Living in stories:

Embodiment in therapy through liturgical practice

by Chad Loftis

Chad Loftis has been working as a therapist for almost ten years. Much of that time was spent
as a school counsellor in Melbourne’s west. Most recently, Chad, his wife, and four children
have been living in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, where he serves as a therapist and trainer
at The Well International. Chad works with expats, volunteers, and missionary workers from
all over Asia and is passionate about hope. He can be reached at chad@thewellcm.com; in
Thailand: 222/11 Baan Tanfah M12, T. Nongkwai, Hangdong, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 50230;
and in Australia: 75 Lonsdale Cct., Hoppers Crossing, VIC, Australia, 3029.

Abstract
Since its inception, narrative therapy has not only been interested in meaning-making with
language, but also with other cultural forms including ritual and ceremony. Drawing on this
tradition, along with the work of thinkers outside the field, combined with a religious lexicon and
several years of experience with ‘liturgical practice’, this article outlines not only the healing
potential of therapeutic ceremony but also its political significance. From mock lawsuits to
funeral-like mourning ceremonies for Joy and Freedom, this article outlines possibilities,
hazards, and essential elements of ‘liturgical practices’, as well as potential categories of
ceremony in keeping with common cultural practices, and examples of practice.

Key words: narrative therapy, ritual, rites of passage, ceremony, embodiment, liturgy
in therapy, myth in therapy

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Brown v. Bullying
Some time ago, during my work as a school counsellor, I had
the pleasure of meeting Jason Brown – a bright, creative,
and playful Year Five student. Jason had attracted diagnoses
of ADD and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asperger’s) and
was not doing well in school. His distractibility had left him
far behind in his schoolwork and frequently at odds with his
teachers. More pressingly, he was constantly coming to verbal
and literal blows with his classmates. Jason maintained he
was being bullied but many of his teachers felt he ‘brought
it on himself’ through relentlessly ‘irritating’ behaviour and
a failure to ‘fit into school life’. He and his family had only
recently returned from Ethiopia, where they had been doing
volunteer work for several years, and Jason’s mother felt he
was still grieving the loss of their life there. For her part, she
was grieving this herself, and was becoming increasingly
frustrated with the school for its lack of support.
After getting to know each other a little, Jason and I began
by externalising and personifying Bullying (see White,
2007). Then we traced – with the help of his mother and
her scrapbooks – some of the aspects of his character that
Bullying had been hiding from everyone at school. I was
especially interested in getting to know people in Ethiopia
who were well aware of the caring, bright, hard-working Jason
that was emerging. At this point, we were in the territory of re-
authoring through re-membering conversations, which I used
in the hopes of making identity positions available that were
normally unknown at school.
When we returned to Bullying, I had some initial difficulty
engaging Jason in externalising conversations. Eventually,
though, using drawings as a form of expression, we came
to understand the sorts of things this villain had been up
to in Year Five – how it had Jason’s classmates treating
him and the sorts of tricks it pulled on Jason himself.
Bullying, I learned, had got Jason acting in ways that invited
it into the yard. Jason drew some incredibly expressive
pictures illustrating things like ‘not knowing when to stop’ or
‘misunderstanding the rules’ (see Appendix 1). In this way, he
was able to continue declining blame for Bullying and take up
a more limited responsibility. We also invited two boys who
had persisted as Jason’s friends to join us in our sessions
and further expand our knowledge about Bullying. In these
interviews, by asking unique outcome questions (White, 2007,
pp. 219–261), I learned even more about Jason’s hidden
acts of care and consideration, in this case for his friends and
classmates, even in the face of Bullying’s tricks.
One day, Jason came in with his mother and was furious
because a teacher had kept him back to finish work during
recess once again. ‘It’s wrong and I want to sue him!’, Jason
exclaimed. While taking teachers to court for routine (even if
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unfair) applications of recess detention wasn’t something
I wanted to encourage, Jason’s unusual burst of passion
did give me an idea. ‘What if we sued Bullying instead?’,
I asked. ‘You’ve already done several drawings we could use
as evidence – and you could make more. Your Mum has been
saving all your awards and trophies, and I’m sure some of
the boys who’ve joined us over the last few sessions would
stand as witnesses.’ Jason was thrilled by the idea and set
about immediately creating two more drawings that would
illustrate his abilities in learning new skills and never quitting
(see Appendix 1). We spent a few more sessions planning
our court case: I would act as counsel, one of my stuffed toys
was chosen to stand in for Bullying, and Jason’s mother and
friends were all coached as legal witnesses on the matter of
Jason’s kind, hard-working, never-quitting character. Jason
also thought that Mrs. Welch, the head of Year Five, would
be a good choice to act as judge. The conference room was
booked and a court date set.
As plaintiff’s counsel, I appeared that day in my finest
clothes and made the opening arguments by outlining, using
Jason’s words and drawings displayed on a screen, the
tactics Bullying had used against Jason and others in Year
Five. Jason himself testified first, confirming and expanding
on the summary I had given. Then I called his mother as a
witness and questioned her about the trophies, ribbons, and
certificates she had brought as evidence that Jason was in
fact capable of working hard to achieve any number of things,
despite what Bullying had spread around about him. Jason’s
friends briefly testified, to verify Jason’s testimony and share
stories about his care and selfless kindness towards them
(for instance, leaving the football game at lunch to take one of
them to the nurse and then staying until he felt okay). Finally,
Bullying was given a chance to defend itself and, when it had
nothing to say, judgement was passed. Mrs Welch, reading
from a script I had given her (see Appendix 2) and looking
and sounding very much the part in her black robes, decided
in favour of the plaintiff and decreed that Bullying would now
be required to subject itself to constant monitoring by the
students, parents, and teachers there present.
Having won the case, we celebrated with some non-alcoholic
champagne and M&Ms – chocolate being one of Jason’s
favourite foods (I had thoughtlessly forgotten, however,
that Jason was on a no-food-colouring diet and wouldn’t be
allowed to eat any!). Everything was captured on video and
given to Jason’s family – particularly for his Dad and brother
to watch.
The effect of all this was quite dramatic. Jason was far less
susceptible to Bullying’s tricks and had a different sense of
himself in the yard. He rediscovered his concentrating skills
during class and had to spend less time inside finishing work
during recess. This improved not only his relationship with
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his teachers, but also his mother’s – she had more faith
that another side of her son had been officially recognised.
Jason even started sticking to the diet his paediatrician had
put him on!
