I
n this chapter my aim is to explain the processes I use to develop story ideas in therapy. Participants
in metaphor workshops often ask, “Where do you get your imagination for therapeutic stories?”
as though you have to be a highly imaginative or creative person to use healing stories. I tend to think
in terms of developing or building a story rather than of creating one. Creating, for me, conjures the
conception that a tale somehow appeared, magically, out of the blue, in my marvelously imaginative
mind. Generally, that is not the case. I do not see myself as a particularly imaginative person, and I do
not think a high level of imagination is necessary to be an effective metaphor therapist. I am, how-
ever, constantly on the lookout for stories. Like a collector of any object, I collect storybooks as I
travel, look for ideas in client cases, read what children are reading, observe the learning experiences
of the children in my own life, and ask myself as I do, “How might this be shaped into a healing story
for one of the children I am working with at the moment?”
To illustrate how I have developed the stories in this book, I will revisit a number of the tales,
seeking to explain where I found the source of the story, how I built the idea into a metaphor, and
the processes by which I constructed the healing story. This chapter thus describes how to develop
metaphors from a variety of sources such as the evidenced-based literature, the cases you encounter
in your day-to-day work, the ideas you find in a storybook, the heroes in the lives of your young
clients, the fertility of your own imagination, or everyday life experiences.
METAPHORS BUILT ON A BASIS OF EVIDENCEIf we set out to provide treatment we need to offer the best treatment available. I consider this par-
ticularly so for children, who may not have the same discriminatory skills as adults and may not be as
CHAPTER 15
Where Do I Get the Ideas for
Healing Stories?