Replacing Certainty with Hope:

Re-imagining and Re-writing Lives

Elite Ben-Yosef, Ph.D. with Hila Yigal-Izon

Abstract: A writing workshop for adolescent girls in state-care in Israel allows for re-thinking, re-valuing and re-writing lives. Participants tell their counter-stories, reaffirm their identity, find agency and plan for the future. The process is arduous, brittle, constantly challenging. Results can be amazing.

On my way to the hostel, I planned our writing class in a workshop for disenfranchised adolescent girls, aimed at re-viewing their very challenging lives through a positive lens, focusing on what they have, what they have gained, what is working, what strengths and abilities each of them brings to the world, being thankful and planning forward.

The hostel serves girls 12-18 who have been severely hurt and harmed by families and circumstances. Here they find safety, care, schooling, hopefully strengthening to live in the community at age 18.

This meeting was supposed to be the lighter of our 12 modules because participants get to dream and possibilities seem limitless: think about a dream you have, something you really want, aspire to: a profession, travel, family, a strong relationship… was the prompt to the group.

The girls are silent.

No dreams, no aspirations.

Subsequently, a voice broke the loaded silence. Shira (14): “I don’t have dreams. I don’t expect anything good to happen to me and I don’t expect to succeed at anything. Only bad things ever happened to me”. Reut (16): “All I can do is be here and now. Can’t even think about what will happen tomorrow, let alone in the future”. Miki (17): “Truth is I am afraid of success. They tell me I am talented in art and graphics but even the thought that I’ll succeed really frightens me. I can’t even dream it”.

Silence again and through it a whisper: “I would like to be reborn into a normal family with a mother that sends me to school in the morning with a sandwich and waits for me at the end of the day”. Rachel can’t dream to the future because she is dreaming into the past.

And still, it is a dream. Something to work with. This is a wonderful dream, I say, validating. Slowly every girl finds a dream which we collect carefully, stepping lightly, because today I learned that dreams can be limited, dangerous.

We learn that Shira wants to be a mother and give her children all that was not given to her. Reut would like to be a police officer knowing to be tough but also kind and helpful to those who would need her to believe in them. Hesitantly, Miki talks about wanting a girlfriend who would be there for her, would support her, but she can’t write or even imagine this because a family is a mother, a father and children, and God will punish her for such dreams…

Finding agency: Narrative identity repair

“Man is called by three names:

one that he is called by his father and mother,

one given by people, and one that he acquires for himself. The best of them – that which he acquires for himself”

Bialik & Ravnitzky

Our lives are constructs of stories – those we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us, stories that change according to the time, place and purpose of the telling. One of the ways we can make the social world less cruel is by finding ways to empower and reinvent ourselves on our own terms, rather than accepting others’ descriptions of us. We can do this through narratives that give us a sense of who we are, how we became who we are and where we would like to be going, replacing “…an unsatisfactory present with a more satisfactory future, thus replacing certainty with hope” (Rorty, 1999, p. 32).

The disenfranchised adolescents we work with are unaware of their power to construct “a good name for themselves”, unaware that their voices and stories have a right to be part of the grand social narrative from which they are mostly excluded. They are trapped in cages of metaphors and normalized language generated by what others craft and tell (“You are bad” “She is a hooker”). These stories – which the girls have learned to own, highlight and construe as shameful differences from mainstream norms, limiting the girls’ identification narratives to negatives and imposing outward invisibility, while damaging identities internally and socially (Ben-Yosef & Ben-Yosef, 2016).

To address this situation, we work with the girls to re-think and re-construct their life stories, changing them from stories of vulnerability to stories of resilience in a process that frees them from the oppressive negative labels holding them back. We would like our participants to learn that they have the right to tell their own story to the world in any way they wish to do so, to re-read into their lives and find the positive, the strengths, the significant moments, their goals and dreams for the future; to re-value their lives which society refuses to value and establish their story as a valid foundation and place to grow their agency from. (Ben-Yosef, 2009; Ben-Yosef & Pinhasi-Vittorio, 2008-2009; Daniel, 2019; Matsuba et al., 2010.)

