s the thing that’s forcing you when you go through that...so, how do you use your skills to get out and what does it feel like to get out?” They do it over and over again, and I ask them what they learned from that experience. (And just to note the lineage here, this is a modification of an exercise I learned from the brilliant teacher Steven Wangh, and which he in turn modified from work with the great Polish theater maker and theoretician Jerzy Grotowski.)

I ask them to focus on any gestures or thoughts or words that came out of that such as poetic or metaphorical words or sounds. Next, I might say, “I want you to start on one side of the room in your ‘up against’ state, or the place where you’re fighting against or being contained, and then to move to the other side of the room using all of these gestures that we’ve created, and while going from there to there, somewhere in the middle, there’s going to be a transition, (which in narrative terms is like an agentive turn) where you shift into taking control of this thing. Sometimes people have to go back and forth—but eventually we help them move through to this side. And so they’re getting a very embodied, experiential sense of this inner journey, This is the bottom-up process!  

BY: One of the things that I saw in Narrative Therapy, at least in the readings, were ideas about ritual ceremonies. Those really caught my attention,. And now, in addition to traditional sessions, I do these experiential exercises in group format that can run six-hours long, and even multiple day intensives.

BY: Strangely, not difficult because my understanding of therapy goes way back to my first exposure through my father’s vision, our dinner table conversations, and later his writings, particularly Love’s Executioner. I read those stories in draft and gave him feedback on those. I did the same on pretty much every book after that so I understood his thinking about therapy and his desire to make a literary form that incorporated therapy, and featured the clinician reflecting on his own thought process and the therapeutic encounter. So, my formation was not only as a therapist but as a writer.   

BY: We had worked together in the past. I had edited a book called The Yalom Reader years ago which was the first big omnibus of his work. In more recent years, I had given very significant feedback on a number of his books.

I did, however, decide that it was just too demanding for both of us to work together until the mountain of stories for Hour of the Heart grew and his memory began to decay. Eventually the manuscript grew to be between 45 or 50 stories, and it was too challenging for him to put them side by side while holding onto the threads that were going on between them.

Some of the stories were sort of repetitive of one another. It’s not because he wasn’t interested in the process or fully invested in each one of those stories, but because he had forgotten what he had written. For example, story 40 may have covered some of the themes already covered in story number 12. At a certain point, we agreed that in order to help him pull it all together, he needed somebody to work with who knew him well enough, knew his way of writing well enough, felt confident enough, and had enough of his confidence to really revise and rewrite. So that’s the work that I undertook.  

BY: That's an excellent Narrative Therapy question. I can only speculate. I think we have a pretty powerful bond and it’s different for all the children. But I am the one who was most engaged in writing. As I went through grad school and after, when I wrote plays and some fiction, I certainly always shared my work with him, and we would discuss it. Likewise, he would share his work with me, and we would discuss that. 

We’re certainly not the same writer, and we have different strengths. I found at some point in my 30’s by the time I had children, that it wasn’t always easy for us to collaborate because he is an anxious, and often impatient, person. And for me, working with an anxious collaborator who would often send me a draft, and then call the very next morning saying , “Do you have the edits yet? was challenging. I would come back with “I have it, I haven't read it yet, I’m trying to get it!” I had three kids to get off to school and whatnot. While we eventually decided not to write together often, we did co-author a column for Inc. magazine for a year, and I’ve edited chapters of many of his books.

But I understood his work well enough to be able to try to write like him in a way, and not to stick things into the stories that sounded out of place. That might have come from my way of thinking but at the same time, we had spoken enough about therapy over the years that I think there was a lot of trust there as well.

It really helped that I had turned the page in my life and decided to pick up the family business and had started my education as a therapist and started seeing clients. So, the questions I was asking were really informed by some experience, as opposed to purely from the writer’s perspective. The other aspect is that I had suffered with depression back in my 20s and 30s, and we had very long talks about that. And similarly, he has had periods of anxiety, and particularly in the years since my mother died. And we had some very long talks about that. So, I think there was a certain amount of trust in one another. And for him, in my psychological acuity and compassion.   

BY: Absolutely it did, and it was really interesting. At the beginning of the book, I would say my father was more concerned about me being interested in doing this, but little by little, he gave me more rope, if you will. I would bring back suggestions that he liked, and he became more and more willing to trust me as a writer. At the same time, I think there was the process of him becoming a little bit less invested in the book, or a little less interested in the book, as time went on because with his clock ticking, and realizing that he doesn’t have that much time left on the planet, there were other things he wanted to be doing and paying attention to.

Those two things allowed him to give me more and more freedom. We also moved from really looking at pages together at the beginning, to more of my doing the work and coming back to him in a Zoom session and saying, “Hey, I’ve got some questions about therapy for you.”

After a certain point, which was quite a bit later, he couldn’t even really remember the individual stories. And sometimes he would reread a story and then we’d talk about it, but often it would be me. I might say, “I’ve written the story. I feel good about it, but I’m not sure about this particular therapeutic dialog in here or this intervention here.” So, I would go back to him and say something like, “Hey, is this something you would say or does this feel right?” I might ask him to imagine he was in this situation with a client, so he didn’t have to remember all the details of the particular interaction in the story.

For instance, if one of the stories was about suicidal ideation, I would ask him how he would address that. It got to a point where what we were having was almost supervision conversations where I was saying, “Does this feel like the right therapeutic move?” and he would say, “Yeah, that that would be good,” or “Here’s a problem with that approach.”  

BY: Yeah, it’s been really powerful. Thank you for asking that. I can’t separate it from my particular stage in life. These things are definitely affecting me as a 56-year-old man with young kids. There’s been a certain awakening on my part to the time that I have left. But I’m not coming from zero because I’ve always been having these existential thoughts, because they were part of the air I breathed as a child where the idea of how we confront death was always a common topic around the table.

So, I think now it has made me look at my life, my kids, and my wife and thinking, yeah, I have X amount of time, and I really want to make the most of it. So that is helping me say “no” to things in a way that I probably didn’t before, and also say “yes” to other things and to other people and their needs, in ways that maybe I didn’t before. I think it has helped me in my mission to be a kinder person. Because we all have frailty.

It’s been difficult watching my father diminish to the extent that he has, not only because he’s my father, and that I think it’s difficult for anyone, but also because there’s this the air of the great man being diminished. Because I’m in the field, and because I’m managing his Facebook page, I’m constantly responding to people about the emotional impact on them of his decline. Everybody wants a little piece of him and wants him to know that they wish him well.

That this book itself deals with the aging question and the memory question means that these were very direct topics of conversation for us. We were often looking specifically at, “What it’s like for you to be having these memories slip away?” And “Sometimes we disagree about something that happened in your past.” But then we can’t just sort of let it go sometimes because it’s actually relevant to the story that we’re writing, so we had to stay with those things that were uncomfortable, linger over them together, and decide how to address them, both in life, and in our writing.   

BY: I took on the mission of making this an accessible book to a broad range of readers. I think many of his central therapeutic ideas are laid out well enough that one could pick this up as their first book during training. My guess, however, and given that most people who are beginning their journeys as therapists are much younger, is that some of the questions about aging which do make up a lot of this book, are probably not as relevant. I think picking up the Gift of Therapy or one of the books of stories is probably a better place to start. But I don’t think you would go wrong if you began with this one.

BY: Thanks Larry. I enjoyed it as well.