Performing new selves
It was not an accident that Jason’s comment about ‘wanting
to sue’ led to this elaborate performance. Several important
influences in my life had already made me available to the
use of ceremony and ritual in therapy – part of what I have
begun to call, borrowing from James K. A. Smith (2009),
‘liturgical practice’. First, I have been an active Christian in
the Protestant church since I was a child. The denomination
I was raised in was not as ‘liturgical’ (focused on ritual,
objects of worship, and seasons of the year) as other
Christian traditions, but ritual, rite, and ceremony were still
an important part of every week and the looseness with
which our denomination viewed convention allowed us to
be inventive about the ceremonial forms we used. Food,
drink, music, light, immersion in water, art, and clothing were
all elements we could combine or alter to engage with our
spirituality and invoke what Turner calls ‘communitas’ – a
spirit of connectedness or oneness in diversity (see Barreto,
Grandesso, Denborough, & White, 2010, p. 38). Joseph
Campbell has said, ‘A ritual is the enactment of a myth.
By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth’
(Campbell & Moyers, 1988). For millennia, religious ritual and
ceremony has allowed communities to enact or, as Smith
(2013) says, live into the narrative myths of their history and
their communal identity – to move through the changes of life
and to connect with each other and even other communities
around the globe.
At present, in my work as a therapist for mission and aid
workers in Asia, I regularly meet people from religious
communities all over the world and liturgical practices can,
at times, have a particular familiarity and resonance for them.
Second, around the time of Brown v. Bullying, my work
was beginning to be heavily influenced by Michael White
and David Epston’s narrative approach to therapy. Along
with externalisation and techniques for drawing people’s
experience of life into ‘double stories’, White and Epston had
been greatly expanding on the commitment in some family
therapies to ‘enactment’. Salvador Minuchin has said:
Rather than simply talking about or describing
situations and problems that occur at home or
elsewhere outside of the therapy room, we would
invite families to display the patterns there and then …
Through enactment, the therapist has the chance to
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witness behaviours and the emotions associated
with them. The therapist sees people sweat and
move, and therapy takes place not only in the realm
of language but experience. My engagement with
enactment derived directly from my theatrical interest
and a belief that the staging of events organises
meaning. (Minuchin in Denborough, 2001, p. 18,
emphasis added)
Unlike Minuchin, though, White and Epston saw enactment
as an opportunity to organise meaning around preferred
identities in the sight of the family or community of the
person(s) who had come for therapy. Their approach
owes much to Barbara Myerhoff’s beautiful description of
‘definitional ceremonies’ which, she said, ‘are likely to develop
when, within a group, there is a crisis of invisibility and
disdain by a more powerful outside society’ (1986, p. 266).
Myerhoff proposes that definitional ceremonies ‘deal with the
problems of invisibility and marginality; they are strategies
that provide opportunities for being seen and in one’s own
terms, garnering witnesses to one’s worth, vitality, and being’,
and that they are performances ‘marked by the enunciation
of the participants’ collective symbols’ (1986, pp. 267–268) –
enactments of identity that draw upon the performers’ cultural
building blocks: myths, rituals, and artefacts. White and
Epston brought this folk-psychological invention into therapy
in the form of certificate ceremonies or celebrations (such as
‘mother appreciation parties’ Epston, 2008, p. 44), and then
perhaps most significantly, in the form of ‘outsider-witness
ceremonies’ which include a partially ritualised procedure to
aid therapists in arranging for the people consulting them to
perform preferred identities before a reflective audience (see
White, 2007, pp. 165–219). I became very interested in how
the principles that informed these initiatives – performance of
preferred identity before an audience using cultural symbols
in order to mount resistance to marginalisation – could
be brought into other forms of ritual or ceremony that, like
religious rites, allowed people to participate in various larger
cultural narratives or myths.
It was clear to me that Jason and his family had been
(unintentionally) relegated to the margins of their community –
that the stories of their identities were becoming increasingly
‘thin’ and singular. Externalising Bullying had already provided
us a context in which to begin deconstructing and correcting
the imbalance of these thin assumptions, and I felt that a
performance of those aspects of Jason that had become
invisible would be important to strengthen their comeback.
I also hoped a performance of this type would allow Jason,
his mother, and his friends to lodge an appropriate objection
to their marginalisation and to open up space in their
immediate community for different action. The cultural ‘myth’
of the courtroom seemed to be one that resonated for Jason
and the sense of the injustice he felt was being done to
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him. At the same time that they were bearing witness to his
preferred self, our enactment of a lawsuit against Bullying
allowed Jason, his mother, friends, and year level head to
join in this mythos of justice, its criticism of the status quo,
and the new possibilities it provided. In this respect, liturgical
practice, by bodily or aesthetically engaging people in
counter-narratives, seeks both to ‘criticise’ the dominant
culture and ‘energise’ it, as discussed below.
Criticism and energising
In his work on the Biblical prophets, theologian Walter
Brueggeman, proposes ‘criticising’ and ‘energising’ as the
dual roles of the contemporary ‘prophet’:
I suggest that the dominant culture, now and in every
time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and
fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to
stop it. Conversely, the dominant culture is a wearied
culture, nearly unable to be seriously energised by
new promises … The task of prophetic ministry is to
hold together criticism and energising … (2001, p. 4)
The idea of both criticising and energising the ‘dominant
culture’ is one that has resonated strongly for me as a
therapist and especially as I help people to shape rituals
and ceremonies.
Brueggeman suggests that any dominant culture becomes
‘triumphal’ – develops and promotes the illusion that
‘everything is already given, contained, and possessed’
(2001. p. 14). This is the foundation of oppression and
exploitation – it must marginalise and discredit anyone
that poses a challenge to this equilibrium and impose, if it
can, order. Criticism can take many forms, but it will always
constitute a break from this order or social docility and, in so
doing, expose the ‘mythic claims of the empire’ that ‘appeals
to sanctions that do not in fact exist’ (Brueggemann, 2001,
p. 5).
On the other hand, energising, which Brueggemann argues
ought to follow criticism, is ‘to bring to expression new realities
against the more visible ones of the old order. Energising is
closely linked to hope’ (2001, p. 14). To me, this is not unlike
uncovering the ‘subordinate storylines’ of people’s lives (see,
for example, White, 2006; Yuen, 2007). Importantly, this
alternative ‘reality’ is not mere ‘railing and polemicising’ or
complaining, but is, in Brueggemann’s religious language,
‘doxology’ – a stepping into hope and claiming it as one’s own
(Brueggemann, 2001, p. 16). Liturgical practice is one way
we can assist people to create personal doxologies in which
they are no longer wistfully hopeful of a better future, but
experience this hope as active in their lives and possible to
realise relationally.
