Journal December 2025 Release - Flipbook - Page 38
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landscape of dreams and imagination and plan how to make it work in this real
world we lived in, wondering how one might bring the not-yet-imagined, the notyet-said, or conceptualized into being. How could Joanna make her dreams come
true?
We encouraged her to dream the dreams she had been afraid to dream before,
for example, living her life after 42, the age her uncle had suicided, defying her
old SS script that wanted to cut her life short. Every individual experience of
anorexia/bulimia is storied in different ways. I learnt to tease out and identify
common counterstory themes that I had not known about from psychiatric
nursing. I learnt not only to recognize the persona, voice, and modus operandi of
anorexia/bulimia but to encourage Joanna to take her preferred story and build a
counternarrative on it. She wanted more than anything to live without labels, to
live in peace, and to contribute to the world.
Before joining up with David, we had not yet learnt to counter the problem story
effectively. We recognized all the unique outcomes that contradict the dark,
dominant story of her life, but we did not know how to use resistance narratives
and how to build preferred, alternative stories. That was probably where Joanna
and I fell short in our initial conversations. It felt as if we were teasing a tiger that
played with us until it turned on us, and Joanna repeatedly ended up in the
hospital with mortal wounds.
Then a lion joined our team. David Epston had no fear of the tiger. Anti-anorexia
proposed radical counterstories. We were no longer trying to make gentle
meaning of Joanna’s attempts at liberty; we contested and wanted to repudiate
the dominant anorexic identity Joanna was living with. We were in a fight for her
life. We realised that if we did not take these radical steps, the anorexic lifestyle
Joanna had been living would prevail and sneak back into her consciousness.
The virtual response team with David taught me to distrust anorexia completely,
while placing all my trust in Johana’s ability to overcome this threat to her life. I
realised that I was not merely “externalizing a problem” but that we were fighting
a duel with SS, and SS wanted her dead. I realised it wasn’t Johanna who stopped
eating, to look for attention, but that she became so battle-worn that it
repeatedly convinced her that death might be her only escape from this torture
that was her life.
An Apprenticeship in Extremis
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, December 2025 Release, p. 5-44.
www.journalnft.com