Counter-stories are a narrative tool we use to repair damage done by society outsiders’ negative narratives. Counter-stories focus on the vernacular and on positive identity development as alternatives to dominant, privileged and exclusionary knowledge of the culturally disenfranchised.  They shift the understanding of who someone is, allowing the “re-identified” persons to see themselves and for others to see them as worthy of moral respect (Nelson, 2001). They provide an opening into agency. By finding their voice through writing and taking authority of telling their own life stories, the girls can disrupt the norms that exclude them and affirm different ways of being, taking charge of their own lives as they move toward a sense of purpose and dignity. Telling counter-stories works on two levels – they replace the degrading social narrative/image of the disenfranchised group as a whole while also affording agency and worth to the teller (Ben-Yosef, 2014; Ben-Yosef & Pinhasi-Vittorio, 2016; Johnson, 2019).

 A counterstory: Gila came in after a committee hearing where it was decided from above that she would be detained for 4 weeks for running away. She was hurt, angry, explosive and put it down in a letter she wrote to the committee head:  “How dare you f–ing talk about me as if I am not there. How dare you f–ing decide about my life without asking me what is happening, without consulting me, as if I am f–ing transparent…” This counterstory, which she could not voice at the hearing, erupted in our writing class. Together we put her rightful complaint into normative language and sent it to the committee head. The girl was called to a case review and the punishment overturned.

Research has shown that writing about troublesome events in a way that makes them a meaningful part of an overall coherent life story can become a self-empowering act, thus our writing workshop was developed for participants to reflect retrospectively, transformatively, re-view and re-write their lives and reconstruct their identities through a personal, positive lens.  Participants learn to imagine different relationships between centers and margins, find agency while acknowledging and exploring multiple ways of being  (Ben-Yosef & Pinhasi-Vittorio,2016, Greenbaum & Javdani, 2017; Johnson, 2017).

 

“A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes”, reportedly said Ghandi. Thoughts can create reality – the more we can place ourselves in the center of our dreams and aspirations, there is a greater chance we will get there. Another understanding is that we can create our world through words (i.e., the U.S. government changed the negative label of “disabled veteran” to a more socially uplifting “wounded warrior” – a small linguistic tweak opening new possibilities of empowered being) (Vojak, 2009). Both ideas buttress the foundation of our workshops and connects to a concept from Ruiz (The four Agreements) who teaches that we can change our world and fine-tune our identity by changing the message that we deliver to ourself (our self-talk). This principle – a mainstay of CBT– allows us to change our feelings and relationships to past events and re-imagine possibilities ahead. We can change our stories going forward as we rightfully hold on to the past, take lessons learned from it, acknowledge our unique strengths and challenges and move ahead  (Sutherland, 2012).

The girls are on a journey to become what they are not yet.

The girls work on realizing the strengths and abilities they bring to the world, many of which they acquired through the incredible challenges they faced and still do. They learn about being thankful for what they do have, for what is working for them and for the wisdom and resilience they have gained on their journeys. There is no magic here. The girls often start out by refusing to come in or come in in defiance, refuse to trust, refuse to cooperate, to imagine, refuse to dream. Sometimes they are upset after writing and ask that we burn their papers. They are angry, hurt, disillusioned. “Do you think I chose to be molested by my father at age 9!? How can I change reality!?…”

Listening deeply, I realize the response for this young girl is in her finding agency to re-view her past, re-think the events of her life and re-write her life forward with strength . “Who are you today?” I ask the older, more mature young women (18+) in my workshops, “I work”, “I’m a student”, “I am loved”… So even though you didn’t choose your life story, you can choose to see it in a different light, as a stepping stone toward a better future.

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