Analysing life stories using Ficto-Memoir

We all tell stories of who we are and what happened to us. We believe they are true, but they are often clouded by the infallible nature of our memories or our internalised belief systems, which may be influenced by others. If we continue to carry these stories with us, we continue to perpetuate living them out when they may not even be true. While we can’t change the past, we can change the way we see the past and the story we tell about it. This is the premise of narrative therapy, developed in the 1970/80s by Australian therapist Michael White, which proposes that meanings are ascribed to our experiences by the way we ‘story’ our lives (White & Epston, 1990, p. 10). The Ficto-Memoir Method™, a strengths-based approach developed through my creative practice-based research (Dodd, 2018), provides a tool that allows participant storytellers to analyse their own life stories through an iterative creative writing process framed by some of the elements of narrative therapy.