In this blog series, I am describing a research-based, scientific Life Skills IQ (LSIQ) Training process that bridges the gap between mental illness and mental health. LSIQ Training consists of four unique steps that are woven into Whole Person Associates’ mental health and wellness reproducible workbooks and card decks. The second of the four cognitive-behavioral steps to raise Life Skills IQ is Focused Storytelling.

In the Collected Works of Carl Jung, editors Fordham, Adler, & Read (2013) quoted the Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist who founded analytical psychology, as saying:

This quote illustrates that many ingrained habits remain hidden in your clients’ unconscious so that they repeat negative, unhealthy cycles of similar events, situations, and emotions. Therefore, therapists must do everything to make the unconscious conscious. In Step 2 of the LSIQ Training process, clients learn how to identify unhealthy patterns through examining critical narratives in their lives. This guided journaling method is called Focused Storytelling. In the LSIQ Training process, clients learn that exploring and understanding the intricate relationship between unconscious personality thinking, feeling, and acting patterns and the habits they produce is a powerful therapeutic strategy for positive, permanent change.     

Making Unconscious Consciousness

Bringing unconscious thoughts into conscious awareness is a process of integrating hidden beliefs, emotions, and patterns so they no longer operate without your knowledge. This is central to Step 2 in the LSIQ Training process – promoting self-awareness, emotional maturity, and breaking repetitive life patterns.

The storytelling process used in the reproducible workbooks is a form of “guided journaling.” This form of journaling uses counselor-generated prompts to help clients process their thoughts and emotions, gain greater self-awareness, and promote psychological growth through written self-reflection. The following is an example from approximately fifteen pages of activities specifically designed around the chapter topic.

Example – My Strengths

All people have both strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to be aware of your strengths so that you can use them to make meaning in your life. People too often focus on their weaknesses and ignore their strengths. When you understand your strengths, you can use them to make meaning in your life by engaging in activities that accentuate them. Write about any strengths, including work skills, spare-time interests, family obligations, community activities, and personality characteristics.

Write about your strength below.

MY STRENGTH	How I Can Use This Strength	How This Strength is a Positive in My Life	How It Adds Meaning to My Life
Example: I enjoy working with older adults.	I may see if the senior center in my neighborhood needs someone to engage in activities with their residents.	I really enjoy giving back to people who have dedicated their lives to raising kids and helping younger people.	Helping others makes my life fulfilling. I feel like I am adding to the greater good of society.

Self-awareness is not self-centeredness, and spirituality is not narcissism. ‘Know thyself’ is not a narcissistic pursuit. ~ Marianne Williamson

With these types of guided journaling activities, clients can tell their narratives by writing about thoughts, feelings, experiences, and observations in a structured format. The guided journaling activities take many forms to access multiple intelligences. Clients are asked to engage in self-reflection and storytelling through such diverse activities as writing, doodling, creating Haiku poems, responding to quotes, and completing sentence starters. 

In Step 2 of the LSIQ Training process, therapists find that the activities provide a private space for clients to identify and explore their healthy and unhealthy thinking, feeling, and acting patterns. Research suggests that this type of guided journaling helps clients reduce stress, conquer anxiety, regulate emotions, identify triggering events, and develop healthy coping mechanisms. Most importantly, it promotes motivated self-reflection and self-awareness, encourages metacognition, supports decision-making, and helps clients process complex experiences. When clients can see patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, they can begin to identify life skill gaps that keep them from living their best lives.  

Focused Storytelling

“Focused storytelling” is an amazing strategy to use in the therapeutic process. Storytelling is the process of writing about and examining narratives that display thinking, feeling, and acting patterns to bring order to life. Storytelling is deeply entrenched in the individual psychological process that promotes identity formation and serves as a core mechanism for making sense of experiences in therapy.

Proponents of narrative psychology suggest that people are innately motivated to organize life events into coherent stories, and from these stories they identify unhealthy life patterns tied to psychological problems. Focused storytelling has complex underlying mechanisms that promote metacognition and help transform negative and often traumatic life experiences into     

This process helps clients begin to change chaotic, stressful, and traumatic experiences into organized, meaningful narratives and stories that improve mental health by reducing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disintegration.

Focused storytelling allows clients to:

• Express problems: Clients can convey life experiences related to their negative thinking, feeling, and acting patterns.   