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Brown v. Bullying performed both of these functions. The
metaphor it appealed to or enacted was both one of criticism
– it sought justice within a system that was numb to its own
totalising judgements of Jason and others, and energising
– by ‘officially’ reinstating Jason’s kindness, hard work, and
ability to make changes in his own life, the court case didn’t
merely speak of but performed new promise and possibility.
Jason was able afterward to step into a new role within his
class. This wasn’t the end of his relationship with Bullying –
his problems were not ‘solved’ and Bullying continued to, as
he said, ‘put pressure on him’ after this. But it was significantly
energising of his abilities and those of his family, classmates,
and teacher to ‘live into’ another, more promising narrative
about Jason’s school life.
‘Living into stories’
James K.A. Smith has proposed that our actions in the
world are not, in the first instance, shaped by intellectual
propositions as much as by what he calls (following Taylor)
the ‘social imaginary’ in which we are immersed: ‘A social
imaginary is not how we think about the world but how we
imagine the world before we ever think about it’ (2009, p. 66).
It is social on two counts:
On the one hand, it is a social phenomenon received
from and shared with others; on the other hand it is a
vision of and for social life – a vision of what counts
as human flourishing, what counts as meaningful
relationships, what counts as ‘good’ families, and so
forth. (2009, p. 66).
Crucially, although this imaginary frequently operates non-
consciously, it is intentional. It has what Smith calls ‘telos’
– a vision and schema for the world – and it is formative
of our desires toward this vision (2009. p. 25, 54). Much of
our action, then, can be said to be intentional even though
it is done ‘without thinking’. Just as crucially, it is inherently
aesthetic and, therefore, connected with the body and its
senses. Smith argues that our bodies accrue a kind of
‘knowing’ that cannot be expressed in logical or propositional
terms but that is formed by and expressed in narrative:
‘We live into the stories we’ve absorbed; we become
characters in the drama that has captivated us’
(Smith, 2013, “Perceiving (by) stories” para. 1).
This year, now three years since the famous case of Brown
v. Bullying, I have had the great pleasure of resuming my
friendship with Jason and his parents. Jason had again been
experiencing significant trouble at school – this time at the
hands of ‘Anxiety’, which he liked to jokingly call ‘Fred’, and
its lieutenants, ‘De-motivation’ and ‘Sleep’. Fred had locked
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Jason into a ‘pattern’ of staying up most of the night, of
sleeping through four out of five days of school a week and
of completely ignoring his homework. His school had taken
pains to relieve from him as much academic pressure as
they could. Jason’s parents had also tried everything
they could think of to restore Jason’s confidence and lost
motivation to him. But these generous efforts seemed all
but useless against Fred. The only thing apparently out of
Fred’s reach was Jason’s work at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
He loved his job, never missed a shift, and undertook
every task, however ignoble, with gusto.
Jason described for me some of the skills and techniques
that had helped him keep his motivation going at work
– ‘looking at the positives’, ‘being methodical’, ‘staying
organised’, ‘persevering’, ‘analysing his mistakes’ – and
I began to get the impression he relished the opportunity
to challenge himself at work. We explored for some time
these themes, along with the many reasons he was wanting
to ‘Get his life back on track’ and resume his schooling.
I began more and more to imagine to myself that Jason
was at the beginning of a challenging journey or trial and
that some coveted treasure lay at the end of it. I introduced
Jason to the metaphor of the Trial or Quest and asked if
the challenge he had been facing to return to school against
the efforts of Anxiety and its minions was like a test of his
strength and perseverance or perhaps a difficult journey.
He connected with this idea but was curious to know more
about what such a trial might look like.
I told him a story from my university days about a competition
in which I had to stand outdoors for some sixty-three hours
without sleep, my hand on the roof of a small hatchback –
all for the sake of owning my first car. I narrated the ups and
downs of this trial, the emotional peaks and valleys and the
physical challenges of exhaustion, cold, and muscle cramps.
I told him about the vital role played by a small team of my
close friends who determined to be my cheerleaders and
make sure I never got lonely, never lost heart, and never fell
asleep! Jason listened to this story with rapt attention and
then I asked him if he thought his own coming trial might have
anything in common with my experience. He thought it might
and heartily agreed that he would like to undertake a quest of
his own. We were taking the first steps into another cultural
narrative that I hoped would be as ‘captivating’ for Jason as
the one he had already been living into.
According to Smith (2013), however, the narratives we live
into are not merely ‘told’ – they are experienced in art, in
discourses about life and society and, most importantly for our
purposes, in ritual and ceremony. Using religious language
to name something inherent to all culture, Smith calls these
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experienced narratives ‘cultural liturgies’: ‘liturgies are
compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination
through the body … we are immersed in rituals that shape
us and determine, unconsciously, what we value,’ (2013,
“Imagining the Kingdom” para. 6, “Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’”
para. 2, emphasis added).
Since its inception, narrative therapy has been vitally
concerned with cultural narratives and their discourses
and the effects of these on individuals and communities –
especially the ways in which these contribute to psychological
suffering or its amelioration (for example, see White, 1991).
But Smith draws our attention to the way in which these
narratives are written into our bodies. His ideas (following
Taylor, Bordieu, Merleau-Ponty and others) make it possible
to consider and become more aware of the narratives
we and our clients are immersed in through ritual and how
we might participate in ‘counter-liturgies’ that allow us to
be formed in preferred ways (2009, p. 85).
I told Jason that the trial of ‘Getting his life back on track’
could involve finding out about the trials of others, what they
encountered, and how they dealt with setbacks, a ritual of
‘setting out’, recruiting people that knew he was capable of
making it through such a trial to support him along the way,
and a ceremony of ‘returning’ which might take the form of a
celebration. All of this interested him. To address the first, we
invited Jason’s Dad to join us one afternoon. I interviewed
him about the experience of getting through teacher’s college
with no money and a recent failure at another university
on his mind and we learned about some of his methods of
overcoming extreme discouragement, uncertainty, and all
kinds of practical setbacks (like being asked to move out of
his house at a moment’s notice!). Jason and his family also
sat down to watch the movie Apollo 13, about astronauts
who have to endure a harrowing trial. They kept an eye out
for what obstacles were faced and the methods used to
overcome them.
All this was forming the beginning of a counter-liturgy –
we were aesthetically connecting with this new narrative.
