Late afternoon on a Vermont hillside, somewhere in the middle of summer. The valley below is the particular green it only gets this time of year. And the mind, given the space that view creates, goes directly to what's wrong.
This is not a character flaw. It is closer to a design feature.
The human brain pays closer attention to negative information than to positive — a bias shaped over hundreds of thousands of years by the need to detect threat. The problem is that this same bias follows us into the stories we tell about ourselves. We string together the setbacks, the failures, the difficult stretches, look back at the sequence, and say that's who I am. The story feels true because every event in it actually happened. What makes it incomplete is not what's included. It's what's missing.
Most people, sitting with this honestly, find that the account they've been carrying leaves out a significant portion of what was also true. The setback at work was real — and so was the relationship that held through it, the thing quietly gotten better at, the moment with someone that mattered. Not to cancel out the difficult events. Just to see the fuller picture of what was actually there.
This is what narrative therapy calls re-authoring: not the replacement of a true story with a false one, but the recovery of a more accurate and complete account of a life.
One of the questions narrative therapy keeps returning to is who wrote the story in the first place. Because not all of the stories we carry were assembled by us. Some were written by other people — by families, by institutions, by the particular circumstances we were born into, by the assessments of those who decided early what kind of person we were. These judgments have a way of becoming internalized, of passing from someone else's observation into our own autobiography so gradually that we stop noticing they were ever external.
Narrative therapy creates space to ask: is this actually my story, or is it one I inherited and never questioned? And if it was handed to me — do I want to keep it?
The forest is still there. It always was. Most of us have just been looking at a handful of trees.
I work with adults throughout Vermont via telehealth — in Burlington, Montpelier, Stowe, Woodstock, Brattleboro, Shelburne, and beyond. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at verdantcounseling@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist providing narrative therapy and other approaches via telehealth in Vermont and several other states.