• Create Distance: Clients can detach themselves from distressing, traumatic, and stressful events.

• Enhance Therapy: Clients can make life events easier to process with a therapist.

• Promote Growth: Clients can reinterpret events and situations to enhance positivity and personal growth.

• Switch Perception: Clients can move from being passive characters in their stories to active creators of future stories.

Using Focused Storytelling

Because it is eclectic in nature, the LSIQ Training approach is effective in many diverse forms of counseling, including individual therapy, group therapy, educational settings, and career coaching. Helping professionals can use reproducible activities in the workbooks to promote healing, reshape beliefs, process emotions, and explore experiences by encouraging direct conversation. Research suggests that focused storytelling activities stimulate cognitive, sensory, emotional, and motor regions of the brain. Therefore, clients can access more than just the language areas of the brain, allowing clients to “emotionalize” their experiences.

Therapists may use storytelling to:

• Guide clients in the process of reviewing their lives to describe traumatic events, with the focus on identifying unhealthy thinking, feeling, and acting patterns.

• Help clients identify life skill gaps that can become the focus of therapy for better mental health.

• Prompt clients to become the sole authors of their future lives.

• Help clients reshape their identity to foster growth and healing.

• Help clients transform how they see themselves and their worlds.

Prepare

To get started, therapists can help their clients by….

• Choosing to reproduce and use the exploratory exercises they believe will assist clients best in the self-discovery process.
• Prompting clients to use storytelling prompts to make sense of their world.
• Helping clients look at the past and see where their thinking, feeling, and acting patterns begin to emerge.
• Using the past to make sense and open new possibilities for the future.
• Informing them that awareness will trigger new behavioral responses when similar situations arise.
• Helping clients construct meaning in their lives from the stories they write about.
• Uncovering thinking patterns that may be triggering negative emotional reactions.
• Deepening understanding of how their thinking, feeling, and acting are connected.
• Promoting insight into healthier ways of behaving.
• Identifying treatment plans for Life Skill IQ Training sessions.
• Providing structure for therapy sessions.

Introduce Focused Storytelling

Therapists should introduce the concept of focused storytelling and guided journaling to clients. This will help to lessen the anxiety related to writing about themselves and their experiences and motivate them to engage fully in the self-discovery process. I usually use something like the following:  

“I am going to ask you to engage in focused storytelling. Writing about yourself and past events that occurred related to our topic will benefit you greatly. Writing is an extremely powerful tool for enhancing self-discovery, learning, transcending unhealthy problems, breaking ineffective life and career habits, and helping to heal from psychological traumas from the past.   From a physical point of view, writing has been shown to reduce stress, lower muscle tension, and lower blood pressure and heart rate levels. Answering questions also leads to group discussions.  Psychologically, writing has been shown to reduce feelings of sadness, reduce depression and general anxiety, and lead to a greater level of life satisfaction and optimism.  Behaviorally, writing has been shown to enhance adjustment in all aspects of life by enhancing social skills, emotional intelligence, and creativity.

Make Sense of Life Patterns

Therapists can help clients make connections between the material and their real lives. Some of the ways to do this include helping clients:

• Make connections between past unhealthy behavior and future healthy behavior.
  • Link the materials to life skills clients can learn for real-life success.
  • Explore thinking, feeling, and acting patterns that repeat.
  • Have clients engage in metacognition (thinking about their own thinking).
  • Look for the reasons why clients keep repeating negative patterns.
  • Identify strategies that you can use to help clients make less reactive choices.
  • Help clients take responsibility for their own thinking, feeling, and acting.
  • Make notes of the life skills clients will need to learn and practice.
  • Probe clients for further information to prompt additional reflection and awareness.
  • Ask clients to evaluate their new understanding of their experiences, behaviors, and choices.

Prepare for the Next Step

For the last part of this step, therapists should note the specific life skills clients need to learn, rewire their brains, and form positive, healthy habits to support. In the next step in the LSIQ Training process, clients learn new life skills and commit to making these new skills part of their identities. Therapists will ensure clients receive the life skills training they require and begin helping clients rewire their neural pathways with new skills.

By Dr. John J. Liptak, Founder, Life Skills IQ Institute

References:

Fordham, M., Adler, G., & Read, H. (Eds.). (2013). The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Jung and Analytical Psychology, Vol. 13, p. 335. Taylor & Francis. The first complete English edition of the works of C.G. Jung.