Much of this work was significantly influenced by Michael
White’s (1997a) use of rites of passage metaphors and Ben
Knowles’ narrative bushwalking therapy which expands on
these ideas by having young people undertake a literal ‘trial’
or ‘rite of passage’ first and then exploring ways this might
connect with their daily lives (2013). By engaging with the
stories of others, Jason and I weren’t searching for practical
advice as much as for models of the narrative he would be
‘living into’ as protagonist.
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Preparing for liturgical practice
All of these initiatives were important preparatory steps to a
ceremony or ritual we planned to undertake. Externalisation,
re-authoring, and re-membering practices (see White, 2007)
as well as therapeutic documents of various kinds have all
been significant linguistic techniques that have formed the
foundation of liturgical practices for me. It has also been
important to continually attend to the power I hold as a
therapist which can cause liturgies to gravitate towards my
professional or religiously-informed meanings and symbols,
rather than those of my client. Preparing for liturgical practices
that are experience-near for the people at their centre
requires a collaborative stance (see White, 1997b) and a
commitment to not only the words of the client but also their
preferred symbols, rites, and timing.
Although Jason had already expressed an interest in
creating some ceremonies to mark his journey, I re-confirmed
whether he was still interested in this each time we discussed
it. Eventually, he decided that a ‘setting out’ or ‘launch’
ceremony wasn’t necessary since he had already begun
‘Getting his life back on track’ and had had the benefit of a
faith conference through his church to mark this beginning.
He was, however, very excited about the idea of a celebration
ritual and insisted that it must include food – preferably
from a restaurant. Wall and Ferguson insist that creating an
‘exclusive place’ for ritual practices is critical (1998, p. 7).
Note that familiar or personally significant locations are not
excluded here – in fact, they are often preferred. Rather,
even these common places should be ‘hallowed’ in some
way before a ceremony is undertaken. Cleaning, decorating,
changing the lighting, or rearranging furniture can all be
ways to make a familiar place ‘exclusive’.
I asked Jason what other elements would be important for
him to include in the ceremony and offered a few suggestions
to scaffold his thinking. Having significant people take part
was important – particularly his family and any friends that
might help him along the way. ‘I think I’ll wait and see who
supports me and then invite them to say thank you’, Jason
said. Setting aside ‘exclusive time’ for such rituals is also
important (Wall & Ferguson, 1998, p. 7). This might involve
deciding on specific indicators that the timing is right to
initiate the ceremony. I asked Jason, ‘When do you think it
would be appropriate to celebrate – what would have had to
happen?’ His initial answers were subjective – for example,
‘When my motivation has about 80% returned’. But further
questions helped this become more concrete: he wanted to
have taken all his exams, to be consistently attending school
four days a week, to be doing some homework (any amount),
and to be going to the gym regularly (at least once a week).
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While I took care not to impose my own views about fitting
indicators, whenever Jason was stuck, I made tentative
suggestions to scaffold him toward forming his own opinions
(‘Would you want to have finished the term, maybe?’),
or asked clarifying questions if I suspected the goal was too
easy or unrealistically difficult (‘That seems really hard!
Do you think you will achieve that this year/in the next
few months?’).
I also asked Jason what he might do if he was making
progress but experienced a setback. This question usually
requires time and help to answer well, but it is crucial to
introduce the concept that setbacks are inherent to all
journeys. It also helps preclude immediate failure (see White
on migrations of identity, 1995, p. 100). Further, I am not
interested in ceremonies like this one becoming rewards or
‘carrots’ to motivate people. This can quickly place me in
a ‘parental’ relationship with my client in which the journey
before them is somehow for my sake or on my authority.
My intention, rather, is that these liturgies provide hope that
the trial will not go on forever and remind the people at the
centre of the ceremony that they have already decided to
take these steps on their own terms. Maintaining clarity
about this can be as simple as taking care with language
(for instance, asking questions like ‘when do you think it
would be appropriate to celebrate?’ instead of ‘when would
you deserve to have a party?’ which implies reward) or
speaking separately with people about rewarding themselves
in small ways as they go (if that is important for them).
At other times, it has been necessary to make these
intentions explicit and discuss whether the form of
ceremony or ritual we are developing fits with them.
As of this writing, Jason had reached most of the markers
he set for himself – he returned to school four days a week,
completed his exams, and went to the gym once or twice in
the last few weeks. He had also experienced some significant
setbacks and our ‘returning’ dinner hasn’t yet been planned.
When the time comes, there will be several logistical details
to organise and a few specifics about who will attend, who
will speak, what they will say and what, if any, gifts will be
given. These details require the same vigilance as larger
decisions. If, as Smith suggests, cultural liturgies are ‘rituals
of ultimate concern … that are formative for identity … in a
way that means to trump other [competing] ritual formations’
(2009, p. 86), then we are obliged to take care that the people
consulting us are at least informed about what will unfold
in a ceremony and have veto power. Ideally, we will assist
them to identify symbols or rituals that will be resonant
for them. We should also be fastidious afterward about
investigating what effects these have and whether or
not these effects are welcome.
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Some key elements of therapeutic
ceremonies and rituals
So far, I have tried to identify some of the ideas that inform
my use of liturgical practices and the key elements that I hope
to include in any ritual or ceremony. In summary, liturgical
practices will:
• in relation to the person(s), allow the performance of
preferred identity (definitional ceremony)
• in relation to the culture surrounding the person(s),
‘criticise and energise’
• take place in an exclusive or hallowed time and place
• include an audience (present or implied)
• e
 mploy experience-near symbols/rites developed in
collaboration with the person(s)
• enact resonant counter-narratives.
Types of rituals
There are potentially endless possibilities for the therapeutic
forms these elements might inhabit. However, since my
interest is in liturgical practice that ‘enunciates collective
symbols’, I have identified four broad categories that align
with rites seen regularly in most cultures:
• objection / protest
• mourning
• induction
• celebration and commemoration.
Just to note: in none of the examples presented here have
liturgical practices constituted a ‘cure’ or end to my clients’
troubles. But they have, in each case, represented significant
turning points or consummations of our work.
Objection/protest : Word-burning
Liturgies of objection seek to express outrage about or
resistance to the status quo. In many ways, expressing
objection is an aim for all of the ceremonies outlined in this
paper, but this category specifically describes those that draw
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on the rites, symbols, and metaphors of protest or justice.
Like the protest march of the Jewish senior citizens in
Venice Beach (see Myerhoff, 1986) and Brown v. Bullying,
these liturgies criticise first and then energise as a result of
the experience of agency that arises from doing this.
The word-burning ceremony that Liz and I undertook
together is one example.
