Richard Hogan: No child starts out thinking that they are useless

"Teenagers have an uncanny knack for developing linear stories about themselves. They allow themselves to be pigeonholed by the labels they received by the educational system, peer group and family."

Richard Hogan: There is nothing as important as the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of doing with our lives.

There is nothing as important as the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of doing with our lives. In systemic family psychotherapy narrative therapy is a relatively modern approach to a therapeutic conversation. It is highly successful as it interrupts old negative paradigms that hold us back by reintroducing previously held positive stories that were corrupted along the way. No child starts out thinking, ‘I’m useless, I couldn’t possibly be able to achieve that'. 

That is something handed to a child by the labels they hear on their sinuous journey through life. When a child receives negative labels in their formative years, it can last a lifetime. I work with trainee teachers in DCU and one of the phrases I repeat to them over the course of their training is, ‘a label doesn’t predict the future it writes it’. Often we hold, what we believe are, concrete ideas about ourselves. They become almost like a blind spot, we say them so often we don’t even know they are there. Like a particular smell in a house, the family are so close to it they live in ignorance to its presence. But those negative ideas hold us back and prevent us from achieving in life, which causes incredible pain and suffering because we are unaware that it is ourselves holding us back from succeeding.