We’re well into Fall now, with the last peaches and the first apples at the markets. In the West End and out on English Bay, rain, wind, and then sudden sunlight. Fallen leaves, beginning to drift into piles. I’m back in my UBC classes. In Clinic, the class in which we work with clients for the first time, we are still making preparations because of COVID-19 disruptions. We meet as a small group with a supervisor on UBC campus, carefully donning masks as we enter a building, and only taking them off when we go into our individual counselling rooms, with our laptops, to connect to clients via Zoom. On our first class, a few weeks ago, it was strange to meet classmates I had only seen by zoom before. You know certain features of someone well through constant online interaction: the shape of their face, and the texture of their voice. Yet there are things that you are surprised you do not know: a person’s height and body shape, the way they carry themselves, and especially that certain sense of presence or personal style that everyone, in very different ways, displays. In my other class, which is conducted via Zoom, I’m back to the strange world of video conferencing: distorting cameras that faces swim up into, bookcases, the interiors of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, and the occasional cat, materializing suddenly through the zoom background of a tropical beach.

Since I got a little ahead of schedule by taking an extra course when locked down in May, I now have a lighter semester. I’ve filled some of it by training online as a Guided Autobiography instructor. Guided Autobiography is part of a larger movement to use life stories for therapeutic purposes, and for self-discovery and self-reflection, and, although it doesn’t promote itself this way, could be seen as a form of peer counselling, in that the instructor (who might better be called a facilitator) does not need to be trained as a therapist or social worker. In its original form, it involves ten weekly meetings of a small group of people who work on fragments of a life story, committing to writing 900 words each week on specific themes, which gradually move deeper into one’s life. There are a series of warm-up exercises, much as you’d have in creative writing, and then a time when each participant reads what they have written to other group members, and in which group members make brief comments on the stories they have heard.

Guided Autobiography emerged from specific practices. Its originator, Jim Birren, from the University of Southern California, was originally a cognitive psychologist who became interested in, and gained expertise in, gerontology. Cheryl Svensson, who studied under Birren, recalls that Guided Autobiography originally emerged for pragmatic purposes when Birren was teaching a class on the psychology of ageing during a sabbatical at the University of Hawai’i.

The class consisted of for-credit students and older retirees who were part of the extended learning program on campus. As Jim told the story, the class was ‘flat’, dull and not engaging. One day in frustration, he threw up his hands, told everyone to go home, write two pages on a ‘branching point’ in their lives and then be prepared to read it in class the next day. This was an ‘ungraded’ assignment. Jim said that  the next day, after they had all read their stories, the class came alive. The older people were talking with the younger students; they were making connections with one another that lasted throughout the remainder of the class sessions. Jim knew he was onto something but not sure what it was.

Cheryl Svensson, “Remembering Jim”

I’m intrigued about the Hawai’i connection, given the fact that University of Hawai’i at Manoa is now a world centre in Auto/Biography Studies, and that George Simpson, who was instrumental in the founding of both the journal Biography and the Center for Biographical Research, would have been there at the time. But what also interests me is that Guided Autobiography emerged from practice and then became retrospectively theorized. Inevitably much of the theorization drew on concepts of self-actualization that were current at the time, but seem dated now. Writing in 2006 with J. J. F. Schroots , Birren still drew on earlier research in which he had posited three aspects of the self – ideal, real, and social image – that needed to be brought together into harmony to achieve self-actualization, and felt that Guided Autobiography’s effect on its participants could be shown through quantitative research using Timothy Leary’s Interpersonal Checklist.

Two elements of Guided Autobiography, though, do intrigue me. The first is that it’s possible that the effect of guided autobiography isn’t so much self-actualization but a form of restorying that emerges through relationships with others who listen and respond. As I often find in my Counselling Psychology courses, things go by very quickly, without the chance to pause, but I’d be curious about whether research had been done that links, for instance, Guided Autobiography with Narrative Therapy, seeing it not so much as an expression of a latent true self, but a an encounter with, and a reworking of, what narrative therapists call “problem-saturated stories” that we internalise from society.

Second, I wonder if the work of storytelling, and the skills that are learned, whether in terms of plotting, description, metaphor, might themselves be therapeutic. In Guided Autobiography we cover many of the areas that we might in a creative writing class, and yet with a difference. In creative writing, these are seen as skills to be cultivated, but there isn’t much reflection on the self that writes. In Guided Autobiography, in potential at least, these elements are seen not merely as ways of appealing to an audience, but of exploring the self in relation to memory and society. In our classes, we tend not to dig too deeply into this, and again to pull back to those metaphors from the last century that are still very powerful today: right brain versus left brain; divergent versus convergent thinking. Yet it would be interesting to think more about how what we call literary practices are deeply embedded in the construction and revision of self.

From theory, back to praxis. This week, if all goes to plan, I’ll see my first clients in Clinic, people who have approached UBC’s Scarfe Free Counselling Clinic for counselling. After a year of training, then, as the weather gets colder and the nights longer, I leave my books and online articles behind and begin to take my first small steps in real-life practice.