Liz told me that she was suffering from debilitating anxiety
– it had already forced her to leave Indonesia, the place
where she served as a cross-cultural mission worker on
several occasions, because of her terror about her health and
nervousness about local medical practices. This anxiety was
vigorously sponsored by what we came to call ‘The Voice’.
The Voice was highly critical of Liz and took advantage of
her intentions to do everything she undertook well. It was
intimately familiar with prevalent Western discourses that
sustain and inform what is often called ‘neo-liberalism’ –
an individualist, market-based vision of society in which
exemplary people ‘rise to the top’ and, fuelled by willpower
and personal inspiration alone, achieve notoriety and
happiness (see Sugarman, 2015). One common outcome of
such a vision is what is known – unkindly – as ‘perfectionism’.
The Voice was also familiar with a related Western Christian
narrative, the ‘all-suffering missionary woman’. In this
narrative, unmarried women from comfortable Western
nations dedicate their lives to the service of the poor in
far-flung rural areas or city slums and are able to continue
undaunted in their work, despite every kind of hardship or
setback. The Voice loved nothing more than to point up Liz’s
failures to attain such potent visions of life, as well as the
disdain in which her teammates or Indonesian friends must
have held her for her ‘weakness’.
Liz had been ‘living into’ a heroic story that was isolating,
unsympathetic toward its version of weakness, and supportive
of The Voice. Re-membering practices (White, 2007) about
significant people in her life were extremely helpful in my
conversations with Liz as I attempted to undermine her sense
of isolation and shame. These conversations were also
significantly counter-balancing of The Voice’s accusations and
threats. However, a problem arose when I became aware that
my own immersion in narratives of success and perfection
rendered me very vulnerable to The Voice’s strategies of
denigration and anxiety: The Voice had criticised Liz for
entering therapy in the first place, and I became extremely
anxious that I would be unequal to the task of assisting Liz
against it. (see White, 1997b, pp. 196–197 for a discussion of
discourses of control for therapists)
I informed Liz that The Voice was influencing me also and that
it seemed to want to ruin our work together. I made a number
of proposals for ways we might exclude The Voice from
participating in our conversations and then proposed a simple
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ceremony of protest against its actions in Liz’s life as well as
my own and our work together. To prepare for the ceremony,
Liz and I spent about twenty minutes in silence writing The
Voice’s claims on small pieces of paper. I wrote statements
such as, ‘You’re a terrible therapist!’ or ‘She’ll stop coming
if you can’t fix this problem!’. Liz wrote many more than me,
with assertions like, ‘You’re weak!’ and ‘Everyone thinks you
can’t hack it,’ or ‘This fear will never go away.’ When this was
done, we took the pieces of paper outside and, with solemnity,
read each one aloud as we set it on fire and tossed it into a
metal pan.
Liz had also been influenced at this time by some discourses
about ‘freedom from lies’ – discourses that concerned
me because of their binary and conflictual nature and the
implication of blame towards persons who had ‘given in’ to
these lies. I was at pains, then, to clarify with Liz that I didn’t
see this ceremony as an opportunity to somehow obtain
freedom from The Voice, but rather to inform The Voice of
our opinion of its ideas. I hoped we might together participate
in a liturgy of ‘having a voice of our own’ and that this act
of defiance might energise Liz’s ability to imagine a life in
which her voice had at least equal status with that of The
Voice. Michael White has written about this ‘revision in the
relationship’ with voices experienced in psychosis and the
experience of having these voices ‘listen to your thoughts for
a change’ (1995, p. 133). He also cautions against ‘situations
of direct conflict’ with such voices. Liz’s ‘Voice’ should not
be confused with the voices experienced by people during
‘psychosis’, but White’s principle stands: liturgies of protest
should ‘criticise’ in keeping with the example of non-violent
activism rather than metaphors of conflict or ‘stand-off’.
Mourning: Grieving for Joy
Using ‘empire’ as a metonymy for dominant culture and its
structures and devices of power, Walter Brueggemann says,
criticism is not carping and denouncing … real criticism
begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the
most visceral announcement that things are not right.
Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and
invited to pretend that things are all right … and as
long as the empire can keep the pretence alive that
things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no
serious criticism. (2001, p. 11)
In recent times, we have seen a proliferation of knowledge
about grief and ‘good grieving’ and, although this has
frequently enabled more individual expressions of grief, it has
done little to address restrictions upon ‘legitimate grief’. It is
in the interests of the dominant culture that certain realms of
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life be excluded from outward or public expressions of grief.
This seems especially true in regard to ‘mental illnesses’
like depression, anxiety, or psychosis and the sense of
self-recognition they often rob people of. For Ron Coleman,
psychiatry has been an instrument of this repression: ‘we tried
to cure what had happened using medicine’ (2013, emphasis
added). To openly grieve the losses sustained at the hands
of such afflictions is, perhaps, to suggest that these maladies
are more than mere physiological malfunctions or individual
failures of personality.
When I met Jennifer and her husband, Jack, she was being
sorely oppressed by what we came to call ‘Anxious Thoughts’.
Much like The Voice in Liz’s life, Anxious Thoughts was
deeply critical of Jennifer and had all but silenced her own
voice. It was empowered not only by the very isolating and
restrictive environment in which they lived in Myanmar, but
also by many liturgies and discourses Jennifer was immersed
in during her years in the USA. These liturgies created a
vision of life in which women should ‘take care of things’ and
in which exuberant or opinionated women were ‘over the
top’. There were also many Western Christian discourses of
‘ministry’ that had convinced Jennifer she was a failure if she
‘couldn’t handle’ the difficult life of a stay-at-home Mum of
three in a foreign country while serving the local community
to boot. On top of this, she experienced expectation to do
something about the immense weight of suffering in the world
that she felt burdened by but unable to engage with.
With all of these potential inadequacies at its disposal,
Anxious Thoughts had come to treat Jennifer in ways that
reminded her of her verbally abusive father. In response
to further embodying questions (for example, ‘What might
Anxious Thoughts look like?’ – see White, 1995, p. 128 and
2007), she began to personify Anxious Thoughts as a thug
that was always just over her shoulder making life hard
some days and unbearable on others. With this vivid picture
in mind, I asked Jennifer what this thug had taken from her
in life. She answered through tears that she had been
stripped of her joy, energy, freedom, and sense of who
she is. She said these were losses amounting almost to
a loss of herself.
Her sense of desolation and grief was so strong that
I proposed a fitting response to these losses might be to
hold a ceremony of mourning. A mourning ceremony, I
hoped, would act not only as permission to grieve but also a
statement that ‘things are not fine’ – not just in Jennifer’s life,
but within the culture she was a part of. Jennifer was intrigued
by the idea but immediately questioned whether it might be a
sign of giving up on those things that were so precious to her.
This is a very important concern and one that emphasised
to me that Jennifer hadn’t entirely lost hope! I told her that
at least one other person had asked this question before
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engaging in a mourning ceremony and that their experience
was one of ‘saying hello again’ to those lost things rather than
‘saying goodbye’ or letting them go forever – an idea from
Michael White and Lorraine Hedtke’s work with bereaved
people (Hedtke, 2001; White, 1998).
However, people may also be uncertain about mourning
ceremonies because of powerful discourses about positivity
and happiness that exist in much of middle-class culture
and I am wary about undermining the political significance
of mourning ceremonies by acquiescing to such ideas.
In his discussion on the ethics of neo-liberalism in Western
society, Sugarman (2015) points out that happiness has
become
both goal and means … an effect of success, yet also
a resource for further success, occasioned by life
interpreted as an endless array of emerging opportunities
and resources, including one’s own emotional states,
to be engaged, deployed, and even risked toward the
overarching goal of making oneself as competitive and
effective as possible. (p. 7)
Following Foucault and Binkley, Sugarman insists that
such discourses of happiness are ‘key to implementing the
technique of neoliberal governmentality’ (2015, p. 7) and, as
such, can be seen to fit Brueggemann’s imperial insistence
that ‘things are all right’ – a discourse for the creation of
‘docile bodies’ (see Foucault in Ahluwalia, 2010, p. 149). From
this perspective, ‘positivity’ or ‘making people happy’ might
be considered ethically hazardous therapeutic goals. In my
(limited) experience with mourning ceremonies, it is precisely
the enactment of genuine grief that allows a reconnection to
lost hopes and values – suggesting that public experiences
of profound sadness can be at least as significant a part of
rekindling hope as happiness.
By this point, we had already identified a few key friends in
Jennifer’s life – scattered across multiple continents – who
knew something important about her ‘old self’ and whole-
heartedly supported this version of womanhood. They had
agreed to become part of a ‘league’ of support for Jennifer
and I thought their words, if not their physical presence, would
provide us with the witnesses that are crucial in ‘traditional’
ceremonies of loss. I emailed the league asking them to
write ‘eulogies’ to memorialise their friend’s joy, energy, and
freedom (see Appendix 3). Jack would also write one, it was
decided, as well as be responsible for compiling the eulogies
and unearthing old photos that represented these aspects of
his wife. Each step was approved by Jennifer.
When the day for the ceremony came, I rearranged my room,
drew the curtains, and lit some candles. Jennifer and Jack
had arranged a babysitter for their children and, to Jennifer’s
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amusement, I had placed a little desk with a glass of water
outside my office door for Anxious Thoughts who
was unwelcome at the ceremony. During the simple ritual,
Jack and I took turns reading Jennifer’s friends’ beautiful
eulogies (see Appendix 4 for an excerpt). We looked at the
photos and the two of them reminisced about their carefree
adventures in nature and the colourful clothes Jennifer used
to wear. There were many tears and plenty of laughs.
Finally, we listened to Vivaldi’s ‘Spring III’, a piece of music
Jennifer felt had always encapsulated the joy and mystery
of the world. She lit one of the candles to symbolise the
beginning of new hope.
Afterward, I gave her this candle which she took home and
lit whenever she wanted to remember her friends’ words
and the ceremony itself. When I saw Jennifer next, she
told me that, following my suggestion, she had taken some
time alone in the hours after the mourning ritual and rested,
thought, and cried. She had also gone out and purchased a
new journal and begun to write in it – something she used to
do regularly but had been unable to for some time. I enquired
about the significance of this and she told me, ‘Before, a
storm was raging whenever I tried to write. Now I have
recovered a little of my voice! … This feels like HOPE –
I am beginning to recover community, boldness, energy,
and inspiration’.
Like liturgies of protest, mourning ceremonies can serve to
‘energise’ precisely because of the criticism they engage in
as the first priority. They can provide a very close fit with,
and significant acknowledgement of, the desolation people
sometimes feel in the wake of depression, anxiety, and other
afflictions. In that sense, they are a protest against all those
forces that have contributed to loss. This act of resistance,
coupled with the memorial to what has been lost, can provide
people with a powerful experience of agency in their own lives
that paves the way for reclamation.
Induction: The Society of
Mad Dragon Trainers
My life in Asia has often brought me into therapeutic work
with families experiencing the effects of transition from one
culture and place to another. These effects can, at times, be
far-reaching and contribute to a loss of a sense of individual
and family identity. At these times, one of my tasks –
sometimes over a short period – is to help families ‘recognise
themselves again’ and reclaim their skills and knowledges
about helping and supporting each other and honouring their
differences. One effective way I have found of facilitating this
is to induct the members of the family into a new collective
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identity that draws upon some motif or metaphor that has
emerged in our work together. I have, for example, been an
honorary member of the ‘Going to America Club’ and ‘The
Guardians of Joyfulness’. Induction ceremonies draw on the
rites of professional, association, or religious communities
for entering their members into new social positions. They
convey eligibility and seek to impress on inductees the
importance of undertaking, and ability to undertake, their
new responsibilities and privileges. In therapy, they are
definitional ceremonies that can energise by making new
identity positions available and criticise by addressing
power imbalances.
The Cullin family came to see me because their transition to
Thailand had completely thrown off the family equilibrium. In
particular, their six-year-old son, Cal, was regularly becoming
so angry and violent that, to feel safe, they wold put him in
his room, lock his door with a piece of rope and leave him in
there to break things and punch holes in the walls until he
calmed down. Immediately, I set about externalising Anger.
It eventually came to be called a Mad Dragon – partly
because the kids were fans of the movie How to Train Your
Dragon 2. The family led me to understand that, along with
Cal’s, his Dad’s Mad Dragon was also out of control. Dad
never became violent or abusive but certainly was holding the
family captive to his moods and had a tense relationship with
virtually everyone. I also began to discover the extent to which
these Mad Dragons were being managed and the family held
together by a very exhausted Mum and, to a lesser extent,
Sal, Cal’s nine-year-old sister.
In one session, I had the two ‘boys’ stay in my office and work
together on an activity with Lego that I hoped would help them
start thinking and maybe talking about Anger. Meanwhile,
Sal and her Mum met with me in the playroom. I interviewed
them about their Mad Dragon training skills and came to find
out that both of them were particular masters in this art. In the
next session, Sal even brought me a list of dragon training
tips she had printed off (see Appendix 5). I wondered out
loud if this sort of training was tiring and if she and her Mum
might like to take a break – whether they thought it was about
time the boys took over training their own dragons. They both
answered a hearty ‘Yes!’.
I could see that this notion that she and her mum were master
Mad Dragon trainers was turning the tables somewhat for Sal.
I asked if she would like to be part of a society I was forming
and if she thought her parents and siblings might like to as
well. She enthusiastically agreed. I spoke with Cal and his
Dad about this, too – we discussed what sorts of things they
would have to learn to do in order to be given membership
and what things they were already doing.
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Significantly for me, all this was beginning to address issues
of gender by honouring the hitherto invisible skill and hard
work that Mum and Sal had employed on behalf of their family
and inviting the men to take responsibility for their actions.
Several women (including Jennifer, above) have informed me
in recent years that girls are frequently raised to ‘take care
of things’ and ensure that ‘everyone is okay’. Rather than
directly challenge this idea and its obverse – that men can
abdicate responsibility to the women in their lives – I hoped
that introducing the Society of Mad Dragon trainers would
provide opportunity for this imbalance to be clearly seen
and for the males to experience themselves as capable of
using some of the same skills the women had been using
to manage them.1
A few weeks passed. I pursued couples work with Mum
and Dad. Soon, Cal did indeed begin to make significant
strides toward controlling his anger – he became more in
touch with his training skills, and his parents began adjusting
things about the way they related to one another and each
of the children. It seemed the time was right for an induction
ceremony. I made invitations and sent one to each person
in the family. Dad volunteered to make certificates and
membership cards (see Appendix 6).
On the day of the ceremony, I used the dinosaur and dragon
toys in our playroom to make a little boulevard, put on some
Lord of the Rings music and brought in some silly ‘ceremonial
objects’ – rubber gloves, a flexible length of plastic hose, and
a plunger. These are details, but they do more than make it
funny for the kids – they assist the aesthetic enactment of the
narrative of society membership. As Smith says, ‘material,
tactile rituals are formative precisely because they are
material’ (2009, p. 104).
With some pomp, each member of the family was
presented with their certificate and card along with one
or two words about their accomplishments as Mad Dragon
trainers. Such individual ‘citations’, drawn from prior
therapeutic conversations, are an attempt to maintain
a balance of individual and collective language (see
Denborough, 2008). (Induction ceremonies and their
creation of group identities present other hazards, however
– including the risk of exclusivity – that demand further
exploration and consideration.) Finally, the Cullins and
I caravanned from the office back to the family’s house,
where some food and drink had been prepared. Cal showed
me up to his room and there was a ceremonial cutting of
the rope that had been used to lock his door. He and
his parents were now all satisfied that his immense
progress in Dragon Training was sufficient for the
family to feel safe again.
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Celebration and commemoration:
A house blessing
In their book Rites of passage, Wall and Ferguson write
Look closely at the rituals of any culture in the world,
and you’ll find that endings and beginnings are forever
and inextricably joined. The lighted Christmas trees
that stand in our homes each year are remnants of
the ancient observance that on the other side of the
longest, darkest, most lifeless day of winter is found
the first blush of spring. In Japan, the sacred cord of
the goddess still hangs above the entrances to the
temples on New Year’s Day, reminding all who pass
that light will once again emerge from the shadows.
(1998, pp. 177–178)
Ceremonies of celebration and commemoration are liturgies
that mark the passage of time on a communal or individual
level. In therapy, the rituals we associate with anniversaries
(for example, birthdays), rites of passage (graduations), the
bestowing of honours (award dinners) or the celebration
of welcome changes (going-away parties) can be used to
mark achievements that would otherwise go unnoticed, or
passages that might not normally be called passages at all.
In this way, they can be acts of disobedience to the status
quo, and can constitute ‘criticism’. And they ‘energise’ by
the celebration of movement through life, which can have
the effect of propelling people into ‘revised futures’. I have
engaged my clients in many liturgical practices that have
energised in these ways – for instance, the ‘Bully Prevention
Team’ comic book launch party, a ‘Bravery Party’, a
forgiveness ceremony involving the stamping of documents,
and even an ‘Asian Weapons Convention’ to celebrate the
legacy a late father had left in his son’s life.
Talitha, a Christian, unmarried woman in her late thirties
with whom I had the pleasure of working over many months,
explained to me the way in which the liturgies of her
community – discourses about life experience and God’s
character being expressed through marriage, as well as
ceremonies like weddings, baby showers, marriage seminars,
and many others – constituted a woman’s purpose and
adulthood in terms of marriage and family. She lamented that
married women with children had many occasions on which
to be celebrated and guided by the community but ‘single’
women had none at all. A recent unwanted breakup along
with some hurtful, patronising treatment at work had left her
feeling childish and powerless in the midst of ongoing illness
and depression.
Over a few weeks, we unpacked some of these discourses of
female personhood and, using the Tree of Life metaphor (see
Denborough, 2008), began to uncover some of the ‘branches’
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– or values and hopes for her life – that had been deprived of
nourishment and which she might like to tend once more. This
played a part in Talitha deciding to move out of her shared
house and find a place of her own in which she could pursue
decorating, hospitality, and other aspects of life that she had
dreamed of having after marriage.
Around this time, I introduced her to some of my ideas about
counter-rituals and encouraged her to consider whether
engaging in one of these with me might fit with her desire to
mark her movement through life in defiance of community
norms. Talitha seemed unsure about this and was especially
uncomfortable about inviting others into our therapeutic
space. Not wanting to, as Kim Billington says, ‘introduce a
non-native species’ (2015) in liturgical form, I told her it was
completely her choice and suggested she think about it over
the week. To my surprise, when next the topic came up, she
told me she had decided on a ceremony of her own that she
would undertake with the help of her Thai church community.
No therapist required! The ceremony would be a Christian
adaptation of the traditional Thai Buddhist house-blessing
ritual – an event that is often attended by neighbours, friends,
and family, as well as food and drinks. This ceremony would
provide her an opportunity to prepare her new house and host
a community she cared deeply for, to receive gifts and even
speak to and be spoken about by respected elders.
Had I been invited to participate in this ceremony, I would
have taken steps to ensure these speeches were significantly
honouring of Talitha’s values and hopes for life, and that the
rites involved criticised discourses that marginalise unmarried
women. However, in Talitha’s case, this possibly would
have jarred her sense of connection to the ceremony and
inadvertently reinforced the idea that she needed a man in
her life telling her what to do! As it was, I was able to provide
her space in therapy to debrief this ceremony afterward and
enrich the sense of autonomy, agency, and visibility in her
community that it had provided without me. By doing it on her
own, Talitha was able to craft a counter-liturgy of celebration
and passage that powerfully criticised and energised the
culture around her in ways that wouldn’t have been possible
with my participation.
Conclusion
Liturgical practice has been transformative of my work.
It invites me and my clients both to step away from the
need for practical ‘real world’ solutions and into a realm of
playfulness, symbol, and a visceral, embodied engagement
with themes of life that we might otherwise only speak
of. It offers us something that, for me, is not available in
traditional ‘talking therapy’. As Smith points out, rituals ‘are
not “expressing” what can be known by other means; rites
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affect what they do’ (2013, “Belief and the body” para. 11).
As such, liturgical practice is not a mere reinforcement to, or
exclamation point at the end of, the linguistic meaning-making
we engage in during traditional therapy. By making ideas
aesthetically ‘real’, liturgical practice can – through our bodies
and imaginations - create experience of preferred identity and
meaning all its own.
Appendix 1 - Evidence Against Bullying
Exhibit A: Bullying takes advantage of Jason’s
physical weakness.
Exhibit B: Bullying takes advantage of Jason’s
volcano-like ‘touchiness’.
Exhibit C: Bullying takes advantage of Jason’s love
of a good argument about who was right when
playing games in the yard.
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Note
1.
It’s important to note that, in my very first session with Mum and
Dad, my concern over the unsustainable load Mrs. Cullin was
carrying every day on behalf of her family led me to become
influential and suggest that a regular ‘break’ be immediately
arranged for her before disaster struck. This conversation had
already begun to address these gender issues within the family.
Exhibit D: Bullying takes advantage of Jason’s difficulty in
stopping himself (like a car going over a cliff) even when he’s
being told to stop (represented by the stop sign).
Exhibit E: The aspects of Jason Bullying has hidden
from everyone. He knows how to train hard (treadmill,
sweat), care for others (cape), and cultivate his big heart.
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Appendix 2 –
Su mmary judgment for Bullying
Judge: [turning to ‘Bullying’] Does the defendant have
anything to say for himself? I thought not.
So, the court will now pronounce its judgment:
This court has heard that the actions of Bullying in and around
this school and against the Year Five boys in particular
have been sneaky, reprehensible, and downright dirty. This
school community will have nothing to do with such low-down
characters as that.
Therefore, I hereby find in favour of the plaintiff, Mr Jason
Brown and against the defendant, Bullying.
The court bans bullying from showing his face on this campus
at any time except to serve 100 days of community service.
In repayment to Mr. Smith and to the Year Five boys, whose
fun playtimes at lunch and snack he has ruined so many
times, Bullying will have to stand outside and think of ideas
to help the boys get along. Under no circumstances will he
be allowed to go into the classroom, and at lunch he will
have to watch Mr. Smith caring for others and doing things to
avoid arguments and fights like stopping when he is asked or
walking away from sticky situations.
If, during the 100 days, Bullying is discovered to be playing
any of the tricks we have heard about here today, this should
be reported immediately to Mr. Klims or Mr. Loftis at which
time Bullying will be taken directly to jail!
[Hits the gavel] Court is adjourned!
Tomorrow, Jennifer, Jack, and I will be joining in an informal
ceremony to mourn the heavy losses that Jennifer (and Jack
and the kids, too) have sustained at the hands of Anxious
Thoughts. Anxious Thoughts – which she has described
as being a little like a thug that has followed her around
and bullied her for years – has robbed Jennifer of JOY,
of ENERGY, of FREEDOM and a sense of WHO SHE IS.
Jennifer and Jack want you to be a part of this with them even
though you’re many miles away. Would you be willing to write
or record some words of eulogy for these parts of Jennifer’s
life that have felt mostly lost in past years? Please feel free
to share any stories about times you encountered them in
Jennifer, why these encounters were significant to you, and
what you think it meant to Jennifer to have these things in her
life. It would also be great if you wanted to write about the
ways these losses have touched you personally – the ways
you miss these things in your friend’s life and how you can
join her in mourning for them.
It has been a relentless campaign of criticism by Anxious
Thoughts that has left Jennifer feeling bereaved and often
defeated. What’s worse, whenever she begins to reflect on
what Anxious Thoughts has taken from her, it insists that
the failure is all hers – that she has let herself and everyone
down! So: we want to exclude Anxious Thoughts and its
blaming ways completely from our ceremony. To help with
this, please refrain from offering any advice to Jennifer. We
would love to read any scriptures that come to mind if they are
in the vein of grieving rather than in the vein of exhortation.
Also, it’s usual, in mourning ceremonies like this, to focus on
happy memories and the loss itself. We’ll leave planning for
the future to another time. :)
I know it’s a lot to ask, but because Jack and Jennifer are
only in town for a few more days, we need to have the
ceremony tomorrow. Can you send us your thoughts as soon
as possible? Don’t feel like you need to write a lot –
a few lines will be great!

Appendix 3 – Letter to If you’re feeling confused or have any questions, just shoot
me a reply – my email is at the bottom!
Jennifer’s ‘L eague of Support’
Thanks so much for your love and support of Jennifer –
Dear Friends of Jennifer,
I can clearly see the marks of your energising friendship
on her!
Hi! This is Chad, a counsellor from The Well in Chiang Mai.
Jennifer tells me that all of you have agreed to be part of a
Blessings, Chad Loftis
‘league’ to stand with her and Jack against the abuses of
Care Provider, Clinical Counselor, The Well International
Anxious Thoughts and Fakeness in her life and to join her as
she finds ways to restore nutrients to some of the ‘branches’
(hopes and values) of her life that have been starved of
nourishment lately. Welcome!

I’d like to ask a favour of you all:

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Appendix 4 – Excerpt from a ‘Eulogy’
for Joy, Energy, and Freedom
As I write this, and as I read your email about what this has
been like for you over the years, I can’t help but hear your
laughter in my head. The laughter that is so contagious. Your
laughter that gets going so much that you have to push your
glasses back up onto your nose – so, good kind of laughter.
I have such fond memories of this image in my head! I grieve
with you that you have to cover your delight, passion, and
spunk that God has [given you]. – Jennifer’s friend
Appendix 5 – Sal’s Mad Dragon
Training Tips